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Technology wars are predictable. Every new wave of gadgetry brings a fight over who will be the next king of the software hill. The next big battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace.

Is OpenStack best deployed as a server distribution, a service from a cloud provider, or something else? You might think that such a question would have a simple answer. Yet at the OpenStack Summit in Paris last month, seven developers participating in a panel discussion failed to reach a consensus....

The amount of open source software used by the U.S. government might well be one of the biggest secrets in Washington. Not even purveyors of FOSS, as in free and open source software, know the extent of federal agency adoption of nonproprietary software. Some in the Beltway Loop contend that open so...

Open source software is now a force drawing enterprises and developers like a magnet. The factors pulling adopters into the open source fold are changing, though. Also changing are the attitudes of software developers and corporate leaders about the viability and adaptability of open source. Open so...

Server-side Linux has been pushing into the enterprise for some years now, and 42 percent of respondents to a survey conducted on behalf of Linux vendor SUSE said it was either their primary server OS or one of their top server platforms. Perhaps more importantly, Linux is extending its reach beyond...

It's obvious from the latest U.S. election that our voting system could use some improvement in terms of both enabling and supporting voters and efficiently tallying and verifying a trusted result. Open source offers the technology, as well as the culture and community, to address these challenges, ...

Windows 8 is on its way. In fact, it's already here, in a manner of speaking. Microsoft recently released what it called a "consumer preview" version of the OS. When the final versions arrive, it will finally give Microsoft a leg up in the tablet market. That might take a bite out of the market sha...

Virtualization giant VMware has unveiled Spring Hadoop, which integrates its Spring Framework with the Apache Hadoop platform. Spring provides a comprehensive, lightweight framework that will make it easier for devs to build solutions around the Hadoop platform, according to the company. Spring Hado...

The stage is set for a new battle of mobile form factors. The winner could set a new non-desktop standard for consumers and office workers looking for a better alternative to bulky laptops. Lighter, thinner and more powerful are the key factors guiding the designs of tablets, convertibles, hybrids a...

Amid the many predictions for 2012 regarding Linux and open source software, including my own forecast of Linux domination, there is a larger, wider embrace of open source software taking place not only in the technology and other industries, not only in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and So...

Google's recent plan to buy Motorola Mobility has the potential for reshaping the entire Android landscape. If it wins regulatory approval for the purchase, Google may only have a short time span to connect its marketing strategy. When and if this happens, it could further fracture the open source A...

New software from Misys Open Source Solutions promises to provide what could be the world's first fully open source, standards-based platform for exchanging health information. The Misys Connect Exchange software was demonstrated and successfully tested last week in Chicago at IHE Connectathon, the ...

Open source healthcare IT solutions are just beginning to become acceptable alternatives to proprietary software systems. As is happening in other fields, open source medical projects are getting noticed as cost-saving alternatives to proprietary vendors. The battle for supremacy between the two mar...

Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Yellow Dog Linux, has been acquired by the Japanese software firm Fixstars Corporation, a developer of Cell Broadband Engine solutions. The new company, now known as "Fixstars Solutions," is operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Fixstars and will maintain i...

Cisco Systems announced on Tuesday the extension of its Application Extension Platform as well as a contest for developers to provide new applications. The Cisco AXP is an open, Linux-based hardware module for the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Its Linux-based integration environment comes with a...

What does a systems engineer in charge of a computer network for a major medical facility do to trim expenses and administer much-needed performance medicine to mission-critical applications? In the case of Orlando's Florida Hospital, network administrators surgically removed failing proprietary sof...

SCALE is no Macworld. First of all, the Linux community doesn't have a charismatic marketing genius like Steve Jobs hawking products on a stage with a three-story screen behind him and an audiovisual program to make U2 jealous. No, we've got Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman -- and they're not her...

In a busy two days of announcements last week, MySQL, the Sweden- and U.S. West Coast-based vendor of the open source MySQL database, said that business users can expect an enriched Enterprise Edition collection of software, service and support, called "MySQL Enterprise." The other leg of the announ...

IBM is contributing a processing engine to the open source and public health communities that will make it easier to track the transmission of diseases around the world. The software, Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, is available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project,...

Red Hat this week released its first JBoss product within a new open source stack that folds together Red Hat Linux, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Hibernate and either of two open source databases -- MySQL or PostgreSQL. The Red Hat Application Stack, available via subscription, is offered as an a...