Archive

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage. Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month. "Either th...

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite and operating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications. Open source security applications are free, or at l...

Open source applications have come into their own. For some time, open source programmers held much the same reputation as shareware authors. They were little more than experimenters and programming geeks who chose the alternate code-writing route because they could not or did not want to compete in...

Anonymous Wikipedia editors who seek to alter articles there for less-than-honorable purposes can no longer hide behind their cloak of anonymity: A new scanner tool now makes it relatively easy to figure out where they came from. WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate ...

After four and a half years, the long, torturous and often twisted legal battle between SCO and Novell came to an end Friday when a federal district court judge put the kibosh on SCO's claims that it owned copyrights to the Unix code and operating system, upon which some of the code in Linux is base...

Nokia Siemens Networks has joined the Linux Foundation and will become active in efforts to develop Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 standards. Nokia Siemens Networks will work with the Linux Foundation specifically on Linux-based technologies for use in user plane and control plane network elements, as well...

Companies that want to take advantage of virtual worlds should think twice about Linden Lab's Second Life and consider better-controlled online worlds, said tech consultancy Gartner. "Media hype and enthusiasm for virtual worlds must be tempered with a realistic assessment of the security and risk-m...

IBM and Linux distributor Novell are strengthening their partnership in order to encourage cross-adoption of their respective platforms and products, especially in the small to medium-sized business space. The companies hope to erode market share inroads recently gained by Microsoft and Red Hat with...

Open source started as a small community with a set of ideals about software development, believing that developers should make their products more expedient and user-friendly by making the underlying code accessible to everyone. As the open source software movement has grown, the fundamental tenets...

Novell and Lenovo, the world's No. 3 PC manufacturer, have inked a deal to pre-install the Linux operating system on certain Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs, the two companies announced Monday at LinuxWorld, held this year in San Francisco. Lenovo will also provide support for Suse Linux Enterprise Des...

The Linux Foundation recently scored an executive coup when it nabbed Novell's Markus Rex, a well-respected Linux-focused business executive. Rex is now the chief technology officer of the nonprofit group, which is dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. Rex comes to the Linux Foundation with...

As part of its ongoing Project Big Green initiative, IBM announced Wednesday that it is replacing 3,900 computer servers in its datacenters with 30 System z mainframes running Linux, for an expected energy reduction of 80 percent over the next five years. The move represents one of the most signific...

Mozilla released a new version of its Firefox Web browser Monday which includes fixes for two vulnerabilities disclosed by Secunia, an Internet security firm, earlier this month. The two flaws, which involved conflicts with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, kicked off a round of finger pointing as both...

What should the virtual world do when a neighborhood becomes a den of iniquity? The only appropriate response is to dive in and clean it up, according to Jesuit scholar Antonio Spadaro. In an article in a Catholic journal, Spadaro writes that Second Life and sites like it should be considered locati...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...