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Claims and counterclaims now have turned into dueling subpoenas, as IBM and SCO continue to spar over allegations that a Linux kernel promoted by Big Blue was copied from SCO's Unix System V source code. Earlier this month, IBM issued subpoenas for SCO investors and analysts, including Bay Star Capi...

Last week, Novell announced its purchase of SuSE for $210 million -- $50 million of it direct from an IBM investment in newly issued convertible preferred stock. This deal raises two difficult questions: What's Novell up to, and why, if the people behind SuSE wanted to cash out, didn't they do an IP...

The desktop may be the final frontier for Linux, but one company is using a combination of Windows interface strategy, Wal-Mart sales and a wide selection of software to try to match the inroads Linux has made in the corporate datacenter. That company is Lindows.com. There was much open-source hoop...

Noster fungitur -- ours works. It's the motto I suggested to a local Mac user group. But it's also the theme you need to push when selling open-source software against the Microsoft desktop system -- Windows 2003 Server with Office 2003. Office 2003, in combination with Server 2003, is the first maj...

In what is being viewed as the maturation of both the company and the Linux operating system, Red Hat has announced it will no longer produce or support its free, consumer version of Linux. Industry analysts praised Red Hat's move to ride a building wave of Linux adoption by exclusively selling Ente...

If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars during some reporting cycle -- like a quarterly or annual period -- makes perfect sense. It's dollars you're interested in, so dollars you measure. That's not true, however, for the open-source community. If you give away the product, then us...

Like other governments and corporations seeking to mix yesterday's IT investments with today's emerging technology, the state of Massachusetts has directed its IT staff to begin adopting open standards and open-source software. The move mirrors other government and enterprise initiatives that have I...

In an interview with Bill Joy headlined "Joy after Sun," Fortune Magazine mentions Joy's famous "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" article from Wired, which concluded that "robotics, nanotech and genetic engineering were emerging so quickly that, if we weren't careful, they could endanger the human sp...

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices. The T-Engine Forum, a project that counts ...

On most workday mornings, my e-mail contains a newsletter promising "unbiased opinion" -- an editorial oxymoron whose intent is probably to deny the presence of commercial advocacy. We tend to think of bias as necessarily negative, but in fact a bias is just a predisposition to believe or disbelieve...

Both VeriTest on Microsoft's behalf and IBM have recently issued reports on running Ziff Davis Media's NetBench performance benchmark on mainframe Linux. Overall, it appears that Microsoft reports better mainframe performance than IBM does. These results might seem surprising enough to those unfamil...

A looming October 14th deadline could result in a widening of SCO Group's legal assault on Linux and distributors of the open-source operating system as the Lindon, Utah-based company mulls plans to pull another Unix license, this time from SGI. SCO laid the groundwork for the move -- which would ex...

Calling it a "migration product" intended to take desktop users away from Windows and toward 64-bit computing and the new 2.6 Linux kernel, SuSE Linux announced its 9.0 desktop update will be available next month. The German software maker said SuSE Linux 9.0 will provide support for both 32- and 64...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...

In response to attacks on the Linux operating system launched by SCO, which claims its own Unix source code was incorporated into the open-source software, Hewlett-Packard is indemnifying its Linux customers against any potential SCO litigation. The move comes after SCO, which has sued IBM for $3 bi...