Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Novells long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and […]

At a small meeting of Web 2.0 developers and partners on Oct. 1 at Microsofts London office, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once more attacked Linux and open source for violating Microsofts patents. The meeting was a Microsoft-sponsored event: the UK Microsoft Startup Accelerator Programme launch event called The Online Opportunity. According to Lars Lindstedt, who […]

When SCO went for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it was thought that SCO was doing it in part to avoid losing its cash reserves and more to Novell in the next stage of the Novell/SCO lawsuit. Now, Novell is pursuing SCO from the IP (intellectual property) courts to the bankruptcy courts. SCO filed for Chapter 11 […]

If theres a better system repair kit than the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD Linux distribution, we havent seen it yet. The new 0.4 version of SystemRescueCd was released on Oct. 4. This new edition focuses on disk partitioning, Vista support, and data rescue tasks. In the past, weve found SystemRescueCD to be the best of the best […]

Microsoft is claiming that releasing the .NET Framework reference source code under the Microsoft Reference License will give developers the opportunity to understand more about .NET. That sounds good for open source, doesnt it? Wrong! Microsofts so-called opening up of .NET Framework is setting a trap for open-source programmers. Open-source developers should avoid this code […]

“To err is human, but to really screw up requires the root password,” is an old Unix saying. Thats because as the root, the super-user, of a Unix, Linux or Mac OS system, theres nothing you cant do. This includes an almost endless array or ways to really foul up your computer. Or, as appears […]

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think its alive, but close up its the walking dead. The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it […]

An old, tested method of teaching a puppy to stop making messes in the house is to give him a swat on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when hes made a mistake. When it comes to Microsoft, though, I dont think even if you wiped its nose in its mess and swatted it […]

Listen carefully. Theyre my computers. Theyre not your computers. I choose to put Windows on some of them. I choose what applications go on them. I choose when, and how, to upgrade them. Is that clear? Well, none of that is clear to Microsoft. We now know— we dont suspect— we know that Microsoft automatically […]

Whatever else you can say about multimillionaire technology entrepreneur Michael Robertson—the founder of MP3.com; Linspire, a Linux distributor; and SIPhone, a VOIP company, to name but a few—he has chutzpah. In each of his business ventures, hes taken on giants, such as the music industry, Microsoft and Vonage. Now, with AjaxWindows, hes at it again, […]