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Sun Microsystems faces the prospect of being forced to pay more than US$1 billion in damages now that a federal court jury has found the computer giant's popular Java languages infringed on a patent held by Eastman Kodak. After a three-week trial, a jury found that Sun violated a patent that Kodak a...

Leading open source vendor Red Hat said it will buy certain security-related assets of Netscape Security Solutions from America Online in a deal worth US$25 million. Red Hat said it will integrate the products it is buying, including the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management ...

About a month ago, I compared the cost for Apple's desktop, server and laptop products to their nearest Dell equivalents and discovered that Macs generally cost less than comparable PC products. That was a bit of surprise, but the truly astonishing thing that came out of the comparison was that Dell...

We can learn some lessons from reality TV. For instance, many disputes can be settled without lawyers. If your brother-in-law owes you money or your neighbor's tree drops fruit in your pool, you can simply vote them off the island. Or fire them. Either way, working it out on your own is a cheaper al...

A consortium of French Linux firms are poised to work on developing a highly secure Linux operating system for business, defense and government use. The effort is being funded by the French Ministry of Defense, which chose Paris-based Linux vendor Mandrakesoft as the project leader. The other French...

Open-source spam killer SpamAssassin 3.0 was released Wednesday, and while the new version has more features than its predecessors, it is in the licensing where it deviates the most from past versions. Previously, the software was available under either the GPL or the Perl Artistic License. For 3.0,...

If you ever feel in need of a lesson in humility, try reading through the TCP/IP RFCs and related literature. I have two questions I have no idea how to answer but rather naively expected that reading this material would help. It didn't, in truth because I didn't understand most of it; so now I'm as...

For those who think the SCO Group v. IBM lawsuit has gotten too ugly to watch, there is a fresh fight in the open-source arena over the ownership of Mambo. Mambo, an open-source content-management system, is maintained by developers at the Mambo Group, and its copyright is owned by Australian firm M...

Open-source firm JBoss made two high-profile announcements today, unveiling the release of Application Server 4.0 and detailing an alliance with the Eclipse Foundation. Both announcements indicate that the company is expanding its open-source presence, as well as becoming more of a contributor to th...

Connoisseurs of 1960s TV might be familiar with Paladin, a Western that featured a San Francisco character with a business card that read "Have Gun, Will Travel." He was a dapper cross between a private detective and a bounty hunter who roamed through the West tracking down bad guys. He was mainly a...

To be a Linux strategist at Microsoft seems a contradiction, even an oxymoron. It is like being a vegetarian butcher shop owner, or a pacifist Army general. Yet Martin Taylor, with the official title of general manager of platform strategy, must fill just such a role. In a recent Computerworld inter...

Microsoft's settlement with Sun Microsystems has sparked attention in the open-source community, since it contains a provision giving Microsoft the right to sue developers and users of OpenOffice.org. The agreement with Sun was inked in April, but its details were made public only this week as part ...

Open source in general, and Unix in particular, appears to be far buggier and less secure than is Microsoft's code in general and Windows XP in particular. You might not believe that, but any count of security vulnerabilities reported since about mid-2001 will lead you to the same conclusion. Mentio...

Borland Software today introduced Borland CaliberRM 2005 and Borland StarTeam 2005, software tools designed to help application developers manage the requirements, resources, tasks, assets and workflow for application development. CaliberRM 2005 and StarTeam 2005 offer several new capabilities desig...

Although Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market, there are some rumblings of change being heard, especially as browsers like Mozilla and Opera find more widespread use. The latest browser to garner attention has been Firefox, a product of the Mozilla Foundation. The group has updated t...