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On the road to the virtual desktop Click ‘n’ run. It seems like such a simple concept. Surf up to a Web page, select the desired application from a list, and click. Voila! Microsoft Word appears on your desktop. Or Excel, or Adobe Photoshop… you name it. Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo "Whatever happened to working alone?”  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Intel project aims to boost power efficiency in Linux Intel plans to announce an open-source project called LessWatts.org, which aims to improve the power efficiency of the Linux operating system and applications. September 20, 11:56 a.m. PDT Trust key to Internet security A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely. September 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Best of open source in platforms and middleware Open source cut its teeth on operating systems, earned its street cred on Linux and Apache, and never looked back, continuing ever since to extend the kingdom to databases, middleware, and newfangled platforms such as hypervisors for server virtualization. Our Bossies in platforms and middleware recognize a few old faces, and some fairly new ones. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Introducing the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies Not too long ago, open source meant starving developers; scant documentation; an ugly, outdated Web site; and software that lived in perpetual beta. Now open source software is becoming big business. “Now hiring” is a common sight on project home pages, and .org and SourceForge sites that used to point straight to source code archives are redirected to .com URLs that celebrate the commercial success of what started out as collaborations among unpaid coders of like mind. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cooler weather brings hotter news Finally, the long, languid, slow news days of summer are behind us. New products are rolling out, people are heading to a myriad of conferences (including, I hope, our own Virtualization Executive Forum, two weeks away), companies are making announcements, and Steve Jobs is handing out refund checks. Yes, it’s a great time to be a tech journalist. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Linux kernel maintainer allays fears about forking Making separate but critical points about the path of the Linux kernel, the maintainer of the kernel on Monday stressed there is no need to worry about forking and not to expect a move to the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. August 7, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source upheaval "I don't use the word 'evil,'" says Mike Evans – though he acknowledges that some of his customers do see proprietary commercial software vendors that way. August 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun looks to steal Linux thunder with Project Indiana Looking to steal thunder from the Linux juggernaut or at least catch the same wave, Sun plans to release binaries in Spring 2008 for its OpenSolaris Unix platform, similar to how Linux is offered, as part of the company's Project Indiana. July 12, 2:53 p.m. PDT Linux official, Microsoft give thumbs-down to GPLv3 The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. July 6, 3:10 a.m. PDT GPLv3 upgrade set for Friday A controversial update to the GNU GPL (General Public License) is set to be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation, a representative of the organization said on Tuesday. June 26, 5:00 p.m. PDT Veracode debuts system to test binary code Veracode launched its Software Security Ratings Service on June 25, introducing its new system for use in testing the safety of applications development among enterprise customers and third-party software makers. June 25, 1:25 p.m. PDT Sun ZFS breaks all the rules It’s somewhat surprising that in the past five years, file systems haven’t changed much on any platform. There are dozens of file systems available for UNIX-like operating systems -- ext3, XFS, UFS, and ReiserFS for example -- and Microsoft’s ubiquitous NTFS, but since the journaling revolution, there’s been a dearth of innovation in mainstream file systems, until now. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft, Novell defend partnership, promise details Executives from Microsoft and Novell defended their controversial business agreement to collaborate and promote integration between Windows and Novell's SUSE Linux operating systems on Wednesday, saying that Microsoft's sales organization is now the biggest channel for SUSE Linux and that the deal will help, not hurt the prospects of Linux in the enterprise. May 24, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source conference homes in on patent issues Although Microsoft was not mentioned by name during opening proceedings of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, the company and its complaints about open source software allegedly violating 235 Microsoft patents clearly were on the minds of speakers and attendees. May 22, 11:30 a.m. PDT Trimming the Longhorn, threatening the Penguin Some weeks, the dog is man's best and fuzziest friend; others he's chasing you around the yard and snapping at your heinie — I'm having a real "Tom and Jerry" moment here. May 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startups class of '06: Where are they now? In 2006, InfoWorld uncovered 15 startups that emerged after the nuclear winter that followed the dot-com bust with cool, useful technologies. Well, another year has brought a new crop of startup darlings, such as the companies we're profiling each day in May for our Month of Enterprise Startups (MOES) feature. But MOES got us thinking about last year's startups. In the year that has followed, how have these innovators fared? May 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft? Somehow, the fact that startup G.ho.st has its headquarters in Jerusalem is fitting. After all, it wasn't far from the ancient city that the biblical hero David squared off against Goliath. And, in a sense, that is the tiny company and its G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating System), is intent on doing with the