Business

Wikileaks.org won a reprieve Friday from a judge's order that had shut down its U.S. site for more than a week. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White lifted the injunction he had previously imposed to keep the site from spreading possible trade secrets. He issued the new ruling after he heard a fr...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

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...

A Swiss bank has succeeded in at least temporarily shutting down the U.S. version of a Web site where a former bank employee posted internal documents he claims showed the bank was being used to hide and launder money. Earlier, a judge approved an order taking down the Web site. The U.S. arm of whis...

The SCO Group, a software technology and mobile services firm that focuses on Unix-based solutions -- but is perhaps best for its high-profile lawsuits against Novell and IBM -- has announced a $100 million cash infusion from Stephen Norris Capital Partners that promises to yank the small Utah-based...

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...

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...

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are making an impact on how companies conduct employee recruiting and workforce management activities. According to an ever-growing group of experts and companies in the employment business, that impact has the potential to be profound and far-reaching. Not everyon...

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...

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...

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 ...