Spotlight Features

One of the original leaders of the open source movement, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, kicked off a blogosphere firestorm in late May by sending a cease-and-desist letter over the use of the term "Web 2.0," as his technical conference is trademarked by that name. The complaint has since been withd...

Virtualization -- the use of multiple instances of operating systems, applications, or other software running on single hardware devices -- comes in many different forms and flavors, but among the most often mentioned of late is XenSource and its open source Xen virtualization technology. While stil...

Florian Mueller is at it once again. The founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign that led to the European Union's landslide vote against a proposal for a software patent directive is ready for the next battle. The same forces that supported the software patent directive he successfully defeate...

Open source development has always been an international phenomenon. After all, the killer app of the movement -- Linux -- was born in Finland, and the quintessential dual licensing business was started in Sweden with mySQL. Companies like Red Flag have stepped up in Asia to take Linux into double...

Richard Stallman is a free software pioneer. As president of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the GNU Project, he is also an evangelist of a free society in which people have inaliable rights to run, study, copy and distribute software. As such, Stallman is often grieved when he reads new...

Open source technologies may not be taking over the world, but they are finding a niche and a large one at that. To be sure, companies large and small are becoming more comfortable deploying open source technologies on the server. Now, an an increasing number of firms are looking into the possibilit...

Open-source database deployments rose dramatically in the last half of 2005, and as one might expect, as more IT pros get acquainted with these non-proprietary systems, security is a chief concern. Open-source database makers like MySQL and PostgreSQL simply must answer some of the most prevalent se...

Whether it is software, standards or architectures, people tend to think -- and argue -- about technological openness in individual silos. Harvard University's Open ePolicy Group, in its recently released Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems urges people to apply and manage openness across an entire ICT...

Much the same as any other open-source debate, opinions about the future of Linux on the desktop are about as varied as they come. On one side you've got the Desktop Linux Consortium with its mission to advance the open-source operating system on desktops everywhere. On the other side you've got sof...

Our system of law in the United States is what is called a "common law" system. When judges make decisions in such a system, they rely on what is called case law -- the written opinions on matters of law that are previously published by other judges. The other legal principal that lucky non-lawyer...

If you ask Ranga Rangachari what the future looks like, he'll tell you it's wide open -- for open source, that is. Rangachari took over as president and CEO of GroundWork Open Source Solutions in July and is prophesying massive change in the enterprise software market. Specifically, he envisions an ...

The battle between Microsoft- and Linux-based servers just got a new twist. It is spelled N-O-V-E-L-L. While many IT managers are still arguing about which platform is fundamentally better, Novell is hoping to generate a buzz around its new Open Enterprise Server system. Open Enterprise Server is a ...

People often ask me how likely it is that an open-source license like the GNU General Public License will ever be enforced. When they ask that, they usually mean: "If I violate it will I get caught?" It's a legitimate question, if one lays aside moral rhetoric, such as the idea that proprietary so...

EnterpriseDB made its official debut in May with the release of its EnterpriseDB 2005 public beta release. Built on the open-source PostgreSQL database, the company is touting it as the world's most advanced and mature open-source database. While MySQL, the open-source database leader, may have some...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." Nearly ten ye...