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In the United Kingdom today, HP unveiled a new round of desktop PCs, offering customers a choice between Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Microsoft Windows XP as default operating systems. The company described the new HP Compaq Business Desktop dx2000 as a simple, inexpensive business computer designed to me...

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,...

What is the safest advice an intellectual property attorney can give clients concerned about potential litigation? "Do absolutely nothing." The truth is that making or selling any products might get you sued for patent infringement. Advertising might get you sued for trademark infringement. And don'...

Tokyo-based VA Linux Systems last week launched a collaborative development project with NTT Data to develop a crash-analysis tool for Linux. According to the companies, this tool will provide crash-related data and crash analysis for IT departments. The project aims to have the tool in circulation ...

Is the legal strategy embraced by SCO Group a "good faith" effort to protect its intellectual property? Or a project to boost the share price on the Lindon, Utah, software firm? A new article, in the current issue of Fortune Magazine, one of the leading business publications in the United Sta...

In going through a stack of resumes last week, I came across one from a person, certified as expert by both Microsoft and Cisco, who claimed to have "architected secure network solutions" at a previous employer. When I recovered from the consequent daydream about flying lead balloons, I decided to s...

Major vendors, like HP and IBM, are embracing Linux. Does that mean that Linux is no longer, practically speaking, free? Some technology experts -- even those keen on Linux -- have widely differing opinions. In an interview with the Australian IT press, Steve Vamos, the managing director for Microso...

Red Hat chose London as the location to launch its new Linux software that is bundled with security and management features. The new product, Red Hat Desktop, is targeted at organizations that are looking to upgrade their PCs but don't want all the features that ship with the latest version of Micro...

The SCO Group is amending its federal lawsuit against IBM, changing its legal tactics in the ongoing public drama over Linux software. But contrary to some reports in the press, the company didn't claim earlier in a letter that the Linux General Public License (GPL) was "unconstitutional." Rather, D...

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...

Joining the ranks of Linux distributors HP, Novell and Red Hat, a company named Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) has launched a program to protect large and small users from legal entanglements arising from adoption of the open-source operating system. Unlike some other indemnification programs, u...

The SCO Group late Friday disclosed that one of its investors is extremely unhappy -- and wants its money back. But the Lindon, Utah-based Unix provider apparently isn't going to resolve the legal controversy without a fight, at least for now. In a letter released to other investors by SCO, BayStar ...

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...

Listening to some Linux critics, you might think that the open-source operating system is more of a threat to U.S. national security than a gaggle of Islamic jihadis lugging rocket-propelled grenade launchers around Fallujah, or mad Pakistani nuclear scientists selling secrets to rogue states. At ye...

Japanese scientists have built their largest distributed computing grid yet, a supercluster that performs 11 trillion floating operations per second, at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). As Japan's largest public research organization, AIST is charged with ...

About a month ago we had some people over for dinner, and the discussion drifted to top-10 lists of the Letterman variety. As part of that conversation, I got challenged to name the top 10 worst IT decisions ever -- something I couldn't do then and still can't do now, which is why I'm asking for you...

Computing giant IBM is seeking a declaratory judgment in its ongoing defense and counterclaim lawsuit with SCO, which has based its $5 billion suit against Big Blue on copyright and contract issues surrounding SCO's intellectual-property claims to Linux. While SCO, which has threatened and sued user...

The creators and distributors of the Gnome open-source desktop software project are investigating a server breach that reportedly did not affect released Gnome sources and the project's source-code repository, but nonetheless delayed the latest update scheduled to come out this week. The sysadmin te...

A week after announcing it was putting Linux on more of its desktop machines for the Asian market, HP made bigger waves this week, disclosing a deal with Novell to put SuSE Linux on the entire HP portfolio of business desktops and notebooks in North America, to be followed by other markets later. An...

Adding to what the company says is a successive list of firsts for Linux, Novell has released SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional and Personal, the first retail offerings of the 2.6 Linux kernel. For Linux novices, Novell is providing a new LiveCD disc that allows them to test and familiarize themselves wit...