Developers

Second Life may be a virtual world, but six entrepreneurs operating there have filed a real-life lawsuit against Second Life users who allegedly copied their products. The suit was filed last week in Brooklyn federal court against New York resident Thomas Simon, who reportedly goes by the name "Rase...

It's been a contentious few weeks on the Linux blogs, what with the big Microsoft news on Monday as well as a few key product happenings and subsequent evaluation. The release of Canonical's Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on Oct. 18 has been a particularly hot topic. Included in the release, which replace...

Mozilla Labs has begun an endeavor with the ultimate goal of creating an environment for PC users in which Web applications function on the desktop the same way and with the same ease of use as desktop applications. The first application to come from the project is Prism, formerly known as "Webrunne...

Curl plans to release much of its code for the Curl Rich Internet Application platform to the open source community to enhance the development of Web 2.0 applications. The company announced Monday the first step in its open source strategy -- the creation of a common repository of open source compon...

Friends, colleagues, organizations and teams will soon be able to use a new service designed to help them share, organize and find information with Twine.com, Radar Networks announced Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Twine is the first mainstream application of what the company called ...

PayPal transacts more than $1,500 every second of every day, with millions of people around the world relying on the robustness of its system. It comes as a surprise to many people that PayPal runs such a large financial services company on an open source platform, but that's precisely how we're abl...

Thursday marks the official stable release of Ubuntu 7.10, but by Wednesday -- with the Ubuntu community Web site ticking off the time as "1 day to go" -- the Internet was awash in glowing tributes to Ubuntu's latest advancement. The highlights of the latest release include 3-D desktop visual effect...

"Free software" is a term that's often used interchangeably with "open source," and often understood simply to mean software that is obtained without charge. However, the idea of free software is neither about openness nor about price; it is a matter of freedom, and its implications extend into the ...

While Linux has come a long way in the past 10 years, I think it's safe to say that it hasn't yet taken over the world -- nor has Linux reached its full potential. Linux continues to become more mainstream every day -- we now see Linux hosting mission-critical servers in the enterprise, large financ...

Firefox creator Mozilla is "serious" about creating a version of its browser for use on mobile phones, according to a company official who said the company's goal is to "rock" the mobile Web. Mozilla is constantly being asked about its plans for a mobile browser, Mozilla engineering vice president M...

Heavy construction is under way to create an open playing field of interoperable technologies for users to navigate the so-called 3D Internet of the future. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, and IBM announced Tuesday that they will work with other partners to drive open standards and tools wh...

The worldwide open source community shares a common overall goal: better software through collaboration and peer review. It's difficult enough to achieve this task even when most of the participants share a common language. Building bridges between different parts of the world -- especially between ...

Microsoft has the best products money can buy -- at least, that's what they would have you believe. However, remove money from the equation so MS buyers can't brag on the size of investment, and OpenOffice fans can't gloat about a freebie, who would win in an OpenOffice vs MS Office 2007 face-off? "...

The reaction to ISO's recent rejection of Microsoft's Office Open XML ranged from triumphant: "Microsoft trounced in document format vote," to cautious: "not so fast." Lost amid the complex ISO process and reports of Microsoft's ballot-stuffing is a clear understanding of just what the fuss at ISO i...

Research forecasts that Linux will be the top operating system for mobile computing began to look a little more fully baked with the announcement by ARM that it will collaborate with six vendors to finesse a standards-based, Linux-based platform for next-generation mobile devices. The company, known...