giant of the operating system business: Microsoft. May 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Closing a chapter of open source By now you will have heard the news: InfoWorld has closed down its print edition and moved to a Web-only model. Over the coming weeks and months, InfoWorld will continue to evolve to take better advantage of the online medium. You can expect many changes -- some subtle, others less so. For example, this will be the last edition of Open Enterprise. April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT GPL v3: V for vindication Version 3 of the Gnu GPL (General Public License) is nearing completion. The third draft -- expected to be the last before the license is finalized -- was released last Wednesday, fully eight months after the first draft was made available for public comment. Yet despite the long and painstaking public ratification process, the new GPL remains embroiled in controversy. April 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mr. Gates, tear down this wall IBM's latest filing in the SCO case looks particularly damning; it may finally be curtains for SCO. But even if the judge dismisses the suit tomorrow, Linux customers won't be able to rest easy. As Bruce Perens reminds us, the Microsoft/Novell partnership has brought a host of new intellectual property issues to bear. And so, the cold war between Microsoft and open source software lumbers on into another year. March 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Are you an open source user or joiner? In my previous column, I touched on the issue of what constitutes an open-source vendor. Ask Andy Astor that question, and his answer is a shrug. "Honestly," he says, "who cares?" To Astor, there are really two broad categories of companies with respect to their relationship to open-source code. Some are users. Others are joiners. March 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Is that code really yours? As open source software pushes its way further into the enterprise, a new set of risks has arisen regarding IP (intellectual property). The problem is that developers happily borrow code from various projects to save themselves from having to reinvent it. This help is all well and good as long as the resulting software complies with the licenses of the donor projects. The problem managers have is that they cannot know what parts of their code base comes from open source projects. A code snippet reused from a newsgroup posting could actually have come from a copyrighted open source project. And its use could legally require the company to open source its entire product. If the company is an ISV, it might even be faced with being required to offer its product at no cost. March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Virtualization: Linux's killer app I came away from InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum last week with two conclusions. First, server virtualization is definitely a big deal. This time last year, customers and ISVs still seemed to be struggling to come to terms with this new approach to deploying and managing servers; today it's full speed ahead. And, second, nowhere is virtualization hotter than in the Linux market. February 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Linux and Vista users share driver pain Customers are getting annoyed. They spent good money on the latest and greatest PC peripherals, only to find out that the hardware is only partially supported on their operating system of choice. Without the kernel drivers necessary to power them, some of the best features of the new toys are going unused. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Foundation proves Linux is big business What do you get if you cross an open source development consortium with an organization that promotes free standards? Answer: You get a Linux advocacy group. Or so it seems. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST The smart business of diversity Carly Fiorina served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. After she was ousted, along with a $21 million exit package, Fiorina did what a lot of us would do if we had millions of dollars in the bank and some time on our hands: She wrote a book. In Tough Choices, published in October, Fiorina talks about rising to the top of a male-dominated culture. Fiorina spoke with InfoWorld correspondent Carmen Nobel for our upcoming feature on the issues women face in IT. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Seven ways Solaris can beat Linux At a recent Sun Microsystems press event, Sun execs talked up plans to market the company's Solaris Unix OS to startups and small-to-midsize businesses. "Open source is what [customers] want to go after," said Peder Ulander, Sun's vice president of software marketing. "It's not so much Linux. Linux just happens to embody open source." January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Sun jumps on Sun Microsystems is joining in the pricing pig pile atop Red Hat, the leading Linux software company. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Key Indian IT services organization moving to Linux The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd. (ELCOT), a government-owned organization that delivers IT services to the southern India state of Tamil Nadu, has decided that its projects will be deployed on open-source software, including Linux. January 3, 9:01 a.m. PST Open Source: Key projects turn pro Throughout 2006, Linux and open source continued their march toward the mainstream of enterprise software. Perhaps no one event exemplified this trend more than Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss in April. With JBoss’s Java technologies under its wing, Red Hat is no longer merely a Linux vendor; it’s become an open source powerhouse, able to offer its customers a complete application software stack. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms Novell’s Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and Windows Longhorn betas, and at BEA’s venerable WebLogic 9.1. