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In a move to expand its support for open-source technologies, IBM announced a partnership with Zend Technologies yesterday that will integrate Big Blue's Apache-based Cloudscape database and Zend's open-source PHP environment. Analysts said the alliance is bound to give both sides competitive advant...

The European Commission recently tolled the death knell for the EU Software Patent Directive, or more precisely, the "Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions." Like most Americans, I am fairly clueless about the EU political process, and I wouldn't presume to write about e...

Red Hat unveiled its updated enterprise Linux distribution today and used the occasion to take a shot at rival Sun. "It's the beginning of the end of Solaris in the enterprise," Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat, said of Enterprise Linux v4, which the company said is ...

Some friends of mine are considering setting up a new company around an e-commerce idea and asked me to research the cost of the IT infrastructure needed. As part of that, I went Web shopping for a low end server to get them started, and found some surprises. Note that all pricing data shown below i...

Large patent portfolio owners seem to be in a particularly generous mood these days. A few weeks after IBM announced it was giving away 500 patents, Sun jumped on the bandwagon by announcing that it is releasing more than 1,600 patents associated with the Solaris OS, a move they describe as eclipsin...

When Hewlett-Packard announced, just recently, that it was combining the headquarters operations of its PC and printing divisions, but would continue to report their results separately, I assumed they were doing it to provide legal cover for the transfer of costs from the PC side to the printing sid...

Last week's announcement that Big Blue was giving away patents was viewed as uncommonly good news in open source circles. When IBM decided to contribute 500 of its patents to a "patent commons" for the benefit of open-source software developers and end users, it conjured up visions of a city commons...

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 weeks ago Linus Torvalds was reported as having said that Solaris has nothing to teach him. That surprised me because my mental picture of Linux is that of a typical early 1990s megakernel -- years ahead of Microsoft's Windows servers, but not exactly state of the art by any standard and f...

What differentiates a Mac user from a PC user, assuming the usage decision is uncoerced by an employer? My wife answered that question with a list straight from Jeff Foxworthy: You think virus protection is what you get a flu shot for; You actually make a conscious choice in selecting your Web brows...

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...

Desperately seeking their future, African countries that virtually no Western commercial software vendors have cared about in the past are turning to free and open software. They are doing so at a pace just quick enough to alarm some commercial software vendors, who fear the prospect of an entire co...

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...

I've never gotten the hang of casual chit chat, and I blew it again the other day. We were at one of those things preceded by a wifely lecture about my behavior, and I really thought I was doing pretty well when the "conversation" meandered to I Robot. Since this was the first movie mention...

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 ...

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...

The use of electronic voting in this year's U.S. elections has the makings of the greatest IT-related disaster yet. Barring a miracle, this is a done deal, a disaster unfolding as we watch. The problem, unfortunately, is that it's too late for alternative technologies to come in while a number of ju...

Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...

Lawyers and programmers have a lot in common. Programmers write code and lawyers write legal documents. Both consider the issues, generate written work product, check it for bugs and then release the product. Both professions rely on libraries to avoid reinventing each aspect of the product. There a...

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...