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MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week of Mule Galaxy 1.0. Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an i...

Bernard Golden is convinced there are two chasms to cross for a commercial open source company and I believe there is only one. As I wrote in my recent blog post, "There is no such thing as commercial open source," the attempt to ride the title wave of open source into a magical business domain call...

2007 was an eventful year for the commercial open source industry. We have seen many new entrants, and now there are hundreds of viable companies that are based on open source, filling nearly every segment of the software market. We have seen significant exit events from companies such as XenSource ...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines. Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search i...

For a computer addict, choosing a Linux distribution is much like being an unsupervised child in a candy store. So many flavors with so many choices make the task of picking just one type of candy a near-impossible -- but fun-filled -- task. For a consumer or business exec who must pick a Linux dist...

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce several key enhancements to its StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office productivity software suites. StarOffice 8 and the corresponding open version, OpenOffice.org 2.3, have both been updated with a variety of new features, including the ability to edit fo...

So you want to give the best this holiday season? How about a nice bundle of free software? Hold on, this isn't a lesson in Scrooge 101 but a way to give some really good software on a shoestring budget, or to lend a hand to charities, struggling college students, underprivileged kids, even help out...

Yahoo, Google and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search. Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open source alternative to mainstr...

Open source software -- think Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia, Apache, Ajax and a host of other projects -- has introduced a radically different development model -- and mindset -- to the stream of high-tech innovation. It is one that is having repercussions in the corporate world that go beyond how softw...

Anonymous Wikipedia editors who seek to alter articles there for less-than-honorable purposes can no longer hide behind their cloak of anonymity: A new scanner tool now makes it relatively easy to figure out where they came from. WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate ...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...

There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process. "We've already seen a shift in both software and the media where individual content is key and any one very talented coder or blogger can impact an industry," Am...

It's probably safe to say that most Americans, at one time or another, have felt they could do a better job of governing the nation than their elected officials. It may even be safe, in fact, to say that that has never been more true than it is today. "Bush's approval ratings are as low as it's poss...

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 ...

Using the Hawaiian word "wiki" meaning "quick," Ward Cunningham coined the concept of WikiWikiWeb as a Web site for speedy interaction among targeted users. In its most basic form, a wiki Web site allows any user to create, add, remove or edit content and pages. Forrester Research recently surveyed ...

Users of Wikipedia trust that anonymous contributors will only add true and accurate knowledge to the free online encyclopedia. However, not everyone is trustworthy. Contributors have made mistakes, of course, and then there's the widely-reported inconsistencies and outright vandalism of entries. So...

One of the editors in charge of monitoring Wikipedia's content has been discovered to be a fraud. EssJay, whom the site had assumed was working under a false name for privacy, had presented himself as a tenured professor of religion with expertise in canon law. However, it has been revealed that Ess...

In its relatively short life online, reference Web site Wikipedia has endured numerous shots from corners ranging from the generally staid Encyclopedia Britannica to a former aide of the late Robert F. Kennedy. Now it's lined up in the sites of a new foe -- a group of high school students wit...

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...

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...