Archive

The three most famous European authors of open-source software today issued an appeal against software patents in Europe. Linux author Linus Torvalds, MySQL author Michael Windenius and PHP author Rasmus Lerdorf are urging the European Union Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adop...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off a mini-brouhaha today with a comment he made at the Asia Government Leaders Forum about a controversial Linux study. The study, from Open Source Risk Management, which aims to sell insurance policies and "risk mitigation consulting" services to users of Linux, ...

President Bush has made it clear that tort reform, narrowly construed in terms of medical liability reform, is on the short-term agenda. In theory, that should be easily done and very positive in its effects, but of course, reality is never as simple as theory, and there are some real risks to open ...

Linux vendors from Europe, Asia, and North and South America have teamed up to create a common core implementation of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0. This implementation will serve as the core for each of the new consortium members' future Linux distribution products, the companies announced join...

In a competitive move against IBM and HP, Microsoft came as close as it might ever get to supporting Unix and Linux when it bought a minority share of platform integration solutions firm Vintela. Vintela technology will allow companies to use Microsoft Windows software management tools to manage Uni...

Back in 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists. He asked, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?" Today, Gates has to eat those words because the...

The speculation is over. Sun is set to release a new version of its Solaris operating system today, and Solaris 10, the newest version of its Unix-based operating system, will soon be available for the first time ever as a free open-source product. Sun spent billions of dollars developing the code, ...

Desperately seeking their future, African countries that virtually no Western commercial software vendors have cared about in the past are turning to free and open software. They are doing so at a pace just quick enough to alarm some commercial software vendors, who fear the prospect of an entire co...

Hewlett-Packard and JBoss announced a deal today in which HP will support JBoss' open-source application server and use its Services division to help clients migrate to JBoss' platform. With the arrangement, HP becomes the first big Linux vendor to certify JBoss. "Most of the Linux firms are pretty ...

In a move to tap into the demand for low-cost software in developing markets, Red Hat announced yesterday it would open its first office in Beijing, China this week. The company said it is working with partners such as HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle to help the Chinese market learn more about open source...

The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that ...

Microsoft announced today that it would extend its indemnification program to all end-users of its software products. According to analysts, however, the move is more a way to ease customers' fears than a real value-add. The software giant's policy protects end users of software from the legal cost...

The Mozilla Foundation today officially released its open-source browser, Firefox 1.0, but the news won't come as a surprise to a great many computer users. Since it released its preview version in September, 8 million people have downloaded the super-fast browser, a direct descendant of Netscape. T...

In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing (HPC), the 24th edition of the Top500 list yesterday crowned IBM's BlueGene system the world's fastest supercomputer. BlueGene set a record Linpack benchmark performance of 70.72 teraflops, or trillions of calculat...

While I was handing out candy on Halloween, a trick-or-treater came to the door dressed as an open-source project. There was code everywhere and volunteer contributors were coming out of his ears. It was a clever costume, but what made it really scary was the giant fork he was carrying. Open-sourc...