Developers

The recent Facebook rumors have come true -- the social networking company is making much of its third-party application development platform open source. The company announced the change one year after it launched Facebook Platform. "On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back t...

Venezuela is now the latest country to appeal the adoption of an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML file format. Following news last week that the South African Bureau of Standards had sent a letter protesting the decision late last month, Brazil and India joined with their ...

Even as the presidential elections draw ever nearer, debate rages about the technologies used to enable the voting process. It's too late for any large systematic changes to be implemented for this year, said Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, ...

Chipmaker Via Technologies took the wrapper of its OpenBook Mini-Note reference design Tuesday, making the blueprint for its latest ultra mobile PC available to anyone who wants to manufacture low-cost computers based on Via's line of low-power processors. The open source, computer-assisted design f...

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. We can expect that the four pillars of ...

As the 2008 elections approach, political mudslinging on the campaign trail has become an all-too-familiar sight. No less muddy, however -- and no less central to the democratic process -- is the battle that's currently being waged over the ballot box. How Americans cast their votes has become a sub...

It didn't take long for the European Union to react to Microsoft's Wednesday announcement that it would provide support for additional document formats in its market-dominating Microsoft Office productivity suite. Shortly after Microsoft announced that it would support the Open Document Format v1.1 ...

Open source mobile messaging software developer Funambol has created a new open source software forge as a central collaboration site for mobile OSS developers around the world. The Web site pulls together some 50,000 global developers to a combination of wikis, blogs and forums in addition to discu...

Mozilla is creeping ever closer to dropping the final version of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 Web browser. The latest build is the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3, which means it's gone beyond the beta stage and is picking up a couple of last-minute polishes before it's offered up live to th...

The Open Handset Alliance may have the power of Google behind it, but a surge of new members has just swelled the ranks of the competing LiMo Foundation to 40, the group announced Wednesday. Verizon Wireless, Mozilla, Infineon Technologies, Kvaleberg, Red Bend Software, Sagem Mobiles, SFR and SK Tel...

Taking on the likes of Adobe and Microsoft, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled its new JavaFX family of products for building rich Internet applications. Based on Sun's longstanding Java platform, JavaFX includes a runtime and a tools suite that Web scripters, designers and developers can use to q...

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris ...

Adobe Systems has assembled a group of industry leaders in an effort to put its Flash-based rich Internet solutions and content on most every screen -- PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and any other consumer electronic device that might have a screen worthy of delivering content. The eff...

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a murder case to go forward if a body has not been found. It is even rarer for the charge to be first-degree murder -- and less common still for the defendant to be found guilty. Those were the exact circumstances, though, under which Hans Reiser was convicted ...

The ideas blend together so well. Open source has been around for a long time and is built on the concept of developers working together and sharing software. Social networking has broken into the headlines as a new generation uses MySpace and Facebook as a whole new means of sharing their life expe...