Archive

Hoping to position itself to deliver its perspective on the epic legal battle over the future of Linux, the SCO Group said it would launch its own legal-defense Web site. The site, called Prosco.net, appears to be a direct reaction to the popular Groklaw.net site, which offers extensive analysis of ...

A day after visual computing company SGI announced its relationship with ATI Technologies, competitor Nvidia is boasting about its new alliance with Sun Microsystems. Sun has bundled Nvidia's Quadro graphics technology into its Java Workstations running Solaris, Windows or Linux operating systems in...

I've never gotten the hang of casual chit chat, and I blew it again the other day. We were at one of those things preceded by a wifely lecture about my behavior, and I really thought I was doing pretty well when the "conversation" meandered to I Robot. Since this was the first movie mentioned that I...

Gupta Technologies announced today that its SQLBase(R) 9.0 for Linux has been certified "Novell Ready" for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9. The Novell Ready designation means that the product has been designed to work with Novell's Linux family of enterprise-class software products. "GUPTA has ...

Sun Microsystems has settled its long-fought patent infringement case with Eastman Kodak, heading off a jury decision on the penalty. Faced with the prospect of paying damages of more than US$1 billion in federal court, the software giant reached an out-of-court agreement late last night, according ...

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...

IBM has launched an aggressive bid to grab an even bigger share of the midlevel market for Unix-based servers, where Big Blue has recently made huge gains on competitors. IBM launched a family of products built around its Power5 microprocessor and made no bones about its desires to use them and thei...

Sun Microsystems faces the prospect of being forced to pay more than US$1 billion in damages now that a federal court jury has found the computer giant's popular Java languages infringed on a patent held by Eastman Kodak. After a three-week trial, a jury found that Sun violated a patent that Kodak a...

Leading open source vendor Red Hat said it will buy certain security-related assets of Netscape Security Solutions from America Online in a deal worth US$25 million. Red Hat said it will integrate the products it is buying, including the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management ...

About a month ago, I compared the cost for Apple's desktop, server and laptop products to their nearest Dell equivalents and discovered that Macs generally cost less than comparable PC products. That was a bit of surprise, but the truly astonishing thing that came out of the comparison was that Dell...

We can learn some lessons from reality TV. For instance, many disputes can be settled without lawyers. If your brother-in-law owes you money or your neighbor's tree drops fruit in your pool, you can simply vote them off the island. Or fire them. Either way, working it out on your own is a cheaper al...

A consortium of French Linux firms are poised to work on developing a highly secure Linux operating system for business, defense and government use. The effort is being funded by the French Ministry of Defense, which chose Paris-based Linux vendor Mandrakesoft as the project leader. The other French...

Open-source spam killer SpamAssassin 3.0 was released Wednesday, and while the new version has more features than its predecessors, it is in the licensing where it deviates the most from past versions. Previously, the software was available under either the GPL or the Perl Artistic License. For 3.0,...

If you ever feel in need of a lesson in humility, try reading through the TCP/IP RFCs and related literature. I have two questions I have no idea how to answer but rather naively expected that reading this material would help. It didn't, in truth because I didn't understand most of it; so now I'm as...

For those who think the SCO Group v. IBM lawsuit has gotten too ugly to watch, there is a fresh fight in the open-source arena over the ownership of Mambo. Mambo, an open-source content-management system, is maintained by developers at the Mambo Group, and its copyright is owned by Australian firm M...