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What began as an MIT group project in a Somerville, Massachusetts, garage four years ago has evolved into a unique and successful developer of RFID, sensing and embedded computing technologies. In August, 2000, the original five founders of ThingMagic, all armed with MIT Ph.D.s, came up with an idea...

It's a new rear, time for focusing on those New Year's resolutions. One of my resolutions was to spend more time outdoors, but it's the rainy season so I'm stuck indoors for now. In that case, I decided to put my cool new presents to good use. I took to the Web to research photo manipulation soft...

The year 2004 might someday be remembered as the year that venture capitalists got interested in open-source software -- interested enough to fund a number of new companies based on open source, especially Linux. The year saw a number of funding rounds for such companies as high-end Linux cluster fi...

From sports to gossip to business, it is a time-honored New Year's tradition for columnists to prognosticate on what we can expect in the coming year. Tabloids tell us which celebrity marriages will break up, where aliens will appear next, and what famous personalities will dominate the news. Fort...

Until quite recently, Oracle's salespeople would recommend Sun hardware because SPARC offered the memory, processor speed and reliability needed to make the database product seem pretty good. Today, however, Oracle sees Lintel (Linux on Intel) as its route to a bigger share of the customer's budget....

PalmSource, the separate company that develops the palmOne mobile operating system, announced today it would buy China MobileSoft, whose Linux technology will give PalmSource an instant foothold in the open-source market. Analysts praised the move. "PalmSource will greatly extend its reach in both t...

Industry analysts say the fastest growing operating system in the world -- Linux -- could be experiencing growing pains as growth outpaces the supply of IT professionals with expertise in this area. "Linux is increasing its market share so rapidly that, in consequence, some companies find it difficu...

A coalition of over 60 European open-source service providers earlier this week united to form an organization dubbed the Open Source Consortium (OSC). The group's stated purpose is to act as an independent reference point to give an unbiased "proprietary-vendor free" voice for all organizations dep...

The same group that said that free and open-source software was a bigger security risk than commercial software and also claimed that Linus Torvalds ripped off the Linux kernel plans to release a new report in a few weeks. Ken Brown, director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's technology pro...

I recently had the opportunity, as part of a review of what works in systems security, to look closely at a couple of massively multi-user online games including "EverQuest" and "Star Wars Galaxies." Several of these now support up to half a million registered users and go beyond simple player co-op...

The three most famous European authors of open-source software today issued an appeal against software patents in Europe. Linux author Linus Torvalds, MySQL author Michael Windenius and PHP author Rasmus Lerdorf are urging the European Union Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adop...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off a mini-brouhaha today with a comment he made at the Asia Government Leaders Forum about a controversial Linux study. The study, from Open Source Risk Management, which aims to sell insurance policies and "risk mitigation consulting" services to users of Linux, ...

President Bush has made it clear that tort reform, narrowly construed in terms of medical liability reform, is on the short-term agenda. In theory, that should be easily done and very positive in its effects, but of course, reality is never as simple as theory, and there are some real risks to open ...

Linux vendors from Europe, Asia, and North and South America have teamed up to create a common core implementation of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0. This implementation will serve as the core for each of the new consortium members' future Linux distribution products, the companies announced join...

Back in 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists. He asked, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?" Today, Gates has to eat those words because the...

The speculation is over. Sun is set to release a new version of its Solaris operating system today, and Solaris 10, the newest version of its Unix-based operating system, will soon be available for the first time ever as a free open-source product. Sun spent billions of dollars developing the code, ...

Desperately seeking their future, African countries that virtually no Western commercial software vendors have cared about in the past are turning to free and open software. They are doing so at a pace just quick enough to alarm some commercial software vendors, who fear the prospect of an entire co...

Hewlett-Packard and JBoss announced a deal today in which HP will support JBoss' open-source application server and use its Services division to help clients migrate to JBoss' platform. With the arrangement, HP becomes the first big Linux vendor to certify JBoss. "Most of the Linux firms are pretty ...

In a move to tap into the demand for low-cost software in developing markets, Red Hat announced yesterday it would open its first office in Beijing, China this week. The company said it is working with partners such as HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle to help the Chinese market learn more about open source...

While I was handing out candy on Halloween, a trick-or-treater came to the door dressed as an open-source project. There was code everywhere and volunteer contributors were coming out of his ears. It was a clever costume, but what made it really scary was the giant fork he was carrying. Open-sourc...