Business

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...

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...

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...

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...

The hot segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future. First, Paglo came out last month with a free and open source crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other elect...

The Software Freedom Law Center is challenging Verizon's use of BusyBox open source code in the wireless routers provided to its FiOS customers. SFLC has filed suit against Verizon in the U.S. District Court of New York on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleging that the...

It's not too often the public schools figure prominently in the Linux blogs, but sure enough, this week they drew a surprising amount of discussion on a few different sites. Specifically, news broke on Tuesday that the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., has signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops fro...

Novell announced Wednesday that it has decided to postpone the release of its fourth quarter and full-year 2007 earnings reports, both of which were scheduled for Thursday. The cause, it said, was an inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission, with which Novell has had a series of exchange...

With all the buzz about Android starting to settle down, and the respite from it all afforded by Thanksgiving, the last few weeks have felt a little more mellow in the Linux blogs. One topic that did generate some passionate attention, however, was the question of whether Asus' new eeePC subnotebook...

The Free Software Foundation on Monday published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, a version of the GNU GPLv3 designed specifically for network-oriented free software. The AGPLv3 is based on version 3 of the GPL but includes an additional terms to allow users who interact with the lic...

Sun Microsystems and Dell have put aside their longstanding rivalry and teamed up to offer business customers Sun's Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris operating systems preloaded on Dell's PowerEdge servers. The joint announcement Wednesday at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco follows a similar...

Taking on entrenched players in the virtualization realm, including VMware, Oracle has unveiled a new server virtualization software product that it claims is much more efficient than its competitors' offerings. Oracle is touting the product, Oracle VM, as being faster, cheaper and scalable. It was ...

Open source computing company Red Hat is testing the waters for delivering its Enterprise Linux operating system on a pay-as-you-go online basis through Amazon's Web services system. The deal, in private beta testing, means companies can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Amazon Elastic Compute Clo...