Archive

The European Parliament and European Commission are in the midst of deciding whether software patents will be permitted in the EU. The Commission recently informed the Parliament that it would not redraft the proposed Computer Implemented Inventions Directive (CIID). The European Parliament must n...

Linux is gaining momentum as a complimentary server presence in Windows networks, according to the "Linux-Windows 2005 TCO Comparison Survey" released by the Yankee Group today. The report states that more than 50 percent of companies surveyed said they plan to install Linux in parallel with, or in ...

A vulnerability has been discovered in the Firefox Web browser that could be exploited by malicious people to gain knowledge of potentially sensitive information, according to an advisory from security research firm Secunia. The vulnerability comes less than six weeks after the Mozilla Foundation re...

Sun Microsystems today announced the names of the five individuals selected to participate in the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB). The board was created to steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance. "The formation of the CAB is another major step forward i...

The Open Source Initiative on Friday announced a new interim president and plans to focus on evaluating the OSD licensing process with its recently added international board members. OSI is the non-profit corporation responsible for the management and promotion of the Open Source Definition, which ...

One of the most vehement opponents to European patents is throwing in the towel before the fight is officially over. Florian Mueller announced today that he is stepping down as manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, the European anti-software patent campaign, and returning to his computer games business...

The space shuttle Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003 sparked development of the world's second largest supercomputer, a system with 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors capable of performing 51.87 trillion calculations per second. Not only did the supercomputer, appropriately dubbed Columbia, stretch Li...

GroundWork Open Source Solutions today said it has it has secured US$8.5 million in its second round of venture capital financing. The Series B financing, led by Mayfield, includes Series A lead investor Canaan Partners. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company develops open-source products for the ente...

After much ado last fall followed by a false start, the SCO Group has finally launched its legal information site to counter the popular Growklaw.net site. SCO had originally said last October the site would use the domain name Prosco.net, but is instead located at SCO.com/scoip. Groklaw postings of...

Sometimes you can't win for trying. Like when you politely ask the kid sitting next to you on the subway who is playing his music a little loud to please turn it down. Just to be contrary, he responds by cranking it up even more. In my March 15 column, Lowering the Volume in the Software Patent Deba...

Novell has made a slew of Linux announcements at this week's BrainShare gathering, but today all eyes are on its next major upgrade of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and an acquisition that will expand its Zenworks systems management offering. Dubbed Code 10, the new SuSE distribution is expected to m...

The press reported a few weeks ago that SCO, the UnixWare purveyor famous for bringing Linux-related lawsuits against IBM and others, was in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ. This announcement was surprising because most public companies don't risk delisting for not filing their 10-Ks. But ...

High-tech heavy hitters such as IBM, Novell and Oracle are among those showing support for the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a set of standards designed to improve compatibility between Linux distributions. The Free Standards Group (FSG) yesterday announced a long list of Independent Software Vendors (...

In the face of a European Union threat to levy US$5 million in daily fines for allegedly failing to license selected software code, Microsoft today announced the expansion of its Shared Source Initiative to cover seven additional countries in the European Union. Launched in May 2001 and now encompas...

Google launched a new site this week designed with open-source developers in mind. Dubbed Google Code, the site includes four open-source projects, APIs, and other tools to assist developers working on Google-related projects. In their welcome letter, Chris DiBona, Google's open-source program manag...