Archive

Freeplane is an application for creating mind maps. A mind map is the doodling you draw with shapes and other symbols around words connected with lines to make charts representing your thoughts and ideas on a particular topic or project. It's not often that productivity software makes the task at ha...

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison has pushed the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- a...

If you fancy game playing, the latest release of the Mageia Linux OS will be a fun experience. Even if you never open a game, Mageia 2 is a solid distribution well suited to newcomers and seasoned Linux users alike. Mageia is a fork of the now defunct Mandriva distro. It was developed by a team of f...

GanttProject is an impressive project management tool that can be a useful alternative to similar applications locked onto other OS platforms. For enterprise and small-business users, GanttProject's cross-platform access and easy data portability make it a winning choice for Linux users. Compared to...

With a ruling from United States District Judge William Alsup that application programming interfaces cannot be copyrighted, it appears Oracle's lost yet another battle against Google over Java. However, the war is not over. Oracle has indicated it will appeal, and the judge has indicated that Oracl...

Recent news that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to partner on the Nook e-reader line rather than keep fighting over intellectual property suggests the prospect of more settlement and fewer IP suits in the industry. However, the deal further obscures the blurry IP and patent landscape curren...

We've been seeing applications that allow you to remotely access desktop PCs for years. They have tended to function on a PC-to-PC connection basis over the Internet -- like Symantec's pcAnywhere software, which is often used for remote PC troubleshooting. More recently, we've been seeing tools that...

The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too s...

Virtualization giant VMware has unveiled Spring Hadoop, which integrates its Spring Framework with the Apache Hadoop platform. Spring provides a comprehensive, lightweight framework that will make it easier for devs to build solutions around the Hadoop platform, according to the company. Spring Hado...

We've seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today's technology world -- where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount -- exist in open application programming interfa...

The Kindle Fire, the Android-based tablet Amazon revealed in late September, could well be the next step in the ongoing metamorphosis of Google's Linux derivative into a proprietary operating system. Even if Amazon does not lock down its altered Android platform, it clearly has created a major fork ...

Sometimes you find good things in small packages. At least that has been my experience with picking through the wares often buried in directories of open source software that feeds my Linux OS passion. Dillo, a little-known tiny Web browser, was an unexpected find. This baby browser has a very small...

We recently saw what is being described as the ending of the seven-year-old SCO contract and intellectual property dispute that dragged Linux through the mud before it propelled the open source OS into much broader enterprise use and credibility. You'd think the lessons of SCO would be a shining exa...

If you had the option to pick your own price for a computer game that only runs on your Linux rig, would you pay to play? Not if you are a typical Linux gamer. At least, that's the popular perception of fans of free and open source software. Linux is available freely. So why pay for a game -- or any...

To say Android's popular among consumers is like saying Godzilla's a lizard. It's a question of degree. More than 500,000 new Android devices were being activated daily, and the number was growing at 4.4 percent week over week, Google's Andy Rubin tweeted in late June. comScore's figures show that f...