Archive

The traditional process for sourcing creative work contains significant risk for the buyer along with the potential for wonderful reward in the form of great design. The typical risks are threefold: first, finding and working with the right designer for your project; second, the inherent limitations...

Linux has proven that the open source model works -- it addresses two of the biggest challenges for IT professionals: the high cost of infrastructure software and the limitations a closed stack imposes on the enterprise. Open source is particularly appealing for cost savings, vendor neutrality, acce...

PicSay is one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge, a contest Google set up to get a batch of decent apps into the Market in time for its launch. Cash prizes went to the devs who built the coolest apps for the platform. It's just an entertaining little app -- it's not likely you'll be u...

There's no leap of imagination needed to expect the arrival one day of a T-Mobile "G2" Android-based smartphone, an expected though still hypothetical follow-up to T-Mobile's popular G1. At this point, however, one does need some imagination to guess on a delivery date and describe a possible featu...

A quiet battle of sorts is taking place behind the scenes in the software industry. Software as a Service and cloud computing have evolved, placing much more attention on Web-based applications. This greater focus has also raised expectations for the services delivered via Web 2.0. The open source s...

Enterprise application whitelisting company Bit9 launched an attention-getting press release last week, a document which merely bubbled for a few days until the recent Internet Explorer flaw took center stage and Mozilla pushed out a few Firefox updates. Eventually, the heat under the issue boiled o...

If you've used an in-flight entertainment system, known in the airline industry as an "IFE," to watch movies, listen to music, or order food lately, chances are it used Linux as an operating system. You might not know that Linux is the operating system behind what you see on your screen, but it prob...

Some 20 years after the Exxon Valdez went ashore on Prince William sound, oil still remains at the bottom of the arctic waters -- but not because those responsible for cleanup have ignored it. Rather, multiple attempts to remove the oil from the sea floor have failed. Cold temperatures have rendered...

The advantages of open source, standards and methodologies have been working their way to the surface for the past few years. Whereas in the past, open source projects were more likely to be described as fledgling efforts that lagged far behind proprietary counterparts, "open source" has become a bu...

The Free Software Foundation filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems on Thursday, alleging the networking giant is in violation of numerous open source licenses. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Manhattan by the Boston-based nonprofit open source software group. The FSF claims that sev...

Adoption of online video is finally moving into the mainstream. Once constrained to companies for whom the production and distribution of video was their primary business, online video is now entering a stage of broad adoption by companies of all sizes who see video as a way to broaden their marketi...

Fourteen more companies have joined the Open Handset Alliance, throwing their support behind Android -- the open source mobile platform developed by Google. The most notable new member is Sony Ericsson, which, interestingly, is also a member of the Symbian Foundation. This surge in membership will...

Mozilla released the second beta for its Firefox 3.1 Web browser to testers Monday. The latest release comes just seven weeks after the open source software maker launched the first beta of the version currently in the works. "So, even before the release of Firefox 3, we'd already been working on wh...

British residents are finding that access has been restricted to a Wikipedia page about "Virgin Killer," an album by the 1970s German rock group Scorpions. Several British Internet service providers have limited access to the page because it displays an image of the album's cover, which depicts a nu...

While the Google-backed Android gang is busy building applications and trying to get new phones manufactured, Google itself has ponied up a new unlocked device for developers: the Android Dev Phone 1. Basically, it's a "T-Mobile G1" that's SIM-unlocked and hardware unlocked, which will let users run...