Business

Mozilla's open source Firefox browser continues to chip away at Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox's share of the global browser market grew to 12.93 percent in July, according to a new report from Web analytics provider OneStat.com. Although that number is still small, compared to the whopping ...

Mozilla's open source Firefox browser continues to creep up on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox's share of the global browser market grew to 12.93 percent in July, according to a new report. Although that number is still small, compared to the whopping 83.05 percent enjoyed by IE, Firefox's to...

The European Commission will hold a public hearing on Wednesday to discuss the future of patent policy for the European Union. How patents are awarded continues to be a critical issue of debate in Europe. The European Patent Office has warned that innovation is at risk if national governments contin...

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...

A district court judge has dismissed the majority of the claims the SCO Group filed against IBM in 2003, which purported that IBM had committed copyright infringement by contributing Unix code to the Linux operating system. Last year, IBM asked the court to limit the scope of SCO's claims on the gro...

Linux leader Red Hat has been named in a patent infringement lawsuit in Texas in connection with its recently acquired JBoss Hibernate 3.0 technology. In the lawsuit, Delaware-based FireStar Software claims the now Red Hat-owned object/relational persistence and query service product infringes on a ...

Florian Mueller is at it once again. The founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign that led to the European Union's landslide vote against a proposal for a software patent directive is ready for the next battle. The same forces that supported the software patent directive he successfully defeate...

Sun Microsystems is touting the growth of its one-year-old open source project OpenSolaris, indicating the open code effort for its formerly closed Solaris operating system has drawn thousands of developers, hundreds of contributions, and millions in revenue. Celebrating the OpenSolaris anniversary ...

Japanese Linux vendor Turbolinux last week announced a couple of big deals in China, as the company looks to take advantage of China's pro-open source government backing and the replacement of SCO-Unix servers in a Turbolinux bid for market expansion. Turbolinux said Qinzang Railway, part of China's...

Sun Microsystems partnered with a somewhat unlikely ally as it announced Tuesday that the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system would run on its latest Sparc servers, the 'Niagara'-based Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 enterprise servers. The two may combine for a powerful server punch, as Sun's Ultra-Spar...

A network of companies collecting patents and pledging them to defend the Linux operating system and environment recently acquired more patents, but doubts linger as to the effectiveness of the effort and corporate support for it. The Open Invention Network, an entity formed last year with support f...

In his opening keynote speech at the 11th annual JavaOne developer conference, Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz outlined new Java solutions and open source plans in front of thousands of international attendees. "It's not a question of whether, but a question of how," Schwartz to...

Open source development has always been an international phenomenon. After all, the killer app of the movement -- Linux -- was born in Finland, and the quintessential dual licensing business was started in Sweden with mySQL. Companies like Red Flag have stepped up in Asia to take Linux into double...

The International Standards Organization on Wednesday approved the OpenDocument Format as an international standard. The approval could be a boon for companies that compete with Microsoft's proprietary Office software -- like Sun with its StarOffice. The ODF emerged from the open source OpenOffice.o

Richard Stallman is a free software pioneer. As president of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the GNU Project, he is also an evangelist of a free society in which people have inaliable rights to run, study, copy and distribute software. As such, Stallman is often grieved when he reads new...