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Many companies are running software on their Web servers that contains open source code with known vulnerabilities, a security firm has found. Software risk management solutions firm Palamida has expanded its Vulnerability Reporting Solution detection capabilities to include 431 open source security...

The career path to the software industry used to be cut and dry. Coders had a choice of either developing projects as part of a remotely dispersed community or punching a clock as a slave to a commercial software house. The former usually meant being considered a player in the software bush league.

San Francisco-based security firm Coverity has been working with support from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and with Stanford University to find flaws in open source software, and it looks like they've found plenty. Since March 2006, an online Coverity software scanning site has analyzed ...

The strained relationship between the One Laptop Per Child organization and Intel has come to an inglorious end with Intel resigning and OLPC claiming the chipmaker "contributed nothing of value." Intel and OLPC announced in July they would work together "to bring the benefits of technology to the d...

A couple of developments in the mobile applications space have my head spinning. First, the LiMo Foundation announced it has increased its membership by adding six new members. Then, Yahoo introduced its mobile developer platform at CES, taking pains to point out that its apps will be compatible wit...

Bernard Golden is convinced there are two chasms to cross for a commercial open source company and I believe there is only one. As I wrote in my recent blog post, "There is no such thing as commercial open source," the attempt to ride the title wave of open source into a magical business domain call...

2007 was an eventful year for the commercial open source industry. We have seen many new entrants, and now there are hundreds of viable companies that are based on open source, filling nearly every segment of the software market. We have seen significant exit events from companies such as XenSource ...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines. Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search i...

MyEclipse IDE vendor Genuitec is stepping up to the general developer downloads plate to take a swing at the task of automated and managed updates, plug-ins and patches to such widespread tools as Eclipse, Android and ColdFusion. The free Pulse service helps bring a "single throat to choke" benefit ...

OpenLogic, a provider of open source packages, has begun the task of quantifying the extent of open source code used on enterprise computers. The company will roll out its global Open Source Census in several phases over the next six months. In early December, OpenLogic announced the first phase wi...

Certifying Linux technicians is a developing trend. The Linux OS is growing up. This is pushing many computer engineers and IT professionals to prove their skills as programmers and systems administrators. While not quite a common job requirement yet, some employers and high-level software developer...

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...

Shakespeare wrote that a rose called by any other name would still smell as sweet. Proponents of open source software and standardizing document formats might wonder whether the same sentiments apply to the poetry between the OpenDocument Format, or ODF, and the Compound Document Format, or CDF. Th...

Several years after the European Commission ruled in an antitrust suit in 2004 that Microsoft had to provide protocol information to its competitors, the Redmond, Wash., software giant has inked an agreement with a team behind the open source project Samba that will let them in on Microsoft's secret...

After almost a decade at the helm of open source software vendor Red Hat, Matthew J. Szulik is stepping down, to be succeeded at the start of the New Year by former Delta Airlines executive James M. Whitehurst as president and CEO. Szulik, who replaced Bob Young as CEO in 1999 shortly after Red Hat'...

Open source software developers who were active in the late 1990s might find themselves yearning for those good old days, when venture capital flowed like wine at Napa Valley party. Maybe they forgot the hangover that settled in once the bubble burst. Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange, likes to point...

Intel has released a software initiator package designed to promote the development of Fibre Channel over Ethernet solutions for Linux, the company announced Tuesday. Now available for download, the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 and is open to all FCoE developer...

For a computer addict, choosing a Linux distribution is much like being an unsupervised child in a candy store. So many flavors with so many choices make the task of picking just one type of candy a near-impossible -- but fun-filled -- task. For a consumer or business exec who must pick a Linux dist...

Linux fans love to debate the pros and cons of myriad technologies, but none more than operating systems -- and you can bet the usual winner isn't based in Redmond or Cupertino. This week the question was raised once again on Slashdot, spurred by a Linux Magazine comparison of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon an...

After a one-week delay, Novell released its fourth quarter earnings Thursday, saying that higher-than-expected costs associated with an ongoing restructuring would weigh on results even as sales of its Linux products surged higher. The restructuring effort could now cost as much as $70 million, Nove...