Categories: open source software

Microsoft’s Patent Dust-Ups

Posted by: Aaron Ricadela on August 19

For the past half dozen years, Microsoft has been busily getting its patent house in order. In a bid to protect itself against lawsuits alleging that it has infringed on…

Google’s Chrome Operating System: We’ve Got It All Wrong

Posted by: Rob Hof on July 11

“A real rival to Windows.” “Google drops a nuclear bomb on Microsoft.” It all sounds so dramatic and exciting, the kind of story we journalists love. But I can’t help…

Ingres: An Open Source Rival to Oracle

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 24

I’ve been following the path of Ingres Corp. ever since Terry Garnett and David Helfrich of Garnett & Helfrich Capital bought it from CA a few years back and made…

What Linux Needs To Win on Desktops

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on November 04

The Register, a snarky British online tech publication, has a great example of the challenges facing Linux if it is ever to make real progress displacing Windows or Mac OX…

Mobile World Congress—Hands On With Android

Posted by: Cliff Edwards on February 12

Here I was, wandering through the halls at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona, waiting for my moment in the sun. Chip licensing company ARM Ltd, you see, was…

Oracle Drops the Bomb on Red Hat

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 25

Red Hat’s stock took a pounding earlier this year when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison suggested that he might buy a Linux company and compete with the No. 1 Linux distributor….

Firefox: Mission Accomplished

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 11

When the folks from Mozilla prepared to launch their open-source Firefox 1.0 browser two years ago, their hope was to gain enough market share to compel Web sites to adopt…

Update on the UN open source symposium

Posted by: Steve Hamm on August 31

In the wake of my last posting, I finally got hold of Colleen Thouez, chief of UNITAR, the United Nations Institute of Training and Research. She filled me in on…

Pushing open standards at the UN.

Posted by: Steve Hamm on August 28

The outcome of the global battle between Microsoft and the proponents of open source software is a hard one to call. Even though open source seems like a natural fit…

The Penguin’s New BFF

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on June 15

In case, you forgot your junior high days, BFF is note-passing slang for “best friends forever.” And, don’t get jealous IBM, but it looks like Tux’s new best pal may…

Flock redux

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 13

Last October, the folks at Flock broke their silence and revealed their plans for a new “social browser” designed for collaborating, sharing photos, and blogging. The Flock beta was supposed…

SugarCRM comes of age

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 01

A year and a half ago, when I first met SugarCRM CEO John Roberts, he was a fresh-faced young guy full of excitement about how open source software was going…

California Mulls Open Source

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on February 06

In some ways, it’s not quite as bold as Massachusetts plan to replace parts of Microsoft Office with OpenDocument by 2007, but this Wednesday, the State of California is holding…

Red Hat and the $100 laptop

Posted by: Steve Hamm on January 31

When Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab proposed a $100 laptop for school kids in poor nations a year ago, he professed interest in a handful of operating systems,…

A big step for Linux in China

Posted by: Steve Hamm on January 12

China has long been seen as a fertile ground for Linux and other open source software. In a country where more than 90% of software in use is pirated, it…

Tux Redux

Posted by: Steve Hamm on December 06

The last time I tuned into Mandrake Software, the founder of the France-based Linux company was begging Mandrake Linux users to send in contributions to keep the company afloat. Then,…

Linux marches on

Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 16

It’s easy to lose track of what’s going on with Linux. That’s due in part to the almost total lack of marketing hype. The kernel crew, led by Linus Torvalds,…

Waving the Open Source Banner Isn’t Enough

Posted by: Sarah Lacy on November 09

Matt Asay has an interesting posting about the Ingres spin out. He posits that a serious foray by Ingres finally gives companies a real, competitive database market again. More interesting…

Red Hat grows up

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 31

Red Hat has ridden the Linux wave quite successfuly for a decade now. It’s by far the leading Linux distributor and growing at 40% to 50% per year. This is…

It won’t help hurricane victims, but…

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 31

Eighteen months ago, in the midst of the flurry of worry over SCO Group’s suit against IBM over Linux source code, a little company called Open Source Risk Management was…

Beta Testing for Beer

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 24

Beta testers are vital for any new software product, but they’re absolutely essential for open-source projects, since companies that sell such software often don’t have big quality-assurance departments. That—and a…

A growing headache for the database giants

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 21

Mainstream database software companies that have been watching open-source upstart MySQL in their rearview mirrors must be having some uncomfortable thoughts right about now. According to a user survey released…

Open Source innovation

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 06

Open source software goes a lot of good things. It’s inexpensive, shared, and creates alternatives to monopolistic proprietary software. Up until recently, however, it hasn’t been very technically innovative. Most…

JBoss vs IBM spat—an opening for Microsoft

Posted by: Steve Hamm on September 27

JBoss CEO Marc Fleury is spittin’ mad these days. His target: IBM. For five years, Fleury has seen his company grow rapidly by selling support and other services around JBoss…

SCO smoking gun

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 15

I have been skeptical of SCO Group’s claims versus Linux and IBM from the start. In fact, I think I invented the now often-repeated observation, “SCO isn’t a company; it’s…

The Way of Xen

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 10

Here’s an odd twist. Microsoft, the whale of software, is being bedeviled by a small fish, VMware, the pioneer of virtualization technology for PCs and PC servers. But, in turn,…

Open Source: Capitalist Tool?

Posted by: Rob Hof on June 01

That’s the opinion, anyway, of Jesús Villasante, head of software technologies at the European Community’s Information Society and Media Directorate General. According to a story on ZDNet Australia, Villasante accused…

The Truth about Linux and Windows

Posted by: Steve Hamm on April 22

I’ve got a bone to pick with the never-ending stream of studies by tech research outfits comparing Linux to Windows. For starters, it seems like about half of them are…

Creating Software Without Software

Posted by: Rob Hof on March 15

Will we all be programmers before long? That’s the upshot of a presentation today at the Emerging Technology conference by Adam Gross, director of product marketing at Salesforce.com. He contends…