Business

The South African government announced Thursday it is ditching proprietary software for a new policy and strategy based on free and open source software. Under the new plan, all new software developed for or by the government of South Africa will be based on open standards -- which in itself doesn't...

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance in an effort to make its products more interoperable with Microsoft's extensive environment. The move makes Red Hat the latest in a growing line of Linux distributors cozying up with Redmond by joining the alliance -- a gr...

Following Wednesday's announcement of the formation of the Open Solutions Alliance by a group of 10 vendors, Unisys said it would join the nonprofit consortium. The OSA, which was announced at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, is dedicated to promoting comprehensive open source busine...

AlterPoint is a network configuration management provider that recently joined the open source ranks with the launch of its ZipTie community and are now members of the Open Management Consortium. The goal of ZipTie is to create a community that will advance network management beyond the limitations ...

In the years leading up to the dot-com bust, the Internet was unchartered turf to which countless entrepreneurs flocked in pursuit of easy money. Just like the Gold Rush of the Old West in the 1800s, the dot-com business surge had its fling and then fell off. Just like the rise of the Old West to a ...

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that created the open source Firefox browser -- the chief competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- is setting up shop in China in the hope of claiming a sizable chunk of the world's second-largest Internet market. Firefox, a popular browser among techies, is...

At the request of the Software Freedom Law Center, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced Thursday that it will re-examine a patent held by e-learning software company Blackboard. The Software Freedom Law Center, an open source software group, made its request in November on behalf of three...

Themis Computer announced Thursday a joint project with Terra Soft Solutions to develop a complete Linux distribution to run on the TPPC64, Themis' new line of 6U VMEbus single board computers based on the IBM PowerPC 970FX superscalar RISC processor. The TPPC64 is a high-end computer built around a...

Microsoft and Novell are proudly announcing the biggest proof-point to date that their groundbreaking alliance to work together for the benefit of their customers has real traction: Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is gearing up to take advantage of Microsoft and Novell's collaboration and in...

Two main representatives of the Linux community -- Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group -- have merged to form the Linux Foundation. The group is supported by several major firms, including Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell and Oracle, which serve as foundin...

GroundWork Open Source develops open source systems and network management software. The company melds together over 180 open source projects, including Cacti, Ganglia, NeDi and Nagios, into a comprehensive, fully supported IT infrastructure and networking monitoring solution. Datacenters want to ge...

A group founded to develop and distribute ultra low-cost computers to children in developing countries is mulling possible commercial outlets for their machines, including using eBay as an inexpensive sales channel. The One Laptop Per Child project, the brain child of Nicholas Negroponte, hopes to s...

Telecommunications industry analysts have been evangelizing the arrival of cell phones running on the Linux operating system for the last few years. The sermonizing has recently reached a fevered pitch in some quarters. The Linux operating system, they say, is on its way as a full-powered alternativ...

Jeremy Allison, a prominent open source software developer and Samba project cofounder, announced last week that he would be leaving Suse Linux vendor Novell over the company's patent pact with Microsoft. The November interoperability and patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft has upset a num...

Microsoft and Novell this week touted results of a recent survey -- sponsored by both companies -- indicating that nearly all IT customers at large organizations overwhelmingly approved of their Windows-Linux interoperability and patent protection deal. Of 201 survey respondents whose organizations ...