Business

Open source software provider Red Hat reported strong revenue growth for its second fiscal quarter and announced there are now more than 3,000 applications certified to run on its Enterprise Linux operating system. The company saw $127.3 million in revenue for the quarter, an increase of 28 percent ...

Despite a press release by the defendant indicating its desire for a quick settlement, the licensing beef between BusyBox and Monsoon Multimedia is in fact still alive and well. No agreement has yet been reached, said Daniel B. Ravicher, the attorney who is prosecuting the Software Freedom Law Cente...

The One Laptop Per Child organization, which seeks to bridge the digital divide for poor children in developing economies, is kicking off a deal that allows charity-minded consumers to buy two laptops -- one for a child in a developing country and one for the buyer to keep. The two-laptops promotion...

Intel has created a new open source energy-saving project -- LessWatts.org -- which it hopes will help drive innovations so that Linux-powered servers, PCs and even household devices use up less juice. Intel unveiled the project at its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Friday, noting that th...

In what promises to be a precedent-setting case, the Software Freedom Law Center announced Thursday that it has filed the first ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License. The case was filed on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox against...

The Mozilla Foundation is spinning off its open source e-mail client, Thunderbird, into an independent company. The new company, MailCo, plans to develop Internet communications software "based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand," Mozilla said. David Ascher, CTO of ActiveState, will lead th...

A proprietary behemoth like IBM giving away enterprise-rich office applications for free? That was the news from IBM this week, but Big Blue's motives aren't entirely altruistic. IBM is presenting a set of enterprise applications -- word processing, spreadsheet, presentation applications -- called "...

In the aftermath of the SCO Group filing for bankruptcy on Friday, reactions from analyst and community quarters are less gleeful and more sober about lessons learned. There weren't any champagne corks popping at the headquarters of the Linux Foundation following Friday's announcement. "The lawsuit ...

Siemens and BMW are the latest enterprise-scale customers stepping up to the Microsoft-Novell alliance plate. Under the Microsoft-Novell alliance, business customers pay Microsoft for certificates that get them Novell Suse Linux and services. Microsoft and Novell are teaming up to maximize interoper...

IBM has announced that it is moving closer than it has ever been to the OpenOffice.org community with stepped-up support in its Lotus product line of collaborative software and a commitment to contribute code. The announcement suggests a win-win for IBM and OpenOffice.org, a seven-year-old project c...

Microsoft's Office Open XML on Tuesday failed to win enough votes among members of the International Organization for Standardization to become an international standard. The vote, however, may not be the final chapter in the fight over standardized document file formats. The Foundation for a Free I...

Collaborative wiki technology is making its way into the small and medium-sized business, offering SMBs a way to foster collaboration among employees and interaction with the public. One company, Des-Moines, Iowa-based CustomerVision, recently released RapidWiki, which is designed to get small and m...

The open source model of developing software is making a significant impact, not only in the software development and broader high-tech community, but more generally within corporations, other types of businesses and organizations around the world, as Part 1 of this series describes. Whether it's on...

The world of technology contact centers is going to get a little more engaging. IBM, forever scrambling to stay ahead of the game in customer interaction models, announced Thursday that a virtual IBM Business Center is open for business in Asia. What makes this different from any other contact cente...

Open source software -- think Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia, Apache, Ajax and a host of other projects -- has introduced a radically different development model -- and mindset -- to the stream of high-tech innovation. It is one that is having repercussions in the corporate world that go beyond how softw...