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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...

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...

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 ...

The Gnome Foundation today released a new version of its popular Linux desktop. The new release, Gnome version 2.8, boosts speed and usability and offers several new features, the foundation said in a statement. Gnome is the default desktop on the Red Hat distribution, among others, and is available...

IBM today announced it is contributing proprietary voice-recognition software to two different open-source software groups. The Apache Software Foundation will receive Reusable Dialog Components (RDCs), used for handling simple words for dates, times and locations. In addition, IBM is proposing a pr...

Macromedia announced that this week it will begin shipping Flex Builder, a new integrated development environment designed to streamline Flex application development. The company noted that creation of Flex Builder was prompted by the rapid adoption of Flex, a server application that converts code w...

Industry observers yesterday took differing outlooks on rumors that Sun Microsystems might buy Novell. "I don't find the speculation credible," analyst Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of operating systems at International Data Corporation, said. Kusnetzky said such a merger would face problems from po...

After a growth surge that contributed to the decline in market share of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) for the first time in six years, usage of the Mozilla browser flattened out during much of this month. "The general trend over the last two weeks, at least, seems to have mostly flattened out," G...

At the Rational Software Development User Conference yesterday, IBM revealed its plans for new capabilities expected to be available in the IBM Software Development Platform by the end of 2004. According to the company, the new software development technologies will help organizations automate their...

This week, IBM introduced the new eServer p5 systems, a line of Unix and Linux servers that use Power 5 microprocessors and Micro-Partitioning, an IBM Virtualization Engine technology. According to IBM, the new eServer p5 systems are the result of a large-scale, three-year research and development e...

For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing ...

Developers at last week's JavaOne conference got a chance to check the progress that tools vendors have made in their long quest to ease Java programming so they can better compete against Microsoft. For starters, conference sponsor Sun Microsystems tried to reassert itself as a major player with th...

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.

To kick off its big JavaOne party for its software developers in San Francisco this week, Sun Microsystems made a flurry of announcements aimed at rekindling enthusiasm for the once high-flying company's future prospects. But some critics of the Santa Clara, California enterprise remained unimpresse...

Fujitsu today announced a new version of the company's fifth-generation Sparc64 processor. The new Fujitsu Sparc64 V is fabricated using 90-nanometer process technology, a first for Unix-based servers, and operates at 1.89 GHz. According to Fujitsu, the enhancements offer a significant performance b...

The SCO Group on Wednesday unveiled an array of new Unix products, as well as channel support and training programs. The announcement comes less than a week after the company reported disappointing financial results that included a quarterly drop from US$21.4 million to $10.1 million. Among the new ...

Firebird, an open-source relational database, emerged from the InterBase source code, release by Inprise Corporation -- now known as Borland -- in 2000. Firebird, which runs on Linux, Windows and a variety of Unix platforms, offers concurrency, high performance and powerful language support for stor...

Novell has released a new version of Mono -- an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework -- and some early adopters are already singing its praises. "Mono makes Novell extremely relevant now," said Kingsley Idehen, president and CEO of OpenLink, which has just released Virtuoso 3.5, ...

Don't make celebratory plans just yet to join the Open Source Solaris Community: Sun Microsystems is only saying that it is looking at its plans to open up the Solaris source code, meaning it could happen months from now, years from now or, in fact, never. Despite reports yesterday that it was a don...

A papoose named Geronimo is venturing out of the teepee this week, and the Apache Software Foundation says it might be ready for its rite of passage later this summer. The organization's effort to develop an open-source version of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) became a full-fledged project this w...