Business

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...

IBM has launched an aggressive bid to grab an even bigger share of the midlevel market for Unix-based servers, where Big Blue has recently made huge gains on competitors. IBM launched a family of products built around its Power5 microprocessor and made no bones about its desires to use them and thei...

Sun Microsystems faces the prospect of being forced to pay more than US$1 billion in damages now that a federal court jury has found the computer giant's popular Java languages infringed on a patent held by Eastman Kodak. After a three-week trial, a jury found that Sun violated a patent that Kodak a...

Leading open source vendor Red Hat said it will buy certain security-related assets of Netscape Security Solutions from America Online in a deal worth US$25 million. Red Hat said it will integrate the products it is buying, including the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management ...

We can learn some lessons from reality TV. For instance, many disputes can be settled without lawyers. If your brother-in-law owes you money or your neighbor's tree drops fruit in your pool, you can simply vote them off the island. Or fire them. Either way, working it out on your own is a cheaper al...

For those who think the SCO Group v. IBM lawsuit has gotten too ugly to watch, there is a fresh fight in the open-source arena over the ownership of Mambo. Mambo, an open-source content-management system, is maintained by developers at the Mambo Group, and its copyright is owned by Australian firm M...

Open-source firm JBoss made two high-profile announcements today, unveiling the release of Application Server 4.0 and detailing an alliance with the Eclipse Foundation. Both announcements indicate that the company is expanding its open-source presence, as well as becoming more of a contributor to th...

With the recent education efforts on Software Freedom Day and aggressive moves by IBM and Novell, it seems that open-source advocates have much to cheer about. Although open-source operating systems have not yet become the standard in corporate and consumer environments, and face plenty of competiti...

Reflecting its commitment to one of the fastest growing Linux markets, Novell has joined the China Linux Standards Group, launched this spring by the Chinese government to promote Linux in China. Representatives from Novell China will work with the Standard Group's officials and other members to con...

The SCO group reported a net loss Tuesday in its fiscal third quarter, with a significant revenue drop from the comparable quarter of the same period last year. The company noted that its Q3 revenue in 2003 was approximately US$20 million, compared with $11.2 million this year. SCO has pointed to a ...

Veritas Software has entered into an agreement to acquire KVault Software (KVS), a provider of e-mail archiving software, in an all-cash transaction valued at US$225 million. With the addition of KVS, Veritas hopes to offer customers software to store, manage and archive corporate e-mail and data. T...

Novell announced Monday that it is consolidating some of its business units in order to concentrate more fully on Linux and identity management. Four business units have now been made into two, which will also necessitate management changes at the company. "Open source offers choice in markets previ...

A recent blog posting by a Microsoft project manager spawned a blizzard of discussion on one of the Internet's major tech forums and generated speculation that Microsoft may be ready to improve its relations with the open-source community. Josh Ledgard, a program manager for Microsoft's Visual Studi...

As part of Software Freedom Day, set for August 28, OpenOffice will be translated into three African languages for the first time. After Saturday, the open-source desktop suite will be available to speakers of the South African languages of Zulu, Sepedi and Afrikaans. The new versions have been prep...

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has asked Microsoft to change an ad that claims Linux has been found to be over 10 times more expensive than Windows Server. The group evaluated the truthfulness of the ad after a number of public complaints were filed. In the ad, Microsoft cites figure...