Archive

Shakespeare wrote that a rose called by any other name would still smell as sweet. Proponents of open source software and standardizing document formats might wonder whether the same sentiments apply to the poetry between the OpenDocument Format, or ODF, and the Compound Document Format, or CDF. Th...

Several years after the European Commission ruled in an antitrust suit in 2004 that Microsoft had to provide protocol information to its competitors, the Redmond, Wash., software giant has inked an agreement with a team behind the open source project Samba that will let them in on Microsoft's secret...

After almost a decade at the helm of open source software vendor Red Hat, Matthew J. Szulik is stepping down, to be succeeded at the start of the New Year by former Delta Airlines executive James M. Whitehurst as president and CEO. Szulik, who replaced Bob Young as CEO in 1999 shortly after Red Hat'...

Open source software developers who were active in the late 1990s might find themselves yearning for those good old days, when venture capital flowed like wine at Napa Valley party. Maybe they forgot the hangover that settled in once the bubble burst. Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange, likes to point...

Intel has released a software initiator package designed to promote the development of Fibre Channel over Ethernet solutions for Linux, the company announced Tuesday. Now available for download, the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 and is open to all FCoE developer...

For a computer addict, choosing a Linux distribution is much like being an unsupervised child in a candy store. So many flavors with so many choices make the task of picking just one type of candy a near-impossible -- but fun-filled -- task. For a consumer or business exec who must pick a Linux dist...

Linux fans love to debate the pros and cons of myriad technologies, but none more than operating systems -- and you can bet the usual winner isn't based in Redmond or Cupertino. This week the question was raised once again on Slashdot, spurred by a Linux Magazine comparison of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon an...

After a one-week delay, Novell released its fourth quarter earnings Thursday, saying that higher-than-expected costs associated with an ongoing restructuring would weigh on results even as sales of its Linux products surged higher. The restructuring effort could now cost as much as $70 million, Nove...

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce several key enhancements to its StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office productivity software suites. StarOffice 8 and the corresponding open version, OpenOffice.org 2.3, have both been updated with a variety of new features, including the ability to edit fo...

The Linux Phone Standards Forum has announced the completion of its LiPS Release 1.0 specifications aimed at fostering interoperability across the Linux-based mobile phone market. In June, LiPS rolled out the first installment of Release 1.0, including a reference model, address book and voice call ...

Running Microsoft Windows or Apple's Mac OS X gives users about the same amount of flexibility as was offered to early car buyers. They could drive any kind of car they wanted, as long as it was a Model T and as long as it was black. When the free open source Linux OS first showed up, early develope...

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday made good on its promise to deliver its OpenSPARC T2 register transfer level processor design to the free and open source community using the GNU General Public License. The OpenSPARC T2 is the open version of Sun's UltraSPARC T2, a processor that features eight cores and...

The hot segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future. First, Paglo came out last month with a free and open source crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other elect...

The Software Freedom Law Center is challenging Verizon's use of BusyBox open source code in the wireless routers provided to its FiOS customers. SFLC has filed suit against Verizon in the U.S. District Court of New York on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleging that the...

It's not too often the public schools figure prominently in the Linux blogs, but sure enough, this week they drew a surprising amount of discussion on a few different sites. Specifically, news broke on Tuesday that the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., has signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops fro...