Search

Oracle on Thursday filed suit against Google for patent and copyright infringement in the latter's development of the Android operating system. Google "knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property," according to the suite, which "seeks appropriate remedies...

Personal data about millions of Android users could be sent to a mysterious Chinese website thanks to a set of wallpaper apps in the Android Market. That's according to mobile security firm Lookout, which discovered the questionable apps as part of its new App Genome Project, an effort to identify s...

Consumers who have put off buying their first smartphone or upgrading an aging one are facing a more complicated decision as of Thursday. Into a market already very heated with the recent launches of Apple's iPhone 4, carried exclusively by AT&T, and HTC's EVO 4G Android, via Sprint, comes Moto...

When Samsung's Android-powered Galaxy S makes its U.S. debut in the coming months, it will do so as five different phones tailored for five different carriers. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and U.S. Cellular will all support a Galaxy S device, though the handset will be renamed and recast slig...

In this debate series for LinuxInsider, we've heard from Evan Prodromou, CEO of StatusNet, who put forth the case for an open, distributed, federated model for social networking in contrast to Facebook's approach. We've also heard from Steven Bristol, partner and self-described "Chief Nerd" at Less ...

Steven Bristol is a partner and "chief nerd" at Less Everything, a company that focuses on building easy-to-use Ruby on Rail Web apps. The company created LovdbyLess, a free open source social network platform, after getting requests from customers. Users download a copy and are responsible for inst...

Facebook has been battling users, prominent people in the high-tech field, and privacy advocates over the question of privacy for years now, and the problem appears to have intensified. In November 2008, Evan Prodromou -- founder of identi.ca and CEO and lead developer of StatusNet -- published a bl...

Positioned somewhere between the smartphone and the laptop, Apple's new tablet is billed as "the best way to experience the Web, email, photos and videos." While the Macintosh, Windows and Linux platforms all compete to varying degrees on PCs, netbooks and smartphones, the iPad currently stands more...

Verizon Wireless is stoking the excitement around its upcoming Motorola Droid smartphone, which it will officially put on sale on Friday. The buzz on the Droid isn't driven entirely by a marketing team, though. The phone's hardware has received many positive reviews, and it will be the first phone t...

Adobe has released two new platform initiatives for developers and content publishers: Open Source Media Framework, previously part of the Strobe project, gives developers new open source tools to build media players based on the Adobe Flash Platform; Text Layout Framework, or TLF, provides develope...

With Google targeting the netbook with both its Chrome and Android operating systems, which way should developers jump? Should they pick Chrome, the browser that will soon become an OS and is likely to face strong competition from Microsoft and Apple? Or should they go with Android, an OS that has s...

There's no doubt some companies have succeeded in using virtual worlds for branding and interaction with their customers, whether through in-world stores, billboards or other means. Wells Fargo, for instance, has been operating its Stagecoach Island aimed at young customers for roughly four years an...

T-Mobile's Tuesday announcement that it will offer a new Android smartphone in August has raised interest in the possibility of greater competition for enterprise adoption. The new Android-powered smartphone, the myTouch 3G, will come loaded with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a 3.5-megapixel camera and a ...

SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories -- the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors per month -...

Although it's struggling against both giant rivals like Google and smaller ones like Microsoft's new search venture Bing, Yahoo is handing over the source code for its version of Hadoop to the community. Hadoop, a top-level Apache project, is an open source distributed file system and parallel execu...

The Linux Foundation has inked a deal that fosters collaboration with SourceForge and acquires ownership of Linux.com. The move is intended to create a long-lasting community destination for Linux users and developers, officials from the organizations said. The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit outfit...

A patent represents a grant from the United States government to an individual for the exclusive right to make, use, import, sell, and offer to sell an invention. In order to obtain a patent, an inventor must prove that the invention is new, useful, and not merely an obvious improvement over what wa...

As promised, search engine giant Google has released the source code for its Android platform -- the open source technology that Google hopes will be adopted by mobile application developers, phone makers and carriers alike. The move comes just a day before the first Android-powered smartphone -- th...

Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project, speaks at great lengths about preserving the ideological purity of free software, and in his vision of the future, computer software development is modeled after mathematics and science research, where all research and development is open. So far as ...

T-Mobile may be partnering with cell phone handset manufacturer HTC to deliver the first smartphone running Google's Android platform, according to reports. Unnamed sources briefed on T-Mobile's plans have said the carrier could announce the phone as early as September -- and would almost certainly ...