Business

Web site operators and bloggers will get free Web hosting, including all advertising revenue from their sites, with a new service called "OpenServing" from the Wikipedia for-profit company Wikia. OpenServing will "extend the essence of the open source model," delivering not only free software and co...

With reported fiscal fourth quarter 2006 revenue of US$245 million, Novell missed Wall Street estimates and expectations this week, causing the software and services company stock price to slip more than 9 percent. Novell, which went through major leadership changes this year, also indicated that it...

The One Laptop Per Child Project, an effort spearheaded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte aimed at delivering functional, educational laptop computers to children in developing nations, is looking to wealthier nations to buy its computers for those in need. The project, which looks to rely on ine...

The French parliament this week announced that its 1,000-plus desktops will be running Linux and open source applications beginning in June 2007, ending the governmental body's reliance on Microsoft Windows. Although the adoption of Linux and other open source software -- as well as open standards s...

Microsoft and Novell, participants in a recent historic Windows-Linux technology- and patent-sharing pact, are having some differences of opinion over the existence of Microsoft technology in the Linux operating system. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer fired up Linux and open source supporters by claimin...

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...

The distaste and distrust of the Microsoft-Novell partnership announced last week among some free and open source software supporters has grown to include allegations the deal may violate the GNU General Public License, which governs Novell's Suse Linux operating system. The free and open source sof...

The last three weeks have provided the biggest news stories to hit Linux in a long time, raising many questions and stirring speculation. What does Oracle have in mind -- cutting into Red Hat's revenue for its own profit, or weakening the enterprise Linux leader for acquisition? What will its partne...

Much of the focus and fight over the next draft of the GNU general public license Version 3 has centered on digital rights management and patent provisions. However, GPLv3, which is slated for final release next year, also tries to address another challenge for the free and open source software comm...

Open source is thriving, with over 1.4 million registered users on SourceForge.net and with startups sprouting around every part of the software stack. The big question is, can companies really make enough money when the software is often downloaded for free? If Red Hat is any indication, the answer...

Microsoft and Novell announced this week a deal to promote and support Novell's Suse Linux alongside Windows. That's right, Microsoft will promote and support Linux -- but only as long as it's from Novell. Following last week's big news of an Oracle-Linux play, Microsoft and Novell said that they wo...

Microsoft announced Tuesday a close technical collaboration with Zend, the programming language vendor that currently dominates Web-based scripting with the open source PHP language. Microsoft and Zend said their collaboration would provide a production-level PHP runtime environment for the next rev...

Sourcefire, provider of open source security software Snort and other intrusion detection and prevention solutions, filed this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The IPO is a rarity in that it involves a security company, as well as a company that r...

The open source market is decidely hot right now, from software to support and services. Recently, venture capital firms have upped the ante, investing millions in open source-focused companies with the hopes of cashing in like JBoss did, when Red Hat scooped it up for a tidy US$350 million in June....

Amid an enormous amount of buzz, software giant Oracle laid out its plans for Linux at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, indicating that it will use Red Hat Linux as the foundation for an Oracle-branded "Unbreakable Linux." During his keynote Wednesday, Oracle chief Larry Ellison ...