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UserLinux is due for public beta on September 1, but already some are questioning whether the distribution can survive in an enterprise market rife with competitors. The project's leader, Bruce Perens, noted that the distribution will be free and will have the same functionality as other distributio...

Munich announced that patent concerns will not affect a planned migration to Linux for 14,000 of the city's desktop computers. Although the city had unveiled a plan last year for the move, on August 4 it decided to postpone the program, nicknamed LiMux, citing legal and financial concerns over softw...

The Webmin enterprise has been helping to promote the corporate use of Linux, and cottage industries are emerging to assist in the use of open source through risk management tools and indemnification insurance, research shows. Yankee Group senior analyst Laura DiDio confirmed research shows Linux is...

Linux Networx today announced that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has chosen the company for implementation of a Linux-based cluster computing system. The system, an Evolocity II Linux Networx cluster, will be used to evaluate the suitability of cluster technology for broader...

My wife has a Dilbert cartoon on her office door in which one of the characters says: "If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how." She's a Mac user and they were worse even before they all became Unix users too. Or maybe not. But finding out whether the average...

Sun recently announced it would open-source its Solaris operating system. While declining to get specific about timetables and the type of open-source license the company plans to use, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software group, promised that Sun will "be very aggressive and pro...

Two orders have been issued in SCO Group's cases against IBM and Novell that could impact how the legal wrangling proceeds. U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball is hearing both cases, which involve contract and copyright infringement claims and counterclaims against IBM, and slander claims against Novel...

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, ...

Veritas announced Tuesday that it has extended support of its storage management and clustering products to the Intel Itanium 2 platform on Red Hat Linux 3.0. According to the company, Veritas is increasing its commitment to making Linux enterprise-ready with the move and is extending its Linux supp...

Next time you open a fortune cookie, consider making it more entertaining. Read the fortune aloud and follow it with the words "in bed." It completely changes the meaning and adds some after-dinner fun. After reading the GPL analysis FAQ prepared by Microsoft in 2001 -- apparently to discourage the ...

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...

The leading candidate in an international race to fly people to space aboard a privately developed rocket plans to make his bid for the final frontier in three weeks. Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, announced Wednesday that he would dispatch his novel craft, called SpaceShipOne, to suborbital alti...

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...

Developers this week have released the new Linux Kernel 2.6.6 -- a development that observers and participants in the open-source process are calling good news. "The 2.6.6 release is a very good maintenance release, which takes in a lot of the maintenance that has come in from the 2.6.1 kernel all t...

Novell this week released the first public beta version of its Mono 1.0 software -- the company's planned alternative to Microsoft's .NET platform. Novell took over the Mono project when it acquired open-source software vendor Ximian in August 2003, and the issues inherent in the merger were said to...

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...

Two years in the making, the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) this week debuted online, providing the public with a constantly updated catalog of the Internet's ever-changing security vulnerabilities. The project is sponsored by Digital Defense and Winterforce and is available at osvdb.org...

The standard chip-making process, based on using lithography to etch circuits in silicon and other materials, has been in use since the mid-1970s, with change expressed mainly in increased manufacturing precision as decreases in the wavelengths used allowed the development of ever smaller components...

Software giant Computer Associates is refuting reports that it is among a handful of companies that have agreed to buy a license to run Linux from SCO Group, which has sued companies that have refused the license on the basis of its claims to owning certain source code used in Linux. SCO backpedaled...