Archive

Open-source firm JBoss made two high-profile announcements today, unveiling the release of Application Server 4.0 and detailing an alliance with the Eclipse Foundation. Both announcements indicate that the company is expanding its open-source presence, as well as becoming more of a contributor to th...

Connoisseurs of 1960s TV might be familiar with Paladin, a Western that featured a San Francisco character with a business card that read "Have Gun, Will Travel." He was a dapper cross between a private detective and a bounty hunter who roamed through the West tracking down bad guys. He was mainly a...

To be a Linux strategist at Microsoft seems a contradiction, even an oxymoron. It is like being a vegetarian butcher shop owner, or a pacifist Army general. Yet Martin Taylor, with the official title of general manager of platform strategy, must fill just such a role. In a recent Computerworld inter...

Microsoft's settlement with Sun Microsystems has sparked attention in the open-source community, since it contains a provision giving Microsoft the right to sue developers and users of OpenOffice.org. The agreement with Sun was inked in April, but its details were made public only this week as part ...

Open source in general, and Unix in particular, appears to be far buggier and less secure than is Microsoft's code in general and Windows XP in particular. You might not believe that, but any count of security vulnerabilities reported since about mid-2001 will lead you to the same conclusion. Mentio...

The Gnome Foundation today released a new version of its popular Linux desktop. The new release, Gnome version 2.8, boosts speed and usability and offers several new features, the foundation said in a statement. Gnome is the default desktop on the Red Hat distribution, among others, and is available...

Borland Software today introduced Borland CaliberRM 2005 and Borland StarTeam 2005, software tools designed to help application developers manage the requirements, resources, tasks, assets and workflow for application development. CaliberRM 2005 and StarTeam 2005 offer several new capabilities desig...

Although Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market, there are some rumblings of change being heard, especially as browsers like Mozilla and Opera find more widespread use. The latest browser to garner attention has been Firefox, a product of the Mozilla Foundation. The group has updated t...

IBM unveiled a new line of Linux servers Monday, noting that it will specifically target entry-level users with competitive pricing. The company will be competing with entry-level Unix and Linux platforms developed by Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Paul Rivot, IBM's director of database serve...

The news is out: SCO is losing money. Fast. Considering that SCO has no revenue and lots of expenses, the news is not surprising. Raising revenue and cutting expenses might help, but neither will be easy. The company reported a significant net loss in the third quarter, which it blamed mostly on a l...

IBM today announced it is contributing proprietary voice-recognition software to two different open-source software groups. The Apache Software Foundation will receive Reusable Dialog Components (RDCs), used for handling simple words for dates, times and locations. In addition, IBM is proposing a pr...

With the recent education efforts on Software Freedom Day and aggressive moves by IBM and Novell, it seems that open-source advocates have much to cheer about. Although open-source operating systems have not yet become the standard in corporate and consumer environments, and face plenty of competiti...

IBM announced Wednesday that it is rolling out a new version of its database software for Linux and Unix customers. The DB2 Universal Database version 8.2, code-named Stinger, is designed to streamline administrative tasks and will be available September 17. Stinger also has the potential to boost I...

The techniques used to develop open-source software like Linux have proven to be so effective that they've been adopted by malware writers to improve their mischievous ways. "There's a community of worm builders creating, almost in an open-source fashion, Trojan source code that can be downloaded, c...

During a break in a series of discussions on US HIPAA compliance for Canadian health care players, one of the attendees regaled the group with a long brag about how his company's techies had defeated a phishing attack. According to the story, the company's wizards had discovered a phishing attack ba...