Archive

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of computing -- and that, of course, has to include Microsoft's future. Microsoft's own vision of its future seems clear. The company sees a transition to a secure Windows OS environment, continuing strength in Office and server applications, and deve...

Promising marked performance and reliability improvements and further demonstrating that Linux is ready for prime-time enterprise use, open-source developers led by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and production kernel maintainer Andrew Morton have released version 2.6 of the operating system kernel. T...

The word "pusillanimous" is normally used to label actions judged to reflect a lack of moral courage on the part of the person taking the action. Thus people who can be rather easily pressured to undertake actions contrary to their own beliefs are often said to be pusillanimous, cowardly or weak-spi...

Asia is emerging as a key battleground for the open-source movement. The Japan-China-Korea partnership, announced last month in Osaka, is the latest in a string of initiatives to promote Linux. Two weeks earlier, Singapore hosted the second annual Asia Open Source Symposium, where 20 Asian countries...

Didn't Netscape lose the browser war? Mozilla, the technology that lies underneath Netscape products and a slew of its own products, just gets better and better. Netscape is effectively dead, but Mozilla keeps on keeping on. In 2010 we'll look back and say 2003 was the year that Mozilla really began...

Dear Mr. McBride: I guess push is coming to shove, huh? You finally got a court to order release of the AT&T code, so things are coming together a bit on that end. It's an important legal step, and one I'm sure you'll be glad to get over with, despite the crowing going on among those who see it ...

One of the bigger risks facing Linux is that explosive growth can destroy it because people who don't understand what it's for often install it simply as a Windows substitute, then discover that it isn't Windows and denounce it. The underlying issue here is that people can easily become captive to w...

Linux is poised to claim a major victory: the bourgeoning market for robot software. The battle is not over yet, but if developments in Japan are any indication of what the future will bring, Linux will rule the world of robots. The stakes are high. Carmaker Honda believes that robots will become th...

Wind River, one of the world's top embedded systems suppliers, has joined two key Linux proponent groups and solidified its intention to coexist rather than compete with the open-source operating system. As a supporter of Unix and its own proprietary VxWorks embedded operating system, Wind River sai...

I've been trying to imagine what the computing universe will look like in late 2008. The exercise not only highlighted the degree to which Linux has become the focal point for anti-Microsoft feeling, but also underscored the risk that the Linux community now faces from commercialization. My belief i...

Several computers supporting the 10-year-old Linux development project Debian were compromised by hackers late last week, causing a delay in the release of the latest distribution of the operating system and disrupting services for the project's 1,100-plus developers. Leaders of the open-source soft...

Australia. Down under. Oz. For most of us, those words conjure up images of kangaroos and coral reefs, of red deserts and a landmark opera house. But behind those icons lies another reality -- that of a sophisticated, technologically advanced society; an economy that has outperformed the rest of the...

While watching CNN last week, I suffered one of those brain spasms that leave you holding an idea you can neither rationally assess nor forget about. I still can't assess the idea -- and I'm about to ask you for help on that -- but my attempts to do something with it did give me a deeper insight int...

Mohandas Gandhi, a master of the tactics of civil disobedience against civilized foes, once had this to say about the stages of a successful campaign for an idea whose time has come: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Advocates of open-source software...

In its first move since being acquired by Novell, SuSE Linux announced its enterprise Linux software will be sold and supported by Gateway in a partnership aimed at seizing more of the U.S. server market, particularly small- to medium-size businesses. Novell's purchase of SuSE Linux earlier this mon...