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST What does 2007 hold for open source? I couldn't have an easier time playing fortune-teller this year. While some segments of the IT market might see the future as a wide-open plain, for the open source community, 2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Perens: GPL v3 is the answer Let the spin control begin. In an open letter issued last week, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian attempted to distance his company from Microsoft's claims that open source software, including the Linux kernel, infringes on Microsoft intellectual property. November 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Major vendors put open source into turmoil Major software vendors are shaking up the open-source market. Microsoft Corp.'s deal with Novell Inc. and Oracle Corp.'s move to support Red Hat Linux have sent IT investors scurrying to figure out what it all means. November 16, 12:57 p.m. PST Microsoft's Linux indemnification trap The partnership between Microsoft and Novell has raised as many questions as it has provided answers. That's a shame, because some of those questions should have been put to rest long ago. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Mono upgrade targets Linux desktop Novell Inc. has announced an upgrade to its Mono software that should make it easier for developers to port .Net desktop applications to Linux. November 9, 6:22 a.m. PST Chizen: Adobe walks fine line with open source A day after Adobe Systems Inc. donated proprietary code for an open-source project, its Chief Executive Officer Bruce Chizen said the company is involved with other similar initiatives. November 8, 12:22 p.m. PST Microsoft, Novell team on Linux in the long-running cold war between proprietary software champion Microsoft and the open source community, last week seemed something like a Velvet Revolution. November 6, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle’s Red Hat support spells trouble for Sun It wasn't the Oracle-branded Linux that many were expecting. In a way, it was something much worse. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Managing Linux, the Windows way A couple of weeks ago, I took BEA to task for insinuating that the open source community wasn't capable of delivering good management tools for its software. A few readers leapt to the defense: BEA is right, they said. Management is critical in complex environments, and the management capabilities of open source software are often pretty poor. October 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft locks down Vista, Longhorn Microsoft’s long, strange trip to protect its software from piracy took another twist last week after the company introduced Microsoft Software Protection Platform for its upcoming Vista and Longhorn server operating systems. 3:00 a.m. PDT Former Novell head Messman quits board early Novell Inc.'s former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jack Messman, who was ousted from those positions in June, has quit the company's board of directors a month and a half earlier than had been previously announced. September 14, 9:35 a.m. PDT Open source is entangled in .Net Python developers had reason to celebrate last week, with the release of IronPython 1.0, a full implementation of the Python language for Microsoft's CLR (Common Language Runtime). With IronPython, Python programs can run as first-class managed code on the .Net platform. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Devices gain an edge with Linux Linux is finding success in much smaller devices than the servers and workstations that have traditionally been its mainstays. For embedded systems developers, the advantage of Linux over proprietary OSes lies as much in its flexibility and openness as in its low cost. September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Blazing trails with open source It’s often said that open source doesn’t innovate. It imitates. That’s certainly what the proprietary software industry would have you believe. And to look at the activity in some of the most prominent open source projects in use in enterprises today, it’s tempting to agree. September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT "Wide open" means extra security There’s a reason nearly every security appliance vendor uses open source tools, and it has little to do with licensing. The vast majority of these devices -- ranging from spam and spyware filters to network scanners to intrusion detection and prevention systems -- are not only built on an open source platform such as Linux or FreeBSD, but they also actively use other open source products to accomplish their given tasks. September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Can't open source and Microsoft just get along? If you support open source, one of the initial things you learn is that you must bash Microsoft. It's understandable; of all the proprietary software companies in the world, the one in Redmond takes the cake for ill will toward the open source community. Just look at the famed "Halloween documents" to see the extent of the bad blood. August 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cacti makes network monitoring less painful The world doesn't revolve around IT. Consultants like yours truly sometimes have a hard time grasping that concept, because our lives really do revolve around IT. So when I walk into a site where we helped build the network three years ago to find that the total amount of network monitoring that's been going on since we finished UAT (user acceptance testing) is … nada, you can imagine the initial reaction. August 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT VMware and Xen clash over Linux virtualization patch Things don't always go smoothly when you try to mix the world of open source with the world of proprietary commercial software. Sometimes those worlds collide. All too often, proprietary vendors are all too willing to ride roughshod over open source to further their own interests. And then again, sometimes it works the other way around. August 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Forget about open source at Apple We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system, Mac OS X. