Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

If you were an open-source, non-profit developer and you needed legal help, you went to the Software Freedom Law Center. If, however, you were in the open-source business and you needed free software savvy legal help, finding a competent attorney could be a challenge. So it is that the SFLC has announced the formation of […]

If you want broadband Internet connectivity, chances are you use a DSL, or cable-modem-based landline connection at home or a T1, T3 or frame-relay at the office. WiMAX technology promises to replace that last mile connection with a point-to-multipoint wireless connection in the same way that 802.11 Wi-Fi has replaced the wired LAN. WiMAX, the […]

If I know anything, I know operating systems. My first one was CICS/MVS on an Amdahl mainframe, followed by VAX/VMS, CP/M-80, TOPS-20, more Unix and Linux variations than you could shake a stick at, every version of DOS and Windows from 1.0 on to today. For sheer annoyance value, Vista takes the prize. There have […]

OK, so we’re not there yet. Well, none of us who isn’t running supercomputers or one heck of a cluster is there yet, anyway. But as RAM continues to drop in price, I can see the day coming.Come the day we get