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Linux vendor Mandriva today said it would buy North American Linux distributor Lycoris in a deal that could open up new markets to a top Linux reseller, especially in the home personal computer space. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It was the second acquisition this year for France-...

Everyone has heard the expression, "You get what you pay for." It suggests that the functionality of something is directly proportional to its price. But that rule of thumb is being turned on its head by open-source software. Open-source software is free, but it differs from "freeware" in some major...

Novell announced yesterday the availability of its latest offering targeting experienced Linux home computing users. SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 boasts a complete Linux operating system, over 3,000 open-source packages, and hundreds of open-source applications, productivity software and home network...

Two weeks ago, I asked for reader aid in getting documentation on early 1990s System VR4 Unix to help understand what things can be done with Linux today but could not be done with AT&T System VR4. The question was naive and I need more help (and aspirin) in struggling toward a better answer tha...

About two months ago, I looked at the cost of the Macintosh relative to Dell PCs and discovered that not only are Macs cheaper than PCs once you upgrade the PCs to rough comparability, but the PC line is narrower than Apple's, with Dell offering nothing to compare to the 17-inch Apple powerbook, the...

Xandros today announced the release of xDMS (Xandros Desktop Management Server) for remote management of Linux desktops for the enterprise. The xDMS enables secure deployment, configuration, and updating for up to thousands of Linux desktops through an intuitive graphical interface. "The deployment ...

At a working lunch last week I had the misfortune of being seated next to some guy from Boston whining about the misery and risk introduced into his life by Sarbanes-Oxley. I kept wanting to ask him what he thought his job was as a CFO, since all Sarbanes-Oxley really does is establish a basis for l...

Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying, "You know what my toughest competitor is? It's pirated software.... If you really look around, you'll find way more pirated Windows than you'll find open-source software. Way more." Gates couldn't be more wrong. At least in China, his tough stance against pi...

Two weeks ago I looked at IBM's forthcoming cell processor architecture and last week speculated about the impact it might have on the x86 desktop. This week, I want to go beyond that and look at the impact the cell architecture will have on the battle for server dominance over the next five years.

If you read a report sponsored by the Flat Earth Society in which an independent research organization found the world to be flat, would you believe it? I'd guess not, but any reputable research organization hired to survey the society's membership on the question would have to come to that conclusi...