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised? July 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun CTO: Incremental open-sourcing of Java is the way Expect the open-sourcing of the Java programming language to be done in incremental steps, with some pieces available by next June -- but not the entire platform, Robert Brewin, co-CTO of Sun Microsystems' software group, said Monday afternoon. July 17, 5:59 p.m. PDT Notes on Linux: One small step Officially, a version of IBM’s Lotus Notes client for Linux wasn’t supposed to arrive until sometime in 2007 with the planned next release of the Notes platform. But IBM surprised customers last week with a Linux version of Lotus Notes 7, as much as a year ahead of schedule. July 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtuozzo caters to high-volume server environments SWsoft’s Virtuozzo was a hit in the InfoWorld Test Center labs. It handles large numbers of virtual servers running on a single host system, and sports a great suite of management tools and open APIs to make automation simple. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization gaining momentum in the enterprise What’s all the fuss about virtual machines? From AMD to Intel, Microsoft to Novell to Red Hat, every major OS and hardware platform vendor today has a stake in the virtualization game. But the truth is that running multiple virtual systems on a single physical workstation or server is simply passé. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Xen 3.0 makes paravirtualization mainstream Before the Xen project popped up on my radar three years ago, I’d never heard of paravirtualization. In this technique, an altered version of an operating system redirects privileged operations -- the bare metal code that restructures virtual memory and communicates with devices -- to a thin “hypervisor” layer, instead of sending them directly to the CPU. It’s far, far more efficient than intercepting and redirecting privileged operations at the CPU instruction level, as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and other hardware emulation-based virtualization solutions must do. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft looks to Longhorn for virtualization speed-up Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 is built along the same lines as VMware but requires Windows Server 2003 as the host OS and, unlike VMware ESX Server, it cannot run in a bare-metal scenario. The latest release adds a fairly nifty Web UI and support for Linux VMs (virtual machines); it is also available as a free download. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT VMware maintains lead with Virtual Infrastructure 3 VMware has long led the x86 virtualization market with its line of hardware emulation-based products. VMware Workstation and Server require a “host” OS -- either Linux or Windows -- to run “guest” VMs (virtual machines) for a variety of OS environments, including BSD, Linux, NetWare, Unix, and Windows. The company’s enterprise-targeted ESX Server product takes a slightly different approach, however. Instead of requiring a host OS, it is essentially a very thin and tightly controlled Linux-based OS that installs on a bare-metal system. Thus, it is relatively limited in hardware support, but it requires less overhead to host each virtual system and can support more concurrent virtual server instances. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hardware vendors are missing the opportunity of open source Enterprising hardware hackers managed another coup last week, having successfully installed a version of the open source DD-WRT firmware on the latest revision of the Linksys WRT54G wireless router. The WRT54G became something of a fan favorite a few years ago, when Linksys released the source code to the router's Linux-based firmware. Since then, a number of custom variations on the original have appeared that add features Linksys never intended, of which DD-WRT is arguably the best. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT The end of the era at Microsoft can't come fast enough The press is abuzz with speculation about Bill Gates' "impending" departure from Microsoft, the company he founded. As InfoWorld Editor in Chief Steve Fox rightly points out, no other company could announce executive turnover in two years' time and have it called news. What lends gravitas to this nonevent, however, is an idea that's been growing within the industry and that's beginning to find its voice: It's time for change. June 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT Novell's SLES 10 preview: Not your father's Suse It appears that there’s been lots of Linux activity in Utah lately: Novell’s SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) 10 is a much different distribution than SLES 9, from stem to stern. June 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Novell hits a desktop home run with SLED 10 For the forthcoming SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10, Novell went back to the drawing board to rethink what makes a good desktop. The result is extremely impressive. June 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Why Apple snubs its open source geeks Apple extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online. To sum up Apple’s objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn’t affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one. June 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Oracle: The biggest Linux vendor you've never heard of Quick -- name a company that has invested heavily and continuously in open source, is one of the top contributors to Linux kernel development, and offers full enterprise support for Linux to thousands of customers. June 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Ubuntu makes a bid for the enterprise Mark Shuttleworth is really sticking his neck out this time. Conventional wisdom says that enterprise Linux customers should stick to one of the "Big Two" suppliers -- Novell or Red Hat -- to be sure they get the support and accountability they need for mission-critical deployments. But as of last week, Shuttleworth officially began offering those customers a new "throat to choke": his own. