Like other governments and corporations seeking to mix yesterday's IT investments with today's emerging technology, the state of Massachusetts has directed its IT staff to begin adopting open standards and open-source software. The move mirrors other government and enterprise initiatives that have I...

In an interview with Bill Joy headlined "Joy after Sun," Fortune Magazine mentions Joy's famous "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" article from Wired, which concluded that "robotics, nanotech and genetic engineering were emerging so quickly that, if we weren't careful, they could endanger the human sp...

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices. The T-Engine Forum, a project that counts ...

On most workday mornings, my e-mail contains a newsletter promising "unbiased opinion" -- an editorial oxymoron whose intent is probably to deny the presence of commercial advocacy. We tend to think of bias as necessarily negative, but in fact a bias is just a predisposition to believe or disbelieve...

A looming October 14th deadline could result in a widening of SCO Group's legal assault on Linux and distributors of the open-source operating system as the Lindon, Utah-based company mulls plans to pull another Unix license, this time from SGI. SCO laid the groundwork for the move -- which would ex...

Sun Microsystems has announced that its Java Desktop System will support AMD's new Athlon 64 processor. Marketing the JDS as "the first viable alternative to Windows in 15 years," Sun hopes to draw customers with the feel of a familiar desktop environment and a price tag that is significantly less t...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...

You might have been given the impression from reading another column published on this network that all of the open-source community is openly against Microsoft and wants you to move right away to GNU or Linux software. The simple truth is that the open-source community was and is quite happy doing ...

In a letter posted today on its company Web site and some open-source sites, SCO Group chief executive Darl McBride aimed the company's Unix-code-in-Linux claims at Silicon Graphics, which SCO says it is in discussions with over the matter. McBride also criticized the existing open-source software d...