Archive

Microsoft this week released a portion of its source code through an open-source license, posting the code on SourceForge, an online source-code repository, in its most high-profile code disclosure ever. The move is designed to help the company improve the toolset's documentation and to allow the op...

With financial and technical support from Hewlett-Packard, Foundry Networks and other leaders in Silicon Valley, students at the University of San Francisco (USF) this week launched a grand project to create an instant, do-it-yourself supercomputer. But technical problems with some of the PCs disabl...

Two years in the making, the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) this week debuted online, providing the public with a constantly updated catalog of the Internet's ever-changing security vulnerabilities. The project is sponsored by Digital Defense and Winterforce and is available at osvdb.org...

Want to know why most business analysts and venture capitalists simply don't get it with respect to Unix? Take a look at the computer books they study while working toward their MBA, financial analysis certificate or accounting designation, and you'll understand that their ignorance isn't entirely t...

Industrial policy has long been discredited as an economic strategy in the United States, but not in Asia. The government of Japan, for example, has always worked closely with companies in IT and consumer electronics to influence corporate winners and losers, but the results have been exceptionally ...

The standard chip-making process, based on using lithography to etch circuits in silicon and other materials, has been in use since the mid-1970s, with change expressed mainly in increased manufacturing precision as decreases in the wavelengths used allowed the development of ever smaller components...

Computing giant IBM is seeking a declaratory judgment in its ongoing defense and counterclaim lawsuit with SCO, which has based its $5 billion suit against Big Blue on copyright and contract issues surrounding SCO's intellectual-property claims to Linux. While SCO, which has threatened and sued user...

The creators and distributors of the Gnome open-source desktop software project are investigating a server breach that reportedly did not affect released Gnome sources and the project's source-code repository, but nonetheless delayed the latest update scheduled to come out this week. The sysadmin te...

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column on LinuxInsider to think out loud about the fundamental differences between Microsoft's operating systems and Unix variants like Linux, Darwin, BSD and Solaris. That drew the usual kinds of responses: Some people said nice things, others critiqued my work, and a lot o...

A week after announcing it was putting Linux on more of its desktop machines for the Asian market, HP made bigger waves this week, disclosing a deal with Novell to put SuSE Linux on the entire HP portfolio of business desktops and notebooks in North America, to be followed by other markets later. An...

Recent acquisitions have helped Novell rise to higher prominence as a vendor of Linux and nonproprietary software, but the company now is touting a wholehearted move toward a total, open platform. Novell's end-to-end, desktop-server Linux play and integration with its NetWare server technology was e...

Adding to what the company says is a successive list of firsts for Linux, Novell has released SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional and Personal, the first retail offerings of the 2.6 Linux kernel. For Linux novices, Novell is providing a new LiveCD disc that allows them to test and familiarize themselves wit...

One way or another, anti-outsourcing legislation seems likely to pass both houses of the U.S. Congress relatively soon. Whether this comes about through the House initiative led by Bernard Sanders or through other routes isn't important. What is important is that most of the proposals being discusse...

Xandros this week began shipping its Linux-based Xandros Business Desktop and Operating System, an enterprise Windows desktop replacement that the company says is completely compatible with Microsoft Windows servers. The software -- priced at $129 per copy or $500 for a five-license pack -- aims to ...

Among the allegations raised by The SCO Group in its current spate of lawsuits is that the GPL -- the GNU General Public License, which is used for much open-source software, including Linux -- is unconstitutional and in violation of federal copyright and patent laws. SCO bases this claim on the cla...