Business

After four and a half years, the long, torturous and often twisted legal battle between SCO and Novell came to an end Friday when a federal district court judge put the kibosh on SCO's claims that it owned copyrights to the Unix code and operating system, upon which some of the code in Linux is base...

IBM and Linux distributor Novell are strengthening their partnership in order to encourage cross-adoption of their respective platforms and products, especially in the small to medium-sized business space. The companies hope to erode market share inroads recently gained by Microsoft and Red Hat with...

As part of its ongoing Project Big Green initiative, IBM announced Wednesday that it is replacing 3,900 computer servers in its datacenters with 30 System z mainframes running Linux, for an expected energy reduction of 80 percent over the next five years. The move represents one of the most signific...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...

Linden Lab, the creator of the massive Second Life online virtual world, is facing heat from its customers after this week's decision to ban gambling from the pseudo-reality realm. The comments filed by members on the Second Life blog, where the gambling ban was announced, range from concerned to ma...

While the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public Licenses are used in nearly three-quarters of all free and open source software, GPL-based licenses not the only game in town. There are dozens of free and open source-focused software licenses, and while most aren't used -- or aren't even usef...

In the search for a new chief technology officer, The Linux Foundation has nabbed Markus Rex, a long-time Linux executive from Suse Linux and, more recently, Novell. While Rex will be working for The Linux Foundation, technically he's only on loan to the non-profit organization that's dedicated to a...

Eyeing an October release, OLPC announced that it has authorized the mass production of the final beta version of its rugged XO laptop aimed at children in developing countries. Featuring the AMD Geode LX processor, OLPC's XO B4 laptops are designed to withstand even the harshest environmental condi...

The free software movement's most important license -- version three of the GNU General Public License was unveiled by the Free Software Foundation late last month. It comes roughly 16 years after its wildly successful predecessor, GPLv2, became one of the most used software licenses ever. Today, ap...

Wal-Mart is among the retailers now carrying a new $298 PC from Everex featuring OpenOffice productivity software, Everex announced Friday. Billed as a "back-to-school" offering aimed at students, the Everex Impact GC3502 is powered by the energy-efficient 1.5 GHz VIA C7-D processor and comes preloa...

Firefox is gaining ground in Europe, according to a report released Monday by French Web analytics firm XiTi Monitor, and at least some of that progress seems to be coming at the expense of Internet Explorer. Mozilla's Firefox accounted for nearly 28 percent of the browser market in Europe in the fi...

There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process. "We've already seen a shift in both software and the media where individual content is key and any one very talented coder or blogger can impact an industry," Am...

In a momentous move to end a long-standing rivalry, Intel and One Laptop per Child announced Friday that the chip giant has climbed on board the nonprofit group's effort to produce low-cost laptop computers for developing nations. OLPC aims to bring laptops and learning opportunities to the most rem...

It's probably safe to say that most Americans, at one time or another, have felt they could do a better job of governing the nation than their elected officials. It may even be safe, in fact, to say that that has never been more true than it is today. "Bush's approval ratings are as low as it's poss...

Microsoft has issued a statement about its position in regard to the Free Software Foundation's version 3 of the GNU General Public License, which was crafted in part to protect users from possible Microsoft patent infringement lawsuits. Microsoft's stance? The company, in four paragraphs of text, e...