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Imagining a day without Microsoft Did you ever hear the warning, “be careful what you wish for, it might come true?” Well, because Microsoft is the company most people love to hate, I decided to ask a cross section of industry cognoscenti this simple question: What would happen if Microsoft and all of its technology disappeared tomorrow? May 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT ActiveGrid speeds Web application development “It’s really hard to build an HTML application that talks to one database, yet IT developers have a huge backlog of requested applications that talk to multiple databases,” says Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid. His company aims to solve that problem, in part by doing away with the traditional three-tiered model of Web application development. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT New models, challenges for open source businesses An open source software company is something of a paradox. On the one hand, it has to convince customers that software is increasingly becoming commoditized, that proprietary software is limiting and expensive, and that standards-based, community-developed and -supported open source software is the way to go. On the other hand, an open source company has to persuade those same customers that they should pay it for the use of that same software. May 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun's Schwartz still doesn't get Linux Scott McNealy is out. Jonathan Schwartz is in. And the future never looked brighter for Sun Microsystems -- or so we're told. But if Sun's new CEO is going to convince me that his company can remain a dominant player in enterprise software, first he's going to have to get his story straight, particularly when it comes to Linux and open source. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT New CEO could sharpen Sun's focus Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy’s decision last week to step aside after two decades at the helm of the legendary Silicon Valley company could throw open the doors to rapid change at the company, as new CEO Jonathan Schwartz focuses Sun’s resources on technologies that may pull it out of its prolonged slump. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT The slippery slope of open source If you work with open source software, you’ve been to the place I’ll describe in this column more times than you care to count. It always starts innocently enough. In my case, I needed to re-create a Linux-based development environment on my Apple PowerBook. The essential ingredients were Apache, Berkeley DB, mod_python, and libxml2. Pretty standard stuff, but I’d never assembled all the pieces on Mac OS X. April 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT Locking down standards for desktop Linux Say what you will about Windows' lack of openness or its seemingly never-ending software flaws. If you double-click on an installer and the version of Windows you're using is reasonably up-to-date, your software will install. This is even truer on Mac OS X, where installing software often involves nothing more than dragging a single icon from the install disk to your applications folder. April 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT XOsoft brings WANSync to Linux XOsoft Inc. Monday will release the next version of its WANSync data synchronization and replication software with added support for Linux, 64-bit environments and the BlackBerry mobile device. April 21, 10:37 a.m. PDT Users: Oracle Linux would be optimal Oracle Corp. customers are intrigued by recent musings from Larry Ellison, the company's chief executive officer, suggesting Oracle might offer its own Linux distribution. Users would welcome the tighter integration a complete Oracle software stack of operating system, database, middleware and applications could provide, they said in interviews this week. April 21, 10:35 a.m. PDT Oracle: Open source brings new customers Oracle is not only looking to buy open-source technology, but sees the software as opening a route to potential future Oracle users. April 19, 11:35 a.m. PDT Open source goes big time with Red Hat-JBoss Deal Red Hat’s surprise announcement that it’s acquiring JBoss could upend accepted wisdom about both the size and function of open source software companies. Still, some customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the deal. April 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT French could outlaw open source DRM, peer-to-peer On May 4, the French Senate will debate a copyright bill that is widely expected to have a chilling effect on the development and distribution of open-source software for digital rights management (DRM) or P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. That's because the bill's provisions include a penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of €300,000 (US$363,171) for publishing, distributing or promoting software in France that is "manifestly intended" for the unauthorized distribution of copyright works. April 14, 9:55 a.m. PDT Microsoft fights fire with fire in server virtualization market Virtualization-related announcements were flying at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Given a flurry of new products and initiatives from the likes of Virtual Iron, VMware, and XenSource, I guess it should have come as no surprise that Microsoft would throw its hat into the ring. What is surprising, however, is just how much of an about-face Microsoft seems to have made. April 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization fever at LinuxWorld Expo The most prominent names in open source descend on Boston this week for the annual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Highlights of the show will include a new Mobile and Embedded conference track and a Grid Solution Showcase, but the hottest trend seems to be virtualization, with several new offerings set to debut throughout the week. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Frustration drove Owens Forest Products to open source The IT group at Owens Forest Products went the traditional route of many smaller companies: a custom ERP system using tools such as Microsoft SQL Server, ASP.Net, and Business Objects’ Crystal Reports. