Peter Galli

BELFAST, Northern Ireland—Initiatives are under way to create an Open Source Center of Excellence across Ireland that will provide the expertise to examine and discuss the use and potential of open source going forward. Momentum NI, a trade association representing some 170 of Northern Irelands ICT (Information Communications and Technology) companies, is spearheading the initiative […]

Software vendor Autodesk Inc. last week decided that its business model would be better served by open-sourcing its MapGuide product and shifting the companys focus to developing applications that run on top of it. Autodesk, of San Rafael, Calif., has contributed the code for what would have been the next version of MapGuide, code-named Tux, […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. last week again challenged the industry-standard proprietary software development model, announcing that it will make its Java Enterprise System, N1 management software and developer tools available to all for development and deployment at no cost. Officials at the Santa Clara, Calif., company also reaffirmed their commitment to open-sourcing this software over time. […]

Microsoft Corp. is working on a significant new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which is designed to update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. Microsoft officials have not talked much publicly about this new feature, but Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsofts platform products […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. has decided to make its Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 management software, and Sun developer tools available for development and deployment at no cost, while reaffirming its commitment to open-sourcing all this software over time. The Santa Clara, Calif., company is also integrating all of this software and the Solaris operating system […]

Microsoft Corp. has decided to move away from its policy of issuing monthly Community Technology Previews for Windows Vista, and will now release these based instead on the achievement of quality milestones. “We will use a quality-based schedule rather than a calendar one going forward, since artificially setting dates for CTP releases is not helpful, […]

Microsoft Corp., continuing its anti-Linux campaign, recently released the results of a study the company commissioned in an effort to show that Windows is more reliable than Linux. The study, conducted by Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist at Security Innovation Inc., of Wilmington, Mass., and titled “Reliability: Analyzing Solution Uptime as Business Needs Change,” compared […]

Microsoft Corp. will finally make its Office file formats open to all. The Redmond, Wash., software company next month will submit the Microsoft Office Open XML Format technology for consideration as a formal standard by Ecma International, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. Once the standard is approved by […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. has lived up to its promise made earlier this year to include an open-source database with its Solaris 10 operating system. The Santa Clara, Calif., company announced in mid-November that the PostgreSQL Global Development Groups open-source PostgreSQL database will be available as a downloadable add-on for OpenSolaris later this month and will […]

Autodesk Inc. plans to release the full code of MapServer Enterprise, its new Web mapping platform, to open source early next year. A snapshot of the MapServer Enterprise source code is available today through the recently established MapServer Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to support and promote open-source Web mapping. The full code […]

Oracle Corp. is betting its future on Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris operating system instead of the open-source Linux alternative. Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., is moving away from Linux as its primary internal development platform on 32-bit machines, opting for Solaris 10 for development for most x64 (x86, 64-bit) architectures, including Suns UltraSPARC-based systems and […]

Microsoft Corp. will continue aggressively pushing customers toward the 64-bit computing platform by making a number of upcoming products only in 64-bit versions. The next version of Exchange, known as Microsoft Exchange Server 12—as well as the upcoming “Longhorn” release of Windows Small Business Server and Centro, the code name for Microsofts infrastructure solution under […]