Business

Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Yellow Dog Linux, has been acquired by the Japanese software firm Fixstars Corporation, a developer of Cell Broadband Engine solutions. The new company, now known as "Fixstars Solutions," is operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Fixstars and will maintain i...

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching fi...

Google's first Android phone has finally made its way into long-waiting hands. The T-Mobile G1 device, expected to be in stores within the coming week, is drawing mixed reviews from early users. The closest thing to a sweeping overview might be that it is a powerful device with a few flaws but plent...

The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled "The Underground Myth," that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades. The author describes a technical landsca...

IBM has announced a new corporate strategy regarding its participation in the hundreds of standard-setting organizations relevant to its products. Simply put, it only wants to work within an environment that is open and transparent. "Standard-setting is too important -- for business, for government,...

Networking giant Cisco Systems said Friday that will acquire instant-messaging software maker Jabber. Terms of the pending deal were not disclosed. Denver-based Jabber makes an open source instant-messaging software that supports an assortment of devices across a business' IT network. Jabber also ma...

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 ...

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT su...

Open source developers now have newly clarified protection, thanks to an appeals court ruling over the validity of their licenses. A judge with U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Wednesday that programmers who "engage in open source licensing" and copyright their work do "have the r...