Developers

With Google targeting the netbook with both its Chrome and Android operating systems, which way should developers jump? Should they pick Chrome, the browser that will soon become an OS and is likely to face strong competition from Microsoft and Apple? Or should they go with Android, an OS that has s...

I believe with the right approach, Linux can take a great chunk of the market; you just have to give the market what it needs and wants, while allaying its fears. What's needed is a true Linux SMB Edition, targeting specifically the needs and fears of those businesses that are using Windows -- espec...

SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories -- the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors per month -...

As the most dynamic and commercial industry on Earth -- which has grown its annual revenues from zero to $1 trillion in less than 25 years and today manages 4 billion consumer relationships -- mobile has propelled itself forward with a highly discriminating attitude toward openness within device tec...

Mozilla's call to developers to participate in its Jetpack project on Wednesday is the latest onslaught in the ongoing war of the Web browsers. Jetpack is an open source application programming interface that will let users create add-ons for Mozilla's Firefox browser using the Web technologies they...

Email was born sometime between 1965 and 1970, depending on how you define its genesis, and by 1980 it was considered by many to be the killer app. It drove the proliferation of PCs in the workplace and allowed people all over the world to work together. SMS texting and tweeting can take some credit...

Application creators can get an early look at the software developer kit for Android 1.5, the next version of the mobile operating system, according to Google. Based on the "Cupcake" branch from the Android Open Source Project, the SDK has application programming interfaces for new features, includi...

Before we can delve into making a scalable application, it's worth spending some time to define just what scalability is and isn't. Contrary to what many novice developers think, scalability is not primarily about performance. Performance is virtually unrelated to the aggregate scalability of an app...

Good things come in small packages, as they say, and that's perhaps never been more true than it is today, thanks to the emergence of increasingly diminutive devices equipped with Linux. Perhaps most notable of late is the $99 Marvell SheevaPlug, a wall-wart-sized device that runs Linux on a 1.2-GHz...

The Linux desktop has traditionally been a very fragmented and niche market, and the mobile Linux space is no different. While choice can be a good thing, fragmentation can be a strong detractor against any one platform gaining traction. What fragmentation means to developers is one, that they have...

I wonder if Levi Strauss would have made billions selling his blue jeans if he had said that the zipper was "sold separately." I wonder if cell phones would be as ubiquitous as they are today if everyone had to learn to speak binary in order to communicate using them. I wonder how many people would ...

A group of large and small IT companies and institutions have signed the Open Cloud Manifesto, pledging to work together to establish and promote open standards in cloud computing. Officially, there are now 38 signatories -- a group that includes IBM, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Rackspace an...

If the FOSS community is united by its love of passionate debate, it is arguably divided in equal measure by diverging views on the purpose of free and open source software. To some, FOSS means simply software that is intended to be free, or without financial cost; to others, the open availability o...

When Microsoft won its bid to make Office Open XML an international standard last year, it was a pivotal moment for many in the FOSS community and beyond. The process had been a highly contentious one, with protests from nations and corporations around the globe, and the International Organization f...

The free and open source software community is known for many things, but perhaps none more than its propensity for passionate debate. No topic is too small for the community's spirited analysis, so it should come as no surprise that the Linux kernel -- one of the most central elements of the FOSS w...