Developers

Riding on the Firefox 1.0 fanfare that saw more than 9 million users download the open-source Web browser, the Mozilla Foundation today announced the launch of its Thunderbird 1.0 mail client. Thunderbird focuses on new features and settings to help stop spam and prevent viruses, the two biggest pro...

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems say that eight months into their 10-year cooperative alliance, dividends are already being paid in the form of increased interoperability of their products. The companies, which reached a groundbreaking deal in March that settled years-old lawsuits and brought the two ...

Linux solutions developer Xandros today announced that Wal-Mart's online store is carrying a full range of Linux desktop computers with the pre-installed Xandros Desktop Operating System. Built by Microtel and available at Walmart.com, the offerings provide a range of inexpensive home, school and sm...

The speculation is over. Sun is set to release a new version of its Solaris operating system today, and Solaris 10, the newest version of its Unix-based operating system, will soon be available for the first time ever as a free open-source product. Sun spent billions of dollars developing the code, ...

The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that ...

In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing (HPC), the 24th edition of the Top500 list yesterday crowned IBM's BlueGene system the world's fastest supercomputer. BlueGene set a record Linpack benchmark performance of 70.72 teraflops, or trillions of calculat...

JBoss is throwing its open source weight around in the business process management (BPM) ring, adding a workflow engine to its middleware platform with today's launch of jBPM 2.0. JBoss will compete with the likes of Oracle, BEA Systems, IBM and Microsoft for its share of a BPM market that Gartner p...

IBM is putting rivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems on notice with the announcement of two new p5 servers capable of running Linux and Unix and allowing users to run 254 virtual servers on each machine. "HP and Sun should be concerned about IBM's p5 because the price of the machines are relat...

IBM has launched an aggressive bid to grab an even bigger share of the midlevel market for Unix-based servers, where Big Blue has recently made huge gains on competitors. IBM launched a family of products built around its Power5 microprocessor and made no bones about its desires to use them and thei...

About a month ago, I compared the cost for Apple's desktop, server and laptop products to their nearest Dell equivalents and discovered that Macs generally cost less than comparable PC products. That was a bit of surprise, but the truly astonishing thing that came out of the comparison was that Dell...

For those who think the SCO Group v. IBM lawsuit has gotten too ugly to watch, there is a fresh fight in the open-source arena over the ownership of Mambo. Mambo, an open-source content-management system, is maintained by developers at the Mambo Group, and its copyright is owned by Australian firm M...

Open-source firm JBoss made two high-profile announcements today, unveiling the release of Application Server 4.0 and detailing an alliance with the Eclipse Foundation. Both announcements indicate that the company is expanding its open-source presence, as well as becoming more of a contributor to th...

The Gnome Foundation today released a new version of its popular Linux desktop. The new release, Gnome version 2.8, boosts speed and usability and offers several new features, the foundation said in a statement. Gnome is the default desktop on the Red Hat distribution, among others, and is available...

Borland Software today introduced Borland CaliberRM 2005 and Borland StarTeam 2005, software tools designed to help application developers manage the requirements, resources, tasks, assets and workflow for application development. CaliberRM 2005 and StarTeam 2005 offer several new capabilities desig...

With the recent education efforts on Software Freedom Day and aggressive moves by IBM and Novell, it seems that open-source advocates have much to cheer about. Although open-source operating systems have not yet become the standard in corporate and consumer environments, and face plenty of competiti...