Archive

The Mozilla Foundation, backer of the Firefox browser, will use code from Adobe to make the Flash player more flexible and interoperable with other Web scripting tools, Adobe announced this week. Mozilla's use of ActionScript Virtual Machine code, the scripting engine of Adobe's popular Flash Player...

Virtualization technology upstart XenSource has announced XenEnterprise, a commercial virtualization package that supports Windows and Linux. The new product challenges VMware's dominance in the market for server virtualization, and for support and management of virtualization. Until now, XenSource ...

Fulfilling the predictions of many security experts, hackers have invaded a "social networking" Web site. The German version of the popular Wikipedia encyclopedia was used to post Web links that could spread malicious code. Security software vendor Sophos reported Friday that links purporting to off...

Much of the focus and fight over the next draft of the GNU general public license Version 3 has centered on digital rights management and patent provisions. However, GPLv3, which is slated for final release next year, also tries to address another challenge for the free and open source software comm...

Open source is thriving, with over 1.4 million registered users on SourceForge.net and with startups sprouting around every part of the software stack. The big question is, can companies really make enough money when the software is often downloaded for free? If Red Hat is any indication, the answer...

Microsoft and Novell announced this week a deal to promote and support Novell's Suse Linux alongside Windows. That's right, Microsoft will promote and support Linux -- but only as long as it's from Novell. Following last week's big news of an Oracle-Linux play, Microsoft and Novell said that they wo...

Microsoft announced Tuesday a close technical collaboration with Zend, the programming language vendor that currently dominates Web-based scripting with the open source PHP language. Microsoft and Zend said their collaboration would provide a production-level PHP runtime environment for the next rev...

Access has announced a Linux and open source software application framework for mobile devices, which will be open to developers under the Mozilla Public License. The Access application framework is tuned for mobile phones and handhelds, and includes services for installing, managing and allowing co...

Sourcefire, provider of open source security software Snort and other intrusion detection and prevention solutions, filed this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The IPO is a rarity in that it involves a security company, as well as a company that r...

Oracle has stirred up the tech world with the announcement of its "Unbreakable Linux" strategy. The company's announcement that it will support its own version of Red Hat Linux has already made an impact, as evidenced by Red Hat's quick response under the banner "Unfakeable Linux." It is still unkno...

The open source market is decidely hot right now, from software to support and services. Recently, venture capital firms have upped the ante, investing millions in open source-focused companies with the hopes of cashing in like JBoss did, when Red Hat scooped it up for a tidy US$350 million in June....

Ubuntu -- an increasingly popular, Debian Linux-based operating system -- just got updated by its commercial backer Canonical, giving users of the new software an improved interface, faster boot time and better security, the company said this week. Dubbed "Edgy Eft," Ubuntu 6.10 is freely available ...

Picking up the pace after somewhat of a piecemeal approach to open sourcing the Java programming language over the last several months, Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Schwartz said the company will open the core Java code to the community by year's end. Speaking at Oracle OpenWorl...

Amid an enormous amount of buzz, software giant Oracle laid out its plans for Linux at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, indicating that it will use Red Hat Linux as the foundation for an Oracle-branded "Unbreakable Linux." During his keynote Wednesday, Oracle chief Larry Ellison ...

The Fedora Project, a community-supported open source collaboration sponsored by Red Hat, has released Fedora Core 6, the latest version of its Linux-based operating system. Fedora Core 6 provides a performance increase during the start-up of applications such as OpenOffice.org and, in addition to i...