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Remember when AOL thought it was doing the world's researchers a big favor and made a boatload of online user behavior data openly available? Remember the unintended consequences? It became fairly easy to link up user preference data with some actual identifiable users. Users were upset, AOL looked ...

Since Jimmy Wales' announcment last week that he plans to launch a new search engine in Q1 2007, speculation has been rife over what it could mean for the search industry -- and specifically for Google. Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is one of the few Web 2.0 players with enough clout to take on t...

TurboLinux last week announced the release of a palm-sized USB device that comes with the firm's FUJI operating system embedded in its 4 GB flash memory. Called "Wizpy," the device will allow users to load Linux on any computer. The company plans to first distribute Wizpy in Japan in February. An En...

Jeremy Allison, a prominent open source software developer and Samba project cofounder, announced last week that he would be leaving Suse Linux vendor Novell over the company's patent pact with Microsoft. The November interoperability and patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft has upset a num...

Financial heavyweights are among the first IT customers to take up Microsoft's offer for Linux -- delivered to its Windows customers through Redmond's recent deal with Novell, which signed up its Suse Linux for the interoperability and patent partnership last month. AIG Technologies, Credit Suisse a...

Mozilla released the first security reinforcements for Firefox 2.0, the latest version of its popular Web browser, providing users of the open source software with fixes for five critical and three minor security holes. Security has emerged as one of the most important aspects of browser software fr...

IBM last week unveiled a new Open Collaborative Research program, through which technology and results from IBM Research will be made available to the faculty and students of several top universities: Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, Rutgers, UC Berkeley and UC Dav...

As consumers experiment with the Linux operating system and consider switching from Windows, the first carryover they expect to find is applications for virus and spyware protection. However, few exist because Linux does not need them. Nearly all Linux distributions bundle a firewall package, but th...

XenSource wants its open source Xen virtualization technology to win over large enterprise customers, and now the company is eyeing smaller, wider markets with new virtualization products aimed at Windows and more mainstream IT users. On the heels of last month's release of XenEnterprise, XenSource ...

Heavy open source software user and Internet search giant Google this week unveiled a fully open source version of its Google Web Toolkit, GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, available for free under the Apache 2.0 open source license. The toolkit, built around Google's code for Asynchronous Javascript and ...

Microsoft and Novell this week touted results of a recent survey -- sponsored by both companies -- indicating that nearly all IT customers at large organizations overwhelmingly approved of their Windows-Linux interoperability and patent protection deal. Of 201 survey respondents whose organizations ...

Linux is fast becoming my operating system of choice because it lacks the software bloat and high overhead plaguing both Microsoft and Apple computing. Those words do not come easily to me. I have been a devout Windows user from the early days. Each Linux distribution offers a distinct flavor of the...

Web site operators and bloggers will get free Web hosting, including all advertising revenue from their sites, with a new service called "OpenServing" from the Wikipedia for-profit company Wikia. OpenServing will "extend the essence of the open source model," delivering not only free software and co...

Fortify Software and the FindBugs Java error detection project this week unveiled a collaborative effort aimed at zapping the bugs of open source software code written in Java. The Java Open Review Project is designed to help open source software projects identify and fix security and other softwar...

Linux has long been a contender in the corporate world to Windows. In addition, consumer interest is on the rise for this free, open source alternative to Windows or the Macintosh OS. Linux developed along similar lines as Windows in terms of GUI and performance capabilities with one major distinct...

Microsoft's Open XML office software format, pushed by the tech giant to compete with the Open Document Format, cleared a standards hurdle this week, winning approval from the Ecma international standards body. The vote was not unanimous, however, as ODF supporter and Ecma member IBM gave Microsoft'...

With reported fiscal fourth quarter 2006 revenue of US$245 million, Novell missed Wall Street estimates and expectations this week, causing the software and services company stock price to slip more than 9 percent. Novell, which went through major leadership changes this year, also indicated that it...

The One Laptop Per Child Project, an effort spearheaded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte aimed at delivering functional, educational laptop computers to children in developing nations, is looking to wealthier nations to buy its computers for those in need. The project, which looks to rely on ine...

Novell is working with Microsoft and other developers to create bidirectional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. The companies said the first translator, for word processing, will be available by the end of Jan. 2007.

Your next operating system move could be to one of the half-dozen most popular free Linux desktop versions instead of to Microsoft Windows Vista. With these versions, you would not have to perform a risky software upgrade, nor would you have to settle for a watered-down Vista option if your new comp...