Peter Galli

Amazon.com has given Brian Valentine, who was head of Windows Vista development until he resigned recently, stock incentives worth more than $12-million at the current share price. The stock award was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and gives Valentine 400,000 shares which will vest between September 2008 and September 2012 at a […]

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, will offer Microsoft’s Live Search for its Mobile Search platform. The Live Search feature will be available for Nokia’s N-Series multimedia phones as well as for phones that use its S-60 software.

Just in case you didn’t already know this, Windows Vista is shipping with four tiers of user interface experience, from the new Aero Glass to Vista Standard, Vista Basic and Windows Classic. The istartedsomething blog has 28 screenshots that compare the four different interfaces.

Are Microsoft and the European Commission set for a major showdown? Or is all the talk of a possible delay when Windows Vista ships in Europe and concerns about the new security features in the operating system just more bluster between the two sides? Microsoft has been speaking out of both sides of its mouth […]

More than a year after its release, the commercial edition of the Open-Xchange Server 5 software is now available for a free 30-day trial. The move is an attempt by Open-Xchange to drive adoption of its open-source collaboration software. It follows requests from the companys worldwide network of partners, who hope it will help organizations […]

Are Microsoft and the European Commission set for a major showdown? Or is all the talk of a possible delay when Windows Vista ships in Europe and concerns about the new security features in the operating system just more bluster between the two sides? Microsoft has been speaking out of both sides of its mouth […]

Linux vendor Red Hat on Sept. 18 will roll out a new series of open-source subscriptions that include offerings from recently acquired middleware provider JBoss. The products will be immediately available to Red Hats global distributors and resellers. The new Red Hat Application Stack subscription includes RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), JBoss AS (Application Server) […]

Controversy has erupted over an initiative by the Open Source Development Labs, known as Open Source as Prior Art, which is designed to improve the quality of software patents and thereby reduce the number of patents that can be used to threaten open-source software developers and users. The goal of OSAPA is to reduce the […]

Microsoft is promising not to take any legal action against developers or customers who use any of 35 Web Service specifications. The software maker, based in Redmond, Wash., issued a new “Open Specification Promise” on its Interoperability Web page on Sept. 12. The full text of the promise, the list of all the specifications covered, […]

Former Microsoft executive Gordon Mangione has a new job as senior vice president of product operations at XenSource, a Microsoft ally that develops infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open-source Xen hypervisor. Mangione was last an executive at Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm in Seattle, a position he took after leaving Microsoft, where he […]

Windows Vista may not ship in the European Union at the same time that it is released in the United States as a result of possible issues with European competition law, Microsoft acknowledged on Sept. 7. The problem from Microsofts perspective is that the EU has been slow in letting the software giant know exactly […]

Microsoft is asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a patent that will cover its system for selecting and conjugating verbs. The Redmond, Wash., software firm filed a patent application on Aug. 31 for a computer-based verb conjugating system. Microsoft says it believes that complex software algorithms can be used to help people learn […]