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Christian Science Monitor seeks closer technology relationships The Christian Science Monitor for the past nine years has been saddled with an inflexible content management system that makes it difficult to modify the newspaper’s Web site or deliver content to new devices, such as smartphones. That tool is emblematic of what Curt Edge sees as a larger issue at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which publishes the Monitor in newspaper and online editions. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Orbitz gets up and running fast with open source When Orbitz launched its online travel site in June 2001, it had two well-entrenched competitors: Travelocity and Expedia. Orbitz's goal was to offer something better, quickly. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT MIT makes heterogeneous IT systems work The IT staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has to be prepared to work with just about anything. It manages a delicate balancing act, promoting core IT standards for security and networking while still giving each department the freedom to choose its own technology platforms and applications. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT The move to open source is good for BZ Results Fast-moving technology that works is what BZ Results wants in its IT tools. That’s why CTO Rob Lackey’s policy is to make sure there is at least one open source bid for each project. “Commercial software can’t compete with the open source development effort,” Lackey says. He cites the frequent, fast security updates available for Apache servers as an example of how the open source community delivers faster than traditional providers. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT OSDL to finance open-source software developers The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Wednesday provided a new opportunity for developers working with open-source technologies to receive funding for their projects. March 29, 11:13 a.m. PST Oracle: Open source keeps vendors on their toes The specter of open source forces large software vendors to stay on their toes and nurtures innovation, an Oracle official said during a presentation at TheServerSide Java Symposium on Thursday afternoon. March 23, 5:37 p.m. PST Novell to ship improved Linux desktop this summer With Linux attracting a worldwide audience of customers who prefer the open source paradigm to closed operating systems, CeBit -- the world’s largest international trade show -- was the perfect venue for Novell this week to announce its latest version of Linux for the desktop. Renamed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, this combination desktop OS and productivity suite is expected to ship by the third quarter. March 13, 5:00 a.m. PST Does open source matter? As I said last week, I can't understand why folks want to vilify Oracle for buying up open source companies such as Sleepycat and Innobase. By the same token, I can't really fault those companies for selling out, either. For small software companies, getting bought has always been a viable exit strategy. February 27, 3:00 a.m. PST The new scourge of open source? Oracle's done it again. Not only has it acquired another company, but in the process it has riled up the open source community once more. February 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Death of the software salesman? Will the software salesperson role become extinct? February 16, 5:01 a.m. PST OSBC: SAP exec cites IT consolidation wave SAP and SpikeSource executives on Wednesday emphasized IT consolidation and the effects of open source, in different presentations at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. February 15, 1:30 p.m. PST A slim market for certified open source? How certain are you that the systems you've built using open source software will work as advertised? Given the complexity of your average server environment, there's no easy answer. Even the so-called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) stack is just a starting point. A Web application server built on LAMP is likely to touch many other components and applications, ranging from automated shell scripts and file-manipulation software all the way up to mail servers and LDAP directories. February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST EarthLink gets wormed, Google takes desktop turn? I’m constantly losing things -- keys, lottery tickets, girlfriends. So it’s comforting to hear the White House has the same problem with e-mail. According to documents filed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, an unspecified number of messages disappeared from White House archives during spring 2003. It was probably just spam, office gossip, and Michael Moore jokes. I’m sure they wouldn’t lose anything important. February 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Don't get too excited about Windows source code Eyebrows raised around the globe last week, as Microsoft announced that it would license Windows source code to third-party developers as part of a settlement of antitrust litigation in the European Union. E.U. competition regulators had demanded that Microsoft make detailed technical documentation available to developers who want to write software that will interoperate with key Windows protocols. In a surprise move, Microsoft decided to go them one further. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft tries to slip Windows XP SP3 delay under our noses It’s been a bang-up year already for Microsoft. Hot on the heels of its WMF disaster, Redmond announced that other vulnerabilities existed in Outlook and Exchange. (The company is working on those.) Then another spat erupted about a supposed wireless flaw in Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and Windows XP OSes. This one’s been going on for a week now, and I’m a mite ticked, not only because it’s not actually a flaw, but also because the flap about it seems to be masking a real flaw: the one in Microsoft’s software release schedule. The company just announced its delay of the Service Pack 3 release until 2007, as much as a year later than expected. January 19, 3:00 a.m. PST > Platforms > Open source standards > Platforms > Operating systems > Standards > Open source standards |
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