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The English language is a great tool. It's expressive, powerful, inclusive, and evolves through the democratic and open-source processes of accepting change on the basis of common usage. Great, but you know what it doesn't have? Enough useable swear words. Think about it, you probably know eight to ...

Lindows has announced the release of a package containing the latest versions of three popular Linux operating systems. Linspire, Fedora and Mandrake are in the bundle, which has been named the Desktop Linux Comparison Kit. According to Lindows, the three systems were chosen on the basis of their pr...

Novell has released a new version of Mono -- an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework -- and some early adopters are already singing its praises. "Mono makes Novell extremely relevant now," said Kingsley Idehen, president and CEO of OpenLink, which has just released Virtuoso 3.5, ...

Veritas announced Tuesday that it has extended support of its storage management and clustering products to the Intel Itanium 2 platform on Red Hat Linux 3.0. According to the company, Veritas is increasing its commitment to making Linux enterprise-ready with the move and is extending its Linux supp...

Next time you open a fortune cookie, consider making it more entertaining. Read the fortune aloud and follow it with the words "in bed." It completely changes the meaning and adds some after-dinner fun. After reading the GPL analysis FAQ prepared by Microsoft in 2001 -- apparently to discourage the ...

Don't make celebratory plans just yet to join the Open Source Solaris Community: Sun Microsystems is only saying that it is looking at its plans to open up the Solaris source code, meaning it could happen months from now, years from now or, in fact, never. Despite reports yesterday that it was a don...

The leading candidate in an international race to fly people to space aboard a privately developed rocket plans to make his bid for the final frontier in three weeks. Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, announced Wednesday that he would dispatch his novel craft, called SpaceShipOne, to suborbital alti...

A papoose named Geronimo is venturing out of the teepee this week, and the Apache Software Foundation says it might be ready for its rite of passage later this summer. The organization's effort to develop an open-source version of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) became a full-fledged project this w...

This week's column is about the nature of the software needed to go with the elections administration hardware laid out in last week's column. In brief, the idea was to ignore political reality long enough to imagine a system in which the voting support application runs on the local servers but capt...

In a move seen as adding further legitimacy to open-source computing, Hewlett-Packard has announced it will support MySQL and JBoss, two popular open-source programs. The announcement helps round out HP's open-source-based offerings, but it is seen as a big win for the two smaller companies involved...

Fujitsu said the company has formed a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems in the Unix server business to minimize its exposure to this segment amid the ongoing shift to Linux servers. IDC Japan, a privately-held research firm, recently forecast that domestic sales of Linux servers will account ...

The tension in the room is as thick as quicksand. The smoke gets heavier by the hour, and with each poker hand, the players wonder how long they can hold out. Who will hold? Who will fold? Who is just bluffing? One by one, they drop. The ongoing legal wrangling between SCO, IBM, Novell, AutoZone, Da...

The dust from CA World is settling down as end users, analysts and true believers try to come to terms with Computer Associates' sudden interest in the open-source development model. The company has created its own CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL), not as a rival to the GPL but as a way to p...

GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has told LinuxInsider that a recent report's use of interviews with Stallman is a "deliberate" attempt to confuse people about the origins of the Linux kernel, the GNU system and software developed as part of the free-software and open-source movements. "The purp...

In a move applauded by legal experts in the free software movement, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) yesterday announced its support for enhancements to the Linux kernel submission process that it hopes will improve accurate tracking of contributions to the kernel and ensure developers receiv...