Developers

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that its cross-browser plug-in, Silverlight, will eventually appear on Linux. Silverlight, a challenge to Adobe's Flash, means Microsoft will have to convince Web users they can really "light up the Web," with Silverlight, as the ad copy states, and view high-quality...

Yahoo, Google and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search. Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open source alternative to mainstr...

Mobile devices are increasingly working their way into our everyday lives, and market research suggests that the operating systems driving these devices are often Linux-based. Technology research firm ABI Research forecasts that Linux will be the fastest growing smartphone operating system over the ...

In his new book, "The Cult of the Amateur," Andrew Keen publicly and pugnaciously says many of the things people were quietly thinking about Web 2.0. He refers to bloggers as a "pajama army" wreaking cultural havoc from their parents' basements. By penning his polemical book, Keen has brought to the...

Mozilla's Firefox now has a campus edition, according to a Tuesday announcement by the company. The Firefox Campus Edition gives students access to music, lyrics, cover art, videos, photos and more, with add-ons FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero. The push is yet another chapter in the business of dr...

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...

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...

Cepstral, a speech technology company, has decided to open its Media Resource Control Protocol library to the developer community. The move is designed to free telephony application developers from the protocol grindstone and lead to greater inroads in software innovation, Cepstral's CEO said. The m...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage. Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month. "Either th...

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite and operating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications. Open source security applications are free, or at l...

Anonymous Wikipedia editors who seek to alter articles there for less-than-honorable purposes can no longer hide behind their cloak of anonymity: A new scanner tool now makes it relatively easy to figure out where they came from. WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate ...

Companies that want to take advantage of virtual worlds should think twice about Linden Lab's Second Life and consider better-controlled online worlds, said tech consultancy Gartner. "Media hype and enthusiasm for virtual worlds must be tempered with a realistic assessment of the security and risk-m...

Open source started as a small community with a set of ideals about software development, believing that developers should make their products more expedient and user-friendly by making the underlying code accessible to everyone. As the open source software movement has grown, the fundamental tenets...

Novell and Lenovo, the world's No. 3 PC manufacturer, have inked a deal to pre-install the Linux operating system on certain Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs, the two companies announced Monday at LinuxWorld, held this year in San Francisco. Lenovo will also provide support for Suse Linux Enterprise Des...

The Linux Foundation recently scored an executive coup when it nabbed Novell's Markus Rex, a well-respected Linux-focused business executive. Rex is now the chief technology officer of the nonprofit group, which is dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. Rex comes to the Linux Foundation with...