Archive

For developers who have fallen in love with .Net/C#, but aren't married to running their applications on Windows, the Mono Project aims to let Microsoft .Net-based apps run on Linux and Mac OS X, among several other platforms. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono Project has released Mono 2.0 of its cross-...

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called "TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds ...

Alfresco Software announced Thursday the availability of Alfresco Labs version 3, an open source alternative to Microsoft's enterprise content management software SharePoint. Formerly called "Alfresco Community," Alfresco Labs 3 offers users the first open source fully compatible SharePoint reposito...

The most widely used open source software packages for the enterprise are exposing users to significant and unnecessary business risks, according to an open source security study from security firm Fortify Software. The study, released Monday, concludes that open source software development communit...

Not all trains run on time, but the Eclipse Foundation has kept to its schedule with its annual release train, this year named "Ganymede." For the third year in a row, the Eclipse community has delivered, on the same day as in previous years, numerous software updates across a wide range of projects...

A partnership with the Collaborative Software Initiative and the Utah Department of Health is cementing an emerging community sourcing software model that could thrust open source development deeper into vertical markets. CSI and the state of Utah on May 19 announced the availability of a software s...

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, one of the largest server makers, announced that it would increase the number of products certified for use with Ubuntu Linux, one of the fastest growing open source operating systems. The upcoming expansion -- which is expected to be detailed in the coming days -- is the latest de...

After a long and bitter battle, Microsoft's Office Open XML appears to have finally been accepted as a standard for open documents by the International Organization for Standardization. Or has it? The ISO is not going to make an official announcement until Wednesday. However, ECMA International, a p...

Tony Baer has a great rundown of Monday's EclipseCon OSGi-based runtime Equinox news. Extending the Eclipse community's unity to runtimes makes a ton of sense, given that developers can focus on the applications and business logic and become far less concerned with complex deployment issues. Write o...

What a nut I was. Back when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced they would be joining forces on interoperability between Sun, nee Java, and .NET -- remember Steve Ballmer of "Ballmer and Butthead" fam] and Scott McNealy sitting side by side -- I thought they meant it. I pushed the envelope, jus...

Open source software is making its way into the systems that touch our everyday lives, from our banks to the stores where we shop. Open source is also found in some of the IT systems that manage traffic flow on city streets, state highways and in the skies. In fact, throughout the overlapping transp...

Mozilla is up to its elbows in code as it works toward the final release of the third iteration of its Firefox Web browser. With the launch last week of the browser's third beta version, the open source developer has given some 500,000 developers and testers the go-ahead to put the application throu...

Raising the bar a notch or two higher in its rivalry with Android and the Open Handset Alliance, a newly enlarged LiMo Foundation on Monday rolled out the first LiMo-compatible handsets and announced its software development kit strategy. Orange and Access are among nine new members that have just r...

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to acquire MySQL, maker of the popular MySQL database system, for $1 billion. Sun -- long a proponent and developer of open source systems -- agreed to pay $800 million in cash and assume liability for $200 million in stock options. The deal likely won't be compl...