Archive

The SCO Group is amending its federal lawsuit against IBM, changing its legal tactics in the ongoing public drama over Linux software. But contrary to some reports in the press, the company didn't claim earlier in a letter that the Linux General Public License (GPL) was "unconstitutional." Rather, D...

Making good on a marketing promise uttered late last year, Red Hat today is ending support for the final version of its Linux 9 product. The Raleigh, North Carolina, Linux vendor in January stopped supporting its other legacy versions of Linux, hoping that customers would switch to the Red Hat Enter...

In my recent commentary on the role dishonest and incompetent IT textbooks play in education, I used the acronym PHB (pointy-haired boss) to refer to people who just don't get it with respect to systems. Unfortunately, that also demonstrated that I don't get the global nature of the LinuxInsider rea...

Tokyo-based Turbolinux this week disclosed that it has developed a new Linux operating system for home PC users -- Turbolinux 10F. Turbolinux is said to be the best-selling Linux distributor in the Asia-Pacific region. "Japanese consumers are moving in large numbers to Linux," said Koichi Yano, pres...

A Philippines-based software developer this week released software that enables Windows-based programs to run on computers using archrival Linux. In a statement, Peter Valdes, CTO of SpecOps Labs, said the software ultimately will help users migrate from Windows machines to the open-source Linux pla...

Sun Microsystems on Thursday revealed it has forged 21 deals with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) during the last four months. The massive announcement provides an objective sign of growth in open-source technologies, according to the company. But is demand for alternative, open-source compu...

Two weeks ago, I wondered out loud about the top 10 worst IT business decisions ever made and nominated HP's decision to follow DEC down the road to oblivion for top spot. Today I'd like to suggest that the U.S. Defense Department's continued use of Microsoft's software is likely to top a future lis...

Joining the ranks of Linux distributors HP, Novell and Red Hat, a company named Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) has launched a program to protect large and small users from legal entanglements arising from adoption of the open-source operating system. Unlike some other indemnification programs, u...

The SCO Group late Friday disclosed that one of its investors is extremely unhappy -- and wants its money back. But the Lindon, Utah-based Unix provider apparently isn't going to resolve the legal controversy without a fight, at least for now. In a letter released to other investors by SCO, BayStar ...

Arguments that Linux poses a threat to national security if its use on Pentagon projects continues unchecked are "short-sighted and self-serving," and are merely an attempt to cultivate "uncertainty and doubt" in the marketplace. So said Dr. Inder Singh, chairman and CEO of LynuxWorks, a San Jose-ba...

The developer of one of the world's most high-profile, open-source databases, Sweden's MySQL AB, this week launched MySQL Cluster, a new open-source database clustering technology for applications that need continuous availability. The MySQL Cluster combines a clustering architecture with the MySQL ...

Sometimes bitter humor is the only sensible response to absurd injustice. A few years ago, for example, a lot of frustrated Apple fans were sure that if Steve Jobs walked across San Francisco Bay, the PC press would thunder "Jobs Can't Swim!" Or, more topically, if Sun won a major legal victory agai...

Listening to some Linux critics, you might think that the open-source operating system is more of a threat to U.S. national security than a gaggle of Islamic jihadis lugging rocket-propelled grenade launchers around Fallujah, or mad Pakistani nuclear scientists selling secrets to rogue states. At ye...

Japanese scientists have built their largest distributed computing grid yet, a supercluster that performs 11 trillion floating operations per second, at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). As Japan's largest public research organization, AIST is charged with ...

About a month ago we had some people over for dinner, and the discussion drifted to top-10 lists of the Letterman variety. As part of that conversation, I got challenged to name the top 10 worst IT decisions ever -- something I couldn't do then and still can't do now, which is why I'm asking for you...