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Tuesday was D-Day for Mozilla with the scheduled launch of the third version of Firefox, its open source Web browser. The company had billed the day as "Download Day" and aimed its sights on setting a Guinness World Record for the most downloads of an application in a 24-hour period. Over the weeken...

The Open Source Census, a collaborative project initiated by OpenLogic to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, has revealed more than 220,000 open source packages and project installations on business hard drives. The census now aims to take a deeper look into open...

Open source business intelligence firm JasperSoft has announced the availability of its new JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite v3 Professional Edition. The suite provides enterprise-class functionality delivered through interactive Web 2.0 interfaces, the company said. The new functionalities ex...

Now that NASA has entered the virtual world with its two islands in Second Life, public outreach, collaboration and space exploration may never be the same again. On its CoLab Island, outreach and collaboration are the focus, as Part One of this two-part feature explains. Its other island, called "E...

It's an interesting question: Why would large, established companies like Adobe and others embrace open source strategies? In some ways, it seems counterproductive. After all, releasing a software application's source code to the community could be viewed as letting an organization's competitive adv...

A high-ranking European Union official urged the use of open standards and open source software Tuesday during a speech in Brussels at a conference Tuesday hosted by OpenForum Europe. In order for companies to compete fairly against each other in the technology industry "standards are more important...

Wiki and social software firm Socialtext has put its own spin on the spreadsheet. The new offering, SocialCalc, is a multi-user, wiki-based spreadsheet program intended to simplfy version control, reduce errors and increase productivity, Socialtext said. SocialCalc joins offerings from Google and ot...

Mobile innovation -- not long ago mired in a tangle of "walled-garden" business models, closed networks, proprietary technologies and fierce litigation -- is at last in high gear. Collaborative source development is lowering the barriers to participation in mobile innovation and yielding new, promis...

For those of us old enough to remember life before the Internet, the term "virtual space travel" probably conjures memories of childhood visits to the local planetarium. Fast forward to today, and things are just a little different. In today's Internet-enabled world, ordinary citizens can explore th...

Disney World and Google are teaming up to take tourism to a new dimension. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worked with programmers at Google Earth to create a fully three-dimensional virtual viewing experience -- said to be the most advanced rendering Google has ever created. Walt Disney World Resort ...

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need...

The recent Facebook rumors have come true -- the social networking company is making much of its third-party application development platform open source. The company announced the change one year after it launched Facebook Platform. "On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back t...

Wikia Search -- the open source search engine Wikia initially launched in January -- got a fresh start Tuesday. The refurbished version lets users edit, comment on and influence search results. After performing a search query on any major search engine, a user typically gets a static results page --...

The daily need to tap into knowledge relevant to their field is driving tech workers in all types of organizations to scour the Web for timely, up-to-date information, but making sure it's accurate can prove a challenge. A recent survey asked tech workers how they search for information, to what deg...

Venezuela is now the latest country to appeal the adoption of an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML file format. Following news last week that the South African Bureau of Standards had sent a letter protesting the decision late last month, Brazil and India joined with their ...