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Microsoft made good Tuesday on a promise it made months ago to the open source community that it would not sue software developers who use its EMCA C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI. This announcement aims to calm growing fears that Microsoft might restrict open sour...

Is software truly open source if you pay for additional features? Your answer may depend on whether you side with the purists or the, ah, not-so-pure. A recent trend entering the debate involves the marketing of so-called open core software. This morphed business model is not what many open source s...

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...

Having recently completed the second issue of "Hackett and Bankwell," I have been taking inventory of my accomplishments and lessons learned. Two years ago, I was working two jobs, writing Web software by day and configuring Linux servers by night. One job was a corporate situation where a lot of th...

The ongoing economic meltdown has presented a unique strategic opportunity to vendors of open source software. Slashed budgets and riffed staffs are forcing enterprise users of proprietary software business solutions to rethink the suitability of open source replacement products. Many firms -- both ...

Several years ago, I helped develop some software that integrates and monitors certain business processes. We chose to use Linux-based systems because of some key free and open source software that allowed us to put together a sophisticated and comprehensive software platform. So often, the defense ...

VMware is introducing an open source version of its View product -- specifically, an open source client for virtual desktop infrastructure aimed at the data center. Called "VMware View Open Client," this release is largely a partner or ecosystem play for the company, pushing out the VMware View sour...

You may be thinking "who needs another open source High Availability project?" Or, in fact, "why do we need any open source HA project?" For those who do not know, OpenSAF is the latest in a line of open source HA projects that is specifically designed to address high availability and clustering. Fi...

For users reared on GUI-oriented commercial operating systems, switching to open source POSIX-type OSes can be an onerous task. Whereas Linux, and FOSS in general, are built around the ideas of inclusion and sharing, the communities built up around the open source operating systems often face accusa...

A quiet battle of sorts is taking place behind the scenes in the software industry. Software as a Service and cloud computing have evolved, placing much more attention on Web-based applications. This greater focus has also raised expectations for the services delivered via Web 2.0. The open source s...

The advantages of open source, standards and methodologies have been working their way to the surface for the past few years. Whereas in the past, open source projects were more likely to be described as fledgling efforts that lagged far behind proprietary counterparts, "open source" has become a bu...

It's a small wonder that the Linux operating system remains vibrant in multiple industries and is poised to make a dash for more consumers' desktops, considering how often misunderstandings get in the way of its advancement. For instance, Linux was not immediately recognized as a real OS in the way ...

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 ...

On Aug. 13, 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in the much-watched case Jacobsen v. Katzer, No. 2008-1001, which turned on whether violating an open source licensing agreement should be considered copyright infringement. It is important for companies to be aware of ...

Larry Augustin strives for collaboration. Augustin and James Vera launched VA Research in 1993 with the hope of providing a Linux-based operating system for personal computers. After the company bought out its biggest rival -- Linux Hardware Solutions -- the company changed its name to VA Linux Syst...

HP announced Thursday a three-part software governance initiative to help companies address the legal, financial and security demands associated with using free and open source software. The company is donating its intellectual property for monitoring open source products to a new open source commun...

When it comes to creative works, such as a drawing or a piece of writing or music, the law is pretty clear about what is a derivative work and what isn't. Not so much with software. If the software is open source -- that is, licensed under the GNU General Public License or a similar license -- the w...

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday made good on its promise to deliver its OpenSPARC T2 register transfer level processor design to the free and open source community using the GNU General Public License. The OpenSPARC T2 is the open version of Sun's UltraSPARC T2, a processor that features eight cores and...

The hot segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future. First, Paglo came out last month with a free and open source crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other elect...

The Software Freedom Law Center is challenging Verizon's use of BusyBox open source code in the wireless routers provided to its FiOS customers. SFLC has filed suit against Verizon in the U.S. District Court of New York on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleging that the...