Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

During the Ubuntu Live Conference in Portland, Ore., Canonical announced the beta release of its Launchpad PPA (Personal Package Archive) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to free software. Canonical, the company that backs Ubuntu, uses Launchpad to help develop Ubuntu. […]

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit group dedicated to accelerating Linuxs growth, announced on July 24 that Markus Rex, a long-time Linux executive at SUSE Linux AG and Novell, will serve as the Foundations new chief technology officer. This position had been held by Ian Murdock, one of the founders of Debian Linux, but he left […]

People used to think the very idea that a major PC vendor would offer desktop Linux was beyond a joke. It was, as Vizzini from The Princess Bride would have said, “Inconceivable!” But, as events turned out, to quote Inigo Montoya from the same movie, “You keep using that word. I do not think it […]

Im annoyed to report that it appears that, thanks to a security breach at a Fox News Web server, one of Ziff Davis servers was compromised. I dont know the details, but from where I sit, you had two pretty simple security mistakes here. The first was that the Fox News site had left its […]

Hewlett-Packard announced on July 23 that it would be buying Neoware, a provider of Linux, Windows CE and Windows XPe OS thin client computing and virtualization solutions. HP will be paying $16.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash) of approximately $214 million on a fully diluted basis for the company. In […]

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on July 22 at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Ore., the availability of Landscape, its Web-based systems management program for Ubuntu servers and desktops. Landscape will be available to Canonicals support subscribers. Landscape provides a key tool for the growing number of businesses that want […]

In early June, Asustek Computer and Intel announced at Computex Taipei that they would soon be releasing a low-end $199 subnotebook PC, the Asus Eee PC 701. It appears to be on schedule, and when it arrives in customers hands in late August or early September it will be running a variation of Xandros Desktop […]

On July 5, Microsoft quietly released a “Covenant to Customers” to clear up how it is handling its patent deal with Linux distributor Linspire. Instead, it did little but puzzle and annoy members of the Linux community. /zimages/3/28571.gifClick here to read more about Linspires patent agreement with Microsoft. Roy Schestowitz, a well-known open-source advocate and […]

Red Hat Inc., the worlds leading business Linux distributor, announced earlier this week that SAP AG, a global provider of business software solutions, has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Advanced Platform 5. The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP […]

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didnt matter. Then […]