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If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars during some reporting cycle -- like a quarterly or annual period -- makes perfect sense. It's dollars you're interested in, so dollars you measure. That's not true, however, for the open-source community. If you give away the product, then us...

Like other governments and corporations seeking to mix yesterday's IT investments with today's emerging technology, the state of Massachusetts has directed its IT staff to begin adopting open standards and open-source software. The move mirrors other government and enterprise initiatives that have I...

In an interview with Bill Joy headlined "Joy after Sun," Fortune Magazine mentions Joy's famous "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" article from Wired, which concluded that "robotics, nanotech and genetic engineering were emerging so quickly that, if we weren't careful, they could endanger the human sp...

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices. The T-Engine Forum, a project that counts ...

On most workday mornings, my e-mail contains a newsletter promising "unbiased opinion" -- an editorial oxymoron whose intent is probably to deny the presence of commercial advocacy. We tend to think of bias as necessarily negative, but in fact a bias is just a predisposition to believe or disbelieve...

Both VeriTest on Microsoft's behalf and IBM have recently issued reports on running Ziff Davis Media's NetBench performance benchmark on mainframe Linux. Overall, it appears that Microsoft reports better mainframe performance than IBM does. These results might seem surprising enough to those unfamil...

A looming October 14th deadline could result in a widening of SCO Group's legal assault on Linux and distributors of the open-source operating system as the Lindon, Utah-based company mulls plans to pull another Unix license, this time from SGI. SCO laid the groundwork for the move -- which would ex...

Calling it a "migration product" intended to take desktop users away from Windows and toward 64-bit computing and the new 2.6 Linux kernel, SuSE Linux announced its 9.0 desktop update will be available next month. The German software maker said SuSE Linux 9.0 will provide support for both 32- and 64...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...

In response to attacks on the Linux operating system launched by SCO, which claims its own Unix source code was incorporated into the open-source software, Hewlett-Packard is indemnifying its Linux customers against any potential SCO litigation. The move comes after SCO, which has sued IBM for $3 bi...

Asia's PDA markets have long been dominated by local players that have developed their own proprietary operating systems, with support for local languages serving as one of their strongest selling points. But Palm and Microsoft have targeted the Asian PDA market, and regional players are increasingl...