Developers

Macromedia announced that this week it will begin shipping Flex Builder, a new integrated development environment designed to streamline Flex application development. The company noted that creation of Flex Builder was prompted by the rapid adoption of Flex, a server application that converts code w...

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium of technology companies and workplace of Linus Torvalds, has announced a major upgrade to its Scalable Test Plaform (STP) enterprise-grade testing services for the Linux kernel. Introduced in 2001, STP provides a set of test suites on a wide rang...

Micro Focus International, a provider of legacy application development and deployment software, announced Wednesday that it will provide a method for migrating legacy applications to HP and IBM Unix and Linux servers. The migration service is part of the company's "Lift and Shift" offering, which c...

At this week's Crypto 2004 conference in California, several papers were presented that demonstrated vulnerabilities in algorithms that are often used to create digital signatures. Although the results are preliminary, many in the security community are concerned about what such weaknesses might mea...

Linux Networx has announced that two Department of Defense centers will be using Linux cluster supercomputers from the company to conduct battlefield simulations. The clusters are part of an initiative to modernize the DOD's supercomputing capabilities, said Major Kevin Benedict, program manager at ...

Storage-management software developer Acronis has announced release of its True Image Server for Linux 8.0, the industry's first native Linux disk imaging, backup and bare-metal restore application, the company said. The South San Francisco, California-based company also announced release of a new v...

IBM announced that it will not use its patents against Linux, and it encouraged other software companies to make the same vow. As the owner of 60 patents on which the Linux core may infringe, IBM could wreak havoc on Linux if it chose to do so. The new promise, delivered at LinuxWorld, emphasizes th...

Hewlett-Packard will be the first major PC maker to offer a Linux-based notebook computer, the company announced at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. The Compaq nx5000 business notebook PC will be preinstalled with Novell's SuSE Linux 9.1, along with OpenOffice, CD-R/RW support, DVD and media player, wir...

At the Rational Software Development User Conference yesterday, IBM revealed its plans for new capabilities expected to be available in the IBM Software Development Platform by the end of 2004. According to the company, the new software development technologies will help organizations automate their...

Last week, I examined the nuances of a marketplace for licenses, and its relationship to a parallel marketplace for products that use those licenses. This time, for those readers who might actually be in the market for a license, let's review the one that gets the most ink -- the General Public Lice...

Red Hat has put its investors through a roller-coaster ride this summer, and the ride just took a major drop in recent days, as bad news hit the markets. The company announced that it would be restating its results due to new accounting policies, and also told analysts that the SEC had launched an i...

When J.S.G. Boggs needs money, he draws it. He draws one side of a banknote on high-quality paper, actual size, and presents it to the merchant. The merchant, knowing that the banknote is not official, can accept it or ask for real cash. If the merchant accepts it, Boggs writes the details of the tr...

For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing ...

Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying, "You know what my toughest competitor is? It's pirated software.... If you really look around, you'll find way more pirated Windows than you'll find open-source software. Way more." Gates couldn't be more wrong. At least in China, his tough stance against pi...

Developers at last week's JavaOne conference got a chance to check the progress that tools vendors have made in their long quest to ease Java programming so they can better compete against Microsoft. For starters, conference sponsor Sun Microsystems tried to reassert itself as a major player with th...