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Give office workers familiar with the Microsoft XP operating system an opportunity to try the same navigational tasks at a Linux-based desktop. Then step back and wait for the reaction. First will come the surprised look. Then questions like "where did the command line go?" will soon follow. That's ...

In the world of Rich Internet Applications, the battle for hearts and minds -- not to mention eyeballs and desktops -- heated up this week when Adobe Systems took the wraps off the beta version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime and slotted it for public release. Adobe AIR, according to the buzz on the...

The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group -- which claims to be the world's most attractive hacker group -- has released Goolag Scanner, an open source tool that uses Google's search engines to look for vulnerabilities in Web sites. Goolag Scanner is either a Web auditing tool that can be used by securi...

Wikis are finally becoming a useful tool for collaboration and information sharing in the workplace. However, like all business tools exposed on the Internet or corporate intranet, IT managers have to view their deployments with a stern eye regarding who can use them and what corporate information m...

AMD has open sourced more than 3,000 routines in its AMD Performance Library for multi-threaded programming. These routines, which will make it easier to build media and other applications for multi-core processors, have been posted under the Apache license on SourceForge.net. With more than 170,000...

Microsoft is making broad changes to its technological and business practices in an effort to make its most popular products more open and interoperable with those from other vendors. Driven by industry changes, competitive pressures and legal realities, Microsoft laid out a variety of moves designe...

Mozilla is up to its elbows in code as it works toward the final release of the third iteration of its Firefox Web browser. With the launch last week of the browser's third beta version, the open source developer has given some 500,000 developers and testers the go-ahead to put the application throu...

Here I was all ready to post my thoughts on user interfaces and ease of use, when news surfaced that the SCO Group has received an investment of $100 million to take it private. The company once claimed to own the rights to Unix and then proceeded to sue IBM and Novell for infringing its intellectua...

Sparks flew at the GSMA mobile telephony conference in Barcelona, Spain, as members of the LiMo and Android consortiums demonstrated their products and announced new developments. LiMo, a consortium of 32 major firms, including mobile phone companies, unveiled 18 commercial handsets and several prot...

Sun Microsystems is acquiring Germany-based virtualization software provider Innotek and, with it, its increasingly popular open source x86 virtualization product VirtualBox. The deal comes on the heels of Sun's recent purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion. VirtualBox enabl...

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...

Mozilla released an update Thursday that corrects several vulnerabilities in the Firefox Web browser. Firefox 2.0.0.12 patches critical flaws that could result in Web browsing history and forward navigation stealing; privilege escalation that could allow cross-site scripting exploits; and crashes wi...

Not quite five months after its acquisition by Yahoo, open source e-mail operator Zimbra Tuesday unveiled its Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 software. This next-generation product has features for reading mail and creating documents offline from a Web browser. ZCS 5.0 enhancements include offline ac...

The world of open source mobile platforms is starting to get a little crowded. Over the past couple of days, rumors began flying that Dell is getting into the game with a phone based on Google's Android platform. Dell denies it, but the amount of attention that is being paid to this segment of the m...

The 2008 presidential primaries capture the lion's share of election season media exposure, but an equally critical campaign is running quietly in the background. The controversial decision to implement various types of electronic voting machines in place of paper ballots is garnering little public ...

WSO2, an open source SOA provider, has combined JavaScript programming and Web services with the launch of its Mashup Server 1.0. This open source offering, which can be downloaded without subscription fees, will allow enterprises to consume, aggregate and publish information in a variety of forms a...

Black Duck Software announced today the availability of Black Duck Code Center software to help manufacturers accelerate software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Code Center manages software component selection, project approval and license tracking designed ...

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...

MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week of Mule Galaxy 1.0. Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an i...

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to acquire MySQL, maker of the popular MySQL database system, for $1 billion. Sun -- long a proponent and developer of open source systems -- agreed to pay $800 million in cash and assume liability for $200 million in stock options. The deal likely won't be compl...