Community

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the ...

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative proce...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is now a member of the Linux Foundation. The foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the accelerated growth of Linux, announced Canonical's membership on Tuesday. Ubuntu community members have been active participants in a v...

Bob Weiss knows a thing or two about dreams. "I grew up with the promise that if one wanted to go to space, they would get the chance," said Weiss, president of the X Prize Foundation. The trouble was that nobody kept the promise. "It became obvious that the only people that were going to space were...

Open source business intelligence firm JasperSoft on Wednesday announced its next-generation community platform at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. The new platform features tools to enhance community project developers as well as business users. The new JasperSoft Forge responds to the changing...

Nokia is getting in the game of open source cell phone software with its newly acquired Symbian platform. Nokia -- which had already owned 48 percent of Symbian -- bought the remaining 52 percent of the company Tuesday and immediately shifted the product to a royalty-free model. Several leading cell...

Most anyone in the free and open source software realm can tell you not only that Linux is better than Windows, but also that it is an optimal alternative to the closed source and proprietary operating system from Microsoft. Anyone at a Linux-oriented event or group can assure you that you have no n...

A partnership with the Collaborative Software Initiative and the Utah Department of Health is cementing an emerging community sourcing software model that could thrust open source development deeper into vertical markets. CSI and the state of Utah on May 19 announced the availability of a software s...

Now that NASA has entered the virtual world with its two islands in Second Life, public outreach, collaboration and space exploration may never be the same again. On its CoLab Island, outreach and collaboration are the focus, as Part One of this two-part feature explains. Its other island, called "E...

It's an interesting question: Why would large, established companies like Adobe and others embrace open source strategies? In some ways, it seems counterproductive. After all, releasing a software application's source code to the community could be viewed as letting an organization's competitive adv...

Wiki and social software firm Socialtext has put its own spin on the spreadsheet. The new offering, SocialCalc, is a multi-user, wiki-based spreadsheet program intended to simplfy version control, reduce errors and increase productivity, Socialtext said. SocialCalc joins offerings from Google and ot...

Mobile innovation -- not long ago mired in a tangle of "walled-garden" business models, closed networks, proprietary technologies and fierce litigation -- is at last in high gear. Collaborative source development is lowering the barriers to participation in mobile innovation and yielding new, promis...

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need...

The daily need to tap into knowledge relevant to their field is driving tech workers in all types of organizations to scour the Web for timely, up-to-date information, but making sure it's accurate can prove a challenge. A recent survey asked tech workers how they search for information, to what deg...