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Its stock price is in free fall and it still faces a potential takeover led by rogue investor Carl Icahn. However, Yahoo can still fire shots across the digital bows of Google and Microsoft; it is inviting third-party developers to use its search technology so they can build their own search engines...

Google reportedly took a moment to show off a prototype mobile phone based on its Android operating system at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Android is Google's open source, Linux-based mobile phone OS, middleware stack and software development platform. Android has the backin...

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 ...

Sony Computer Entertainment pushed back its open beta test for the launch of Playstation's Home, a 3-D virtual world, from the summer to the fall, marking the second time the company has delayed the launch of the product. Unlike traditional games, Home is a sandbox world designed to allow players th...

Google Thursday launched a wiki-like Web information-sharing tool that the search company hopes will become a quick-start collaboration platform and a place to tie together work done on its growing family of productivity applications. Google Sites is built on the Jotspot platform, which Google acqui...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines. Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search i...

The hot segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future. First, Paglo came out last month with a free and open source crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other elect...

Linden Lab, the creator of the massive Second Life online virtual world, is facing heat from its customers after this week's decision to ban gambling from the pseudo-reality realm. The comments filed by members on the Second Life blog, where the gambling ban was announced, range from concerned to ma...

London-based Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver used by more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries, announced on July 5 the appointment of James Bilefield as CEO. Bilefield brings more than 15 years of entrepreneurial, management and media experience to Openads from his work at...

PHP developer Zend Technologies announced July 2 the release of version 1.0 of Zend Framework, an open source application framework for PHP. Zend Framework 1.0, pre-released in beta versions since last year, is the result of collaboration from 230 contributors comprised of individual developers and ...

Using the Hawaiian word "wiki" meaning "quick," Ward Cunningham coined the concept of WikiWikiWeb as a Web site for speedy interaction among targeted users. In its most basic form, a wiki Web site allows any user to create, add, remove or edit content and pages. Forrester Research recently surveyed ...

Consumers and enterprise workers will not likely soon see cute marketing labels such as "Linux Inside" or images of penguins pasted on the outer casings of their favorite entertainment and communications products. Nor will products they buy be touted as using Linux in advertising campaigns. Regardle...

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...

Your next operating system move could be to one of the half-dozen most popular free Linux desktop versions instead of to Microsoft Windows Vista. With these versions, you would not have to perform a risky software upgrade, nor would you have to settle for a watered-down Vista option if your new comp...

Opera Software is singing a new tune with its updated Mini 3.0 browser, released on Wednesday. It brings photo sharing and other social networking functionality to the Norwegian company's free mobile phone mini browser. Despite its struggles in the desktop Web-browser market, Opera has succeeded wit...