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The publication in the Harvard Business Review of an article by Nicholas Carr titled "IT Doesn't Matter" raised much controversy. Carr's fundamental argument is that every widely used business technology conferred significant strategic advantage on early adopters but lost that potency as it m...

Novell has announced it will indemnify users of its newly acquired SuSE Linux software systems. Following the lead of Hewlett-Packard, which was praised for its savvy in being the first Linux vendor to indemnify customers in the face of SCO's source-code claims last September, Novell said enterprise...

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of computing -- and that, of course, has to include Microsoft's future. Microsoft's own vision of its future seems clear. The company sees a transition to a secure Windows OS environment, continuing strength in Office and server applications, and deve...

The word "pusillanimous" is normally used to label actions judged to reflect a lack of moral courage on the part of the person taking the action. Thus people who can be rather easily pressured to undertake actions contrary to their own beliefs are often said to be pusillanimous, cowardly or weak-spi...

Asia is emerging as a key battleground for the open-source movement. The Japan-China-Korea partnership, announced last month in Osaka, is the latest in a string of initiatives to promote Linux. Two weeks earlier, Singapore hosted the second annual Asia Open Source Symposium, where 20 Asian countries...

Linux is poised to claim a major victory: the bourgeoning market for robot software. The battle is not over yet, but if developments in Japan are any indication of what the future will bring, Linux will rule the world of robots. The stakes are high. Carmaker Honda believes that robots will become th...

I've been trying to imagine what the computing universe will look like in late 2008. The exercise not only highlighted the degree to which Linux has become the focal point for anti-Microsoft feeling, but also underscored the risk that the Linux community now faces from commercialization. My belief i...

Australia. Down under. Oz. For most of us, those words conjure up images of kangaroos and coral reefs, of red deserts and a landmark opera house. But behind those icons lies another reality -- that of a sophisticated, technologically advanced society; an economy that has outperformed the rest of the...

While watching CNN last week, I suffered one of those brain spasms that leave you holding an idea you can neither rationally assess nor forget about. I still can't assess the idea -- and I'm about to ask you for help on that -- but my attempts to do something with it did give me a deeper insight int...

Mohandas Gandhi, a master of the tactics of civil disobedience against civilized foes, once had this to say about the stages of a successful campaign for an idea whose time has come: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Advocates of open-source software...

Claims and counterclaims now have turned into dueling subpoenas, as IBM and SCO continue to spar over allegations that a Linux kernel promoted by Big Blue was copied from SCO's Unix System V source code. Earlier this month, IBM issued subpoenas for SCO investors and analysts, including Bay Star Capi...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...