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This week's column is about the nature of the software needed to go with the elections administration hardware laid out in last week's column. In brief, the idea was to ignore political reality long enough to imagine a system in which the voting support application runs on the local servers but capt...

Fujitsu said the company has formed a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems in the Unix server business to minimize its exposure to this segment amid the ongoing shift to Linux servers. IDC Japan, a privately-held research firm, recently forecast that domestic sales of Linux servers will account ...

Red Hat's new Linux product, Fedora Core 2, has been playing well with cutting-edge enthusiasts and adventurous developers since its release on Tuesday. But some in this target audience wonder whether the company's strategy of providing different products for personal and enterprise use is a sound o...

My server has been getting a lot of hits lately from searches that request things like "windows vs. Unix term paper." On the one hand, I suppose this reflects increased academic interest in Unix. On the other, it does make me wonder about the marking keys used to judge a student's success in differe...

New research once again confirms that Linux and open-source acquisition costs are a "fraction" of the cost of comparable proprietary options -- but the research adds a new caveat, noting that costs will be driven lower in coming years. Today, savings from Linux are often "offset by high integration,...

Sun Microsystems and Capgemini yesterday announced the launch of a jointly developed Radio Frequency Identification system. The system is designed to help enable retail and consumer packaged-goods companies to comply with RFID mandates issued by a growing number of retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Targe...

Making good on a marketing promise uttered late last year, Red Hat today is ending support for the final version of its Linux 9 product. The Raleigh, North Carolina, Linux vendor in January stopped supporting its other legacy versions of Linux, hoping that customers would switch to the Red Hat Enter...

Tokyo-based Turbolinux this week disclosed that it has developed a new Linux operating system for home PC users -- Turbolinux 10F. Turbolinux is said to be the best-selling Linux distributor in the Asia-Pacific region. "Japanese consumers are moving in large numbers to Linux," said Koichi Yano, pres...

A Philippines-based software developer this week released software that enables Windows-based programs to run on computers using archrival Linux. In a statement, Peter Valdes, CTO of SpecOps Labs, said the software ultimately will help users migrate from Windows machines to the open-source Linux pla...

Sun Microsystems on Thursday revealed it has forged 21 deals with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) during the last four months. The massive announcement provides an objective sign of growth in open-source technologies, according to the company. But is demand for alternative, open-source compu...

Sometimes bitter humor is the only sensible response to absurd injustice. A few years ago, for example, a lot of frustrated Apple fans were sure that if Steve Jobs walked across San Francisco Bay, the PC press would thunder "Jobs Can't Swim!" Or, more topically, if Sun won a major legal victory agai...

Want to know why most business analysts and venture capitalists simply don't get it with respect to Unix? Take a look at the computer books they study while working toward their MBA, financial analysis certificate or accounting designation, and you'll understand that their ignorance isn't entirely t...

Want to know why most business analysts and venture capitalists simply don't get it with respect to Unix? Take a look at the computer books they study while working toward their MBA, financial analysis certificate or accounting designation, and you'll understand that their ignorance isn't entirely t...

A buzz of activity in the SCO-Linux legal saga probably is not distracting Linux developers from their work, according to a survey by Evans Data Corporation that indicates more than 90 percent of those developers believe SCO's claim to own source code used in Linux has no merit. SCO Group, a Utah so...

One of the unfortunate realities of the Wintel monoculture is that expectations are set mainly by ads, the Sunday supplements and stereotypes like TV character Marshall, the supertech on the show Alias. But delivery is constrained by reality. As a result, the Microsoft Certified Systems Engin...

Didn't Netscape lose the browser war? Mozilla, the technology that lies underneath Netscape products and a slew of its own products, just gets better and better. Netscape is effectively dead, but Mozilla keeps on keeping on. In 2010 we'll look back and say 2003 was the year that Mozilla really began...

IBM reportedly is working with Microsoft to port the Redmond, Washington-based company's popular Office desktop software to the Linux platform, a platform that IBM has wholeheartedly endorsed and leveraged to win market share in the enterprise-computing space. Although open-source alternatives such ...

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has released a set of guidelines aimed at helping users deploy Linux in corporate data centers. Following a process that mirrors the open, ongoing development of Linux software itself, OSDL is inviting feedback on the Data Center Linux Technical Capabilities 1...

The word "pusillanimous" is normally used to label actions judged to reflect a lack of moral courage on the part of the person taking the action. Thus people who can be rather easily pressured to undertake actions contrary to their own beliefs are often said to be pusillanimous, cowardly or weak-spi...

Asia is emerging as a key battleground for the open-source movement. The Japan-China-Korea partnership, announced last month in Osaka, is the latest in a string of initiatives to promote Linux. Two weeks earlier, Singapore hosted the second annual Asia Open Source Symposium, where 20 Asian countries...