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Wikia, the open source search engine initiative and potential Google-killer, has snagged Jeremie Miller, who founded Jabber, an open instant messaging platform. Miller was handpicked by the Wikia project's founder, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. "Jimmy sat down in January after he announced his intention ...

Microsoft has rolled out alpha and beta versions of Silverlight, its recently announced RIA platform, at a keynote address at the MIX07 conference underway in Las Vegas. As part of its strategy to flatten Adobe with is own iteration of flash technology, Microsoft has configured Silverlight, essentia...

For the first time ever, Wikipedia last month cracked into comScore's top 10 hottest properties on the Web, largely due to the exposure the online encyclopedia receives from search engines like Google. During January, comScore reported that Wikipedia and its affiliated sites garnered 42.9 million un...

Browser usage numbers for 2006 are beginning to appear on the Web, and for the first time in many moons the market share of Microsoft's dominant offering, Internet Explorer, has dipped below 80 percent. While Internet Explorer's star was sinking, its chief competitor's, Mozilla Firefox, was ascendin...

Since Jimmy Wales' announcment last week that he plans to launch a new search engine in Q1 2007, speculation has been rife over what it could mean for the search industry -- and specifically for Google. Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is one of the few Web 2.0 players with enough clout to take on t...

JBoss Monday released Hibernate 3.2, the latest update to the company's Java object/relational mapping software. Hibernate packages now support the most popular development frameworks, and can be used with JDK 5.0 annotations, the Java Persistence API, or full Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0. A significant...

PalmSource this week announced that it will push its new software library, which is part of the Access Linux Platform, into the open source developer community. The firm said its libsqlfs software library, a SQLite add-on, would ease implementation of the ALP. The library is immediately available fo...

IBM has announced another contribution to the open source community: software technology that supports the exchange of healthcare information. The move is "a major step in the drive toward a national electronic medical records system," the company said. The software, donated to the Eclipse Foundatio...

The Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center released a second working draft for the next iteration of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3, which updates digital rights management, patent and other provisions included in the most popular free and open source software lice...

Saying it may have some scratch for the open source software itch, search giant Google chose the O'Reilly Open Source Developers Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., this week to unveil a free service hosting open source software projects. The service, Project Hosting, will give open source softwar...

Florian Mueller is at it once again. The founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign that led to the European Union's landslide vote against a proposal for a software patent directive is ready for the next battle. The same forces that supported the software patent directive he successfully defeate...

The Google rumor mill is churning again. Google has reportedly confirmed it is using Ubuntu desktop Linux technology internally, but has not divulged its purpose. Ubuntu Linux is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with community and professional support. It is based on the Deb...

IBM today said it has formed a joint agreement with Univa Corporation, a commercial software and professional services provider for open-source Globus software. Under the terms of the agreement, Univa will deliver a commercially supported and enterprise-ready release of open-standard software built ...

Anonymizer, a leading provider of Internet privacy and security products, plans tomorrow to release Anonymizer Total Privacy Suite, the first comprehensive identity protection product that works with Firefox, Mozilla's popular open-source Web browser. The new software, available for online purchase ...

A vulnerability has been discovered in the Firefox Web browser that could be exploited by malicious people to gain knowledge of potentially sensitive information, according to an advisory from security research firm Secunia. The vulnerability comes less than six weeks after the Mozilla Foundation re...

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...

Holiday shopping sure has changed. This year, my shopping list includes all things digital -- a TiVo box, some DVDs, perhaps even a digital camera. A generation ago, consumer goods did not come with microprocessors. Back then, once you bought something, you owned it. You could use it however you ...

Every four years, the fall sport becomes following U.S. presidential politics. As any sports fan knows, you have to know the lingo to understand the talking heads. I take politics seriously, so after hearing the expressions "red-state" and "blue-state," I did my research and learned that red is th...

Back in 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists. He asked, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free?" Today, Gates has to eat those words because the...

Gupta Technologies announced today that its SQLBase(R) 9.0 for Linux has been certified "Novell Ready" for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9. The Novell Ready designation means that the product has been designed to work with Novell's Linux family of enterprise-class software products. "GUPTA has ...