Peter Galli

While Sun Microsystems Inc. considers creating a new licensing model to open-source its Solaris operating system, some enterprise customers are questioning the companys motives and its true commitment to the effort. At the JavaOne conference last month, Jonathan Schwartz, chief operating officer and president of the Santa Clara, Calif., company, reiterated Suns intentions to open […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. has been talking up its commitment to open source and its plans to open the code for some of its flagship products. The Santa Clara, Calif., company has yet to reveal details of the licensing model or when users can expect the code to be opened. Jonathan Schwartz, Suns president and chief […]

Microsoft is facing pushback from volume licensees whose three-year Licensing 6.0 and Software Assurance plans are about to expire. Many of the Redmond, Wash., companys volume license customers, whose contracts have expired or are set to expire, are questioning the value they got from the programs and whether they should renew. At the same time, […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday sent his annual e-mail update to all full-time staff telling them what the companys business priorities are and how the company is faring in meeting its areas of strategic focus. In the lengthy e-mail, which was seen by eWEEK and is timed to coincide with the start of the […]

Microsoft is losing another customer to an alternative desktop operating system, with Allied Irish Bank, one of Irelands largest banking and financial services groups, set to transition its branch-dependent applications and migrate about 7,500 desktop users off Windows and onto the Sun Java Desktop System over the next year or so. Sun Microsystems Inc., of […]

Open source has expanded into the political world, with open software powering the online operations of the Democratic National Committee and Sen. John Kerrys presidential campaign. The DNC has embraced open source to run its online operation, including outreach and fund raising, and has been working on this front since 2001 with New York-based consultant […]

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday confirmed it is entering the market for high-performance computing software and will be offering a new version of Windows Server 2003 specifically for this. That follows weeks of denials by company officials that it had made any final decision about new Windows software for HPC (high-performance computing). The new version will […]

Worries over intellectual property can make for strange bedfellows. In the case of Microsoft Corp.s nearly ubiquitous FAT (file allocation table) file system, its Microsoft and the Linux community. The open-source community has an enormous interest in the outcome of last weeks decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine the patent […]

The open source Linux operating system continues to gain ground in governmental agencies around the world, winning another two converts this week. The Norwegian city Bergen on Tuesday said it plans to move 100 schools and 32,000 users away from its proprietary Unix and Microsoft Windows applications platform to Linux by the end of this […]

Public-sector deployments of Linux are continuing to grow at the expense of Unix and Windows. The latest Linux win is the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), in Washington, which provides administrative support, program management and policy development services to U.S. federal courts. The administrative office is migrating applications from Solaris to Linux using […]

Microsoft on Monday afternoon released the much-anticipated second release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 2. But the Redmond, Wash., software firm was mum about the timing of its final release. At the same time, a Microsoft Corp. spokesman told eWEEK that he was unable to give a specific date for the final release of […]

Microsoft Corp. on Monday released the Release Candidate for its Virtual Server 2005 software and announced that the product would ship by the end of the year in two versions: an Enterprise Edition and a Standard Edition. While the features remain the same across the two product versions, the Standard Edition will support up to […]