Peter Galli

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of organizations from across the world whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched on March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has now grown to 138 […]

Will he stay or will he go? Thats the million-dollar question about the future of Sun Microsystems CEO and co-founder Scott McNealy. Well, at least thats what the rumor machine would like us to believe. Speculation about McNealys future at Sun is not new: Weve been there so many times before, and well most certainly […]

Red Hat has significantly expanded its reach and product portfolio with the acquisition of JBoss for $350 million, but the company will have to navigate some potentially choppy waters with existing partners. The acquisition of JBoss, announced April 10, means Red Hats web of partnerships has become more complicated. For instance, JBoss, as an independent […]

When David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners in Boston, first heard about a company called JBoss, he was interested, mostly because he had also founded a company in the application server space, Silverstream Software, before becoming a venture capitalist. But Skoks interest sharpened when some of the companies Matrix had invested in told […]

Does Red Hats acquisition of JBoss for $350 million conflict with the very cozy relationship that has existed between Red Hat, IBM and Oracle? Some analysts think it does. “IBM and Oracle now clearly see JBoss as a major competitive threat and will be less likely to favor Red Hat going forward,” said Scott Donahue […]

Microsoft is giving customers of its Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 Enterprise Edition and the open-source community a free ride. On April 3, the Redmond, Wash., software company announced at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here that its Virtual Server product, which allows users to deploy virtualization technology, is available as a free download from […]

One of the fundamental questions that Red Hats acquisition of JBoss raises is what impact that deal might have on existing agreements between JBoss and companies like Microsoft and Novell. For its part, Microsoft is saying there will be no change to its existing technical collaboration agreement with JBoss, but Red Hat is hedging its […]

BOSTON—Microsoft has launched a new Web site called Port 25 that is designed to give a birds-eye view of its internal open-source software laboratory and elicit feedback and ideas about how it can work better with the open-source community. Bill Hilf, Microsofts director for platform technology strategy, used his keynote address, titled “Interoperability: Dealing with […]

BOSTON—While Microsofts Windows Hypervisor technology, code-named Viridian and currently under development, will not be ready when Windows “Longhorn” Server ships sometime next year, company officials are optimistic that it will be available “sooner rather than later.” But they are not yet prepared to say exactly when “sooner” might be, especially in light of the recently […]

BOSTON—Proponents of the free and open-source software development model are using the recently announced delays in the shipping of Microsofts Windows Vista and Office 2007 products as an example of how the companys software engineering process simply does not work well. They are also pointing to how it stands in direct contrast with the way […]