Archive

The leading candidate in an international race to fly people to space aboard a privately developed rocket plans to make his bid for the final frontier in three weeks. Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, announced Wednesday that he would dispatch his novel craft, called SpaceShipOne, to suborbital alti...

A papoose named Geronimo is venturing out of the teepee this week, and the Apache Software Foundation says it might be ready for its rite of passage later this summer. The organization's effort to develop an open-source version of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) became a full-fledged project this w...

This week's column is about the nature of the software needed to go with the elections administration hardware laid out in last week's column. In brief, the idea was to ignore political reality long enough to imagine a system in which the voting support application runs on the local servers but capt...

In a move seen as adding further legitimacy to open-source computing, Hewlett-Packard has announced it will support MySQL and JBoss, two popular open-source programs. The announcement helps round out HP's open-source-based offerings, but it is seen as a big win for the two smaller companies involved...

Fujitsu said the company has formed a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems in the Unix server business to minimize its exposure to this segment amid the ongoing shift to Linux servers. IDC Japan, a privately-held research firm, recently forecast that domestic sales of Linux servers will account ...

The tension in the room is as thick as quicksand. The smoke gets heavier by the hour, and with each poker hand, the players wonder how long they can hold out. Who will hold? Who will fold? Who is just bluffing? One by one, they drop. The ongoing legal wrangling between SCO, IBM, Novell, AutoZone, Da...

The dust from CA World is settling down as end users, analysts and true believers try to come to terms with Computer Associates' sudden interest in the open-source development model. The company has created its own CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL), not as a rival to the GPL but as a way to p...

GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has told LinuxInsider that a recent report's use of interviews with Stallman is a "deliberate" attempt to confuse people about the origins of the Linux kernel, the GNU system and software developed as part of the free-software and open-source movements. "The purp...

In a move applauded by legal experts in the free software movement, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) yesterday announced its support for enhancements to the Linux kernel submission process that it hopes will improve accurate tracking of contributions to the kernel and ensure developers receiv...

Most of us are afraid of getting infected with a virus, whether it comes from a common cold or an attachment in our e-mail. Are open-source licenses viral in nature? Can they infect downstream users? The question is the subject of considerable debate. Companies refer to open-source software as "pote...

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today announced its support for enhancements to the Linux kernel submission process to improve the tracking of contributions to the kernel and ensure developers receive credit for...

Sun Microsystems is attaching itself to Linux's growth in the retail market with today's announcement that it has made inroads into five chain stores by teaming up with Tomax Corporation. There's a good reason Sun has been porting its Solaris server to the Linux operating system. Tomax predicts that...

Renowned computer scientist Andrew "Andy" Tanenbaum said he doesn't believe the conclusions of a draft report on the origins and legality of open-source software, particularly the allegation that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux, as is commonly believed, but copied much of it from Minix, a Unix-lik...

Red Hat's new Linux product, Fedora Core 2, has been playing well with cutting-edge enthusiasts and adventurous developers since its release on Tuesday. But some in this target audience wonder whether the company's strategy of providing different products for personal and enterprise use is a sound o...

What would your answer be if a selection team charged with hiring a new CIO to develop and implement an organization-wide "strategic systems architecture" were to ask you what management considerations most differentiate use of Windows from use of Linux? The right answer, I think, is that the more f...