Business

With Google's Android rollout this week, hand in hand with the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, the Linux community has had plenty to discuss regarding the platform, its openness and what it would all mean for wireless users. There was considerable debate on Slashdot, focusing on what part of ...

Red Hat has signed a pair of agreements with Sun Microsystems that will help put the open source company on the fast track to delivering a more complete end-to-end application development and runtime stack for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers. Red Hat has been heading in this direction for a w...

Sun Microsystems announced modest increases in revenue and profit for its first quarter of 2008 and said continuing the growth remains its "top priority" for the rest of the year. The company, now in its 25th year, reported first-quarter net income of $89 million, which equates to 3 cents per share....

Second Life may be a virtual world, but six entrepreneurs operating there have filed a real-life lawsuit against Second Life users who allegedly copied their products. The suit was filed last week in Brooklyn federal court against New York resident Thomas Simon, who reportedly goes by the name "Rase...

It's been a contentious few weeks on the Linux blogs, what with the big Microsoft news on Monday as well as a few key product happenings and subsequent evaluation. The release of Canonical's Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on Oct. 18 has been a particularly hot topic. Included in the release, which replace...

Mozilla's revenues for 2006 were up roughly 26 percent from 2005, reaching $66.8 million, the company said Monday. In a report including both the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, the maker of the Firefox browser also said that expenses for the year were just $19.8 million, leaving it with...

Curl plans to release much of its code for the Curl Rich Internet Application platform to the open source community to enhance the development of Web 2.0 applications. The company announced Monday the first step in its open source strategy -- the creation of a common repository of open source compon...

The third version of the GNU General Public License version 3, released last summer, is on the slow road to acceptance. The new licensing conditions usher in numerous changes in how open source software developers regulate what users of their freely distributed programming code are legally able and ...

"Free software" is a term that's often used interchangeably with "open source," and often understood simply to mean software that is obtained without charge. However, the idea of free software is neither about openness nor about price; it is a matter of freedom, and its implications extend into the ...

Two companies have hit Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell with a patent infringement lawsuit alleging their products use technology first patented more than a decade ago. IP Innovation and Technology Licensing filed the suit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Texas, a popular jurisdiction for patent...

Linspire released its Linspire 6.0 Linux distribution, which contains a mix of open source and proprietary drivers and software and is the first commercial offering from Linspire to provide customers with Microsoft patent covenants. There was only one word missing that could have made the announceme...

Heavy construction is under way to create an open playing field of interoperable technologies for users to navigate the so-called 3D Internet of the future. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, and IBM announced Tuesday that they will work with other partners to drive open standards and tools wh...

The worldwide open source community shares a common overall goal: better software through collaboration and peer review. It's difficult enough to achieve this task even when most of the participants share a common language. Building bridges between different parts of the world -- especially between ...

Microsoft has the best products money can buy -- at least, that's what they would have you believe. However, remove money from the equation so MS buyers can't brag on the size of investment, and OpenOffice fans can't gloat about a freebie, who would win in an OpenOffice vs MS Office 2007 face-off? "...

The reaction to ISO's recent rejection of Microsoft's Office Open XML ranged from triumphant: "Microsoft trounced in document format vote," to cautious: "not so fast." Lost amid the complex ISO process and reports of Microsoft's ballot-stuffing is a clear understanding of just what the fuss at ISO i...