Developers

The Linux community is planning to improve the position of the open source operating system by addressing one of the more vexing barriers slowing mainstream adoption: Linux-compatible device drivers. Developers are now offering to provide hardware vendors with the necessary drivers for free. Drivers...

In Part 1 of this series, I talked a bit about how COBOL is everywhere. From telephones to credit cards to supermarket checkouts to ATMs -- sometime during the day, just about everyone touches COBOL. They don't see it directly, but drivers don't see under the hood while they're driving either. COBOL...

Microsoft has just released its ASP .NET AJAX 1.0, a free tool that lets developers create standards-compliant Web applications based on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax. The most ubiquitous Ajax-based applications, for example, are Google Maps and Gmail, which let users interact with them w...

Centeris released on Tuesday a product that lets network administrators manage multiple environments on the same computer. Likewise Identify 3.0 is a cross-platform application that joins Linux and Unix machines to a Windows Active Directory. This major upgrade extends directories to all of the stru...

Two main representatives of the Linux community -- Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group -- have merged to form the Linux Foundation. The group is supported by several major firms, including Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell and Oracle, which serve as foundin...

It's no secret that Linux at the server level is growing fast in the business world. It's stable, it's infinitely customizable, it has the kind of support that an enterprise demands and its return on investment is amazing to people more accustomed to the costs of other approaches. So, you find it ev...

Chances are that one or more of your consumer products uses the Linux operating system. In order to find out, you'll have to look at the fine print. Manufacturers do not openly advertise with labels announcing "Linux Inside." Linux has steadily become the operating system of choice by manufacturers ...

Since Jimmy Wales' announcment last week that he plans to launch a new search engine in Q1 2007, speculation has been rife over what it could mean for the search industry -- and specifically for Google. Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is one of the few Web 2.0 players with enough clout to take on t...

Jeremy Allison, a prominent open source software developer and Samba project cofounder, announced last week that he would be leaving Suse Linux vendor Novell over the company's patent pact with Microsoft. The November interoperability and patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft has upset a num...

As consumers experiment with the Linux operating system and consider switching from Windows, the first carryover they expect to find is applications for virus and spyware protection. However, few exist because Linux does not need them. Nearly all Linux distributions bundle a firewall package, but th...

Web site operators and bloggers will get free Web hosting, including all advertising revenue from their sites, with a new service called "OpenServing" from the Wikipedia for-profit company Wikia. OpenServing will "extend the essence of the open source model," delivering not only free software and co...

Fortify Software and the FindBugs Java error detection project this week unveiled a collaborative effort aimed at zapping the bugs of open source software code written in Java. The Java Open Review Project is designed to help open source software projects identify and fix security and other softwar...

IBM announced this week that 372 new Linux on Power applications were released in 2006, yielding a total of 2,500 tested Linux-based solutions available for the Power processor platform. In addition, Big Blue announced the latest Linux on Power application, the Sybase Unwired Accelerator, which offe...

Mobile Linux is one of the fastest growing markets and has the potential to be the largest segment in Linux. With literally billions of mobile devices in the market, Linux on mobile could outstrip both Linux-based desktops and servers combined, according to a la Mobile CEO Pauline Alker. By all acco...

Novell has pulled out of the open source Hula Project, a community development effort that it kicked off early last year to compete with e-mail, calendaring and collaboration solutions such as Microsoft's Exchange and IBM's Domino servers. Novell encouraged continued development of the Hula server, ...