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Sun Microsystems today announced the names of the five individuals selected to participate in the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB). The board was created to steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance. "The formation of the CAB is another major step forward i...

The Open Source Initiative on Friday announced a new interim president and plans to focus on evaluating the OSD licensing process with its recently added international board members. OSI is the non-profit corporation responsible for the management and promotion of the Open Source Definition, which ...

One of the most vehement opponents to European patents is throwing in the towel before the fight is officially over. Florian Mueller announced today that he is stepping down as manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, the European anti-software patent campaign, and returning to his computer games business...

GroundWork Open Source Solutions today said it has it has secured US$8.5 million in its second round of venture capital financing. The Series B financing, led by Mayfield, includes Series A lead investor Canaan Partners. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company develops open-source products for the ente...

After much ado last fall followed by a false start, the SCO Group has finally launched its legal information site to counter the popular Growklaw.net site. SCO had originally said last October the site would use the domain name Prosco.net, but is instead located at SCO.com/scoip. Groklaw postings of...

High-tech heavy hitters such as IBM, Novell and Oracle are among those showing support for the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a set of standards designed to improve compatibility between Linux distributions. The Free Standards Group (FSG) yesterday announced a long list of Independent Software Vendors (...

In the face of a European Union threat to levy US$5 million in daily fines for allegedly failing to license selected software code, Microsoft today announced the expansion of its Shared Source Initiative to cover seven additional countries in the European Union. Launched in May 2001 and now encompas...

Google launched a new site this week designed with open-source developers in mind. Dubbed Google Code, the site includes four open-source projects, APIs, and other tools to assist developers working on Google-related projects. In their welcome letter, Chris DiBona, Google's open-source program manag...

Sun said yesterday it would modify its licenses to make Java source code access more open, but analysts said it's still miles away from the open-source status that the developer community is calling for. Sun is introducing two licenses for using the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), the software for b...

Novell's chief technology officer, Alan Nugent, has left the company, LinuxInsider has learned. Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said: "Alan has left Novell to pursue other interests. We appreciate the work he's done for us and wish him well. The folks that were reporting into Alan, a fairly small team...

Novell is on the move with its Linux enterprise strategy with a series of announcements that began last week with the release of its Open Enterprise Server (OES) product. The company has since released details about its ZENworks 7 Linux management line, and several other vendors are launching softwa...

The debate over software patents is getting dramatic. For some, more than just lines of code are at stake. Rather, it is nothing less than freedom itself. As in the apocalyptic "Lord of the Rings trilogy," the armies prepare for war. The battle cry from Free Software Foundation Europe sounds: "Join...

Five months after a preview version of CherryOS was released to cries that it was merely a copy of the open-source PearPC, software distributor Maui X-Stream has done it again. The Hawaii-based company re-released a final version of CherryOS on Tuesday to a similar reception. PearPC, a PowerPC archi...

After months of vehement arguments from anti-patent lobbyists, the European Union could finally approve a controversial draft software patent law on Monday. The decision would signify a possible end to a long battle over the use of such patents in the EU. The Computer Implemented Inventions Directiv...

In the latest development in the ongoing battle over patent law in Europe, the European Commission has rejected a request by the European Parliament to rewrite the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. The directive was unanimously rejected by the EP in January and scheduled for additional revi...