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The Mozilla Foundation is spinning off its open source e-mail client, Thunderbird, into an independent company. The new company, MailCo, plans to develop Internet communications software "based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand," Mozilla said. David Ascher, CTO of ActiveState, will lead th...

Yahoo, Google and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search. Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open source alternative to mainstr...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...

London-based Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver used by more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries, announced on July 5 the appointment of James Bilefield as CEO. Bilefield brings more than 15 years of entrepreneurial, management and media experience to Openads from his work at...

PHP developer Zend Technologies announced July 2 the release of version 1.0 of Zend Framework, an open source application framework for PHP. Zend Framework 1.0, pre-released in beta versions since last year, is the result of collaboration from 230 contributors comprised of individual developers and ...

IBM and Yahoo on Monday launched an upgraded version of their free OmniFind enterprise search offering. The new IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition includes some 60 new features and corrects 22 bugs. Designed for use by businesses and other organizations, the no-charge application is installed on a server an...

I'm not sure I get the follow-through of Sun wooing mashup artist start-ups. If anything, by Sun trying to appeal to these types of low-capital spending firms shows Sun's latest quandary -- it waited too long to compete with its customers. Microsoft has rarely passed up the opportunity to compete w...

Yahoo has become Oracle's first big Linux client, Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle, announced this week during a conference call with analysts on the company's third-quarter financial results. Though his company is still in its early days with its Linux support offering, Ellison said...

Browser usage numbers for 2006 are beginning to appear on the Web, and for the first time in many moons the market share of Microsoft's dominant offering, Internet Explorer, has dipped below 80 percent. While Internet Explorer's star was sinking, its chief competitor's, Mozilla Firefox, was ascendin...

Opera Software is singing a new tune with its updated Mini 3.0 browser, released on Wednesday. It brings photo sharing and other social networking functionality to the Norwegian company's free mobile phone mini browser. Despite its struggles in the desktop Web-browser market, Opera has succeeded wit...

Without fanfare -- in fact, there was no official announcement made at all -- China decided to stop blocking its citizens' access to Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. The move hints that China may be loosening its control of public access to the Internet and other forms of media. Th...

Open source database vendor MySQL released new functionality and services under an "enterprise" moniker, reflecting the Swedish company's aggressive strategy for acquiring bigger and better customers. Taken together, all of the open source databases -- including MySQL, Ingres and PostgreSQL -- occup...

Yahoo used its recent "Hack Day" to springboard its opening of substantial chunks of code to software developers, highlighted by the application programming interface of Yahoo's widely-used Web e-mail application. Yahoo said the Web application code release -- aimed at spurring new interfaces and ot...

Following last month's release of Lotus Notes collaboration software for Linux, IBM this week started supporting the open source platform on desktop and server computers with its enterprise instant messaging solution Lotus Sametime. Big Blue said the collaboration messaging solution would support in...

Software development toolmaker Trolltech, which provides its Qt and Qtopia development software for embedded, mobile and Linux systems developers, completed its initial public offering and earned a listing on Norway's Oslo Stock Exchange this week. "We wanted to have bigger financial muscle," Trollt...

IBM Research will turn over its data search technology to the open-source community, the company said yesterday. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture searches store data not through keywords, but by analyzing the data within documents to see if they fit the concepts and facts the use...

Novell announced yesterday the availability of its latest offering targeting experienced Linux home computing users. SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 boasts a complete Linux operating system, over 3,000 open-source packages, and hundreds of open-source applications, productivity software and home network...

Yahoo today announced the beta release of the Yahoo Toolbar for the Firefox Web browser, giving the Mozilla Foundation's platform what analysts said is an endorsement of the alternative browser that should help it take more market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "The Yahoo Toolbar provides...

The English language is a great tool. It's expressive, powerful, inclusive, and evolves through the democratic and open-source processes of accepting change on the basis of common usage. Great, but you know what it doesn't have? Enough useable swear words. Think about it, you probably know eight to ...

SCO Group is laying off employees at its Santa Cruz office, prompting speculation as to the real motive for the move throughout the Linux industry, LinuxInsider has learned. Competitors queried by LinuxInsider said they had not heard of the layoffs previously and found them "interesting." A report i...