Developers

Mozilla has posted the first public beta of Firefox 3. At the same time, however, Mozilla is warning that the beta is for testing purposes only and not for casual users. Because this beta is targeted at testing core functionality added to the browser, Mozilla notes that some of Firefox 3 Beta 1 is s...

When it comes time to upgrade to a new version of proprietary software -- take the Windows OS, for example -- many users are less than thrilled. Upgrades can mean an added expense for anything more extensive than a bug fix or minor feature upgrades. Even free minor version upgrades of a software pro...

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...

In what may well be one of the most unusual computing tasks performed by the Linux operating system, Terra Soft Solutions integrated its Yellow Dog Linux distribution and the Sony PlayStation 3 to guide a specially designed driverless car competing in the qualifying rounds for the DARPA autonomous v...

The OpenDocument Foundation, after five years of promoting the OpenDocument Format for office applications, is switching direction and embracing a different format. ODF, which is overseen by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has been accepted as an ISO standar...

Uruguay recently became the first country to order the One Laptop Per Child Foundation's so-called $100 Laptops, devices designed for children in developing nations. The only problem? The laptops, 100,000 of which were reportedly ordered by the nation, cost just about twice as much as the foundation...

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 Labs has begun an endeavor with the ultimate goal of creating an environment for PC users in which Web applications function on the desktop the same way and with the same ease of use as desktop applications. The first application to come from the project is Prism, formerly known as "Webrunne...

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...

Friends, colleagues, organizations and teams will soon be able to use a new service designed to help them share, organize and find information with Twine.com, Radar Networks announced Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Twine is the first mainstream application of what the company called ...

PayPal transacts more than $1,500 every second of every day, with millions of people around the world relying on the robustness of its system. It comes as a surprise to many people that PayPal runs such a large financial services company on an open source platform, but that's precisely how we're abl...

Thursday marks the official stable release of Ubuntu 7.10, but by Wednesday -- with the Ubuntu community Web site ticking off the time as "1 day to go" -- the Internet was awash in glowing tributes to Ubuntu's latest advancement. The highlights of the latest release include 3-D desktop visual effect...

"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 ...

While Linux has come a long way in the past 10 years, I think it's safe to say that it hasn't yet taken over the world -- nor has Linux reached its full potential. Linux continues to become more mainstream every day -- we now see Linux hosting mission-critical servers in the enterprise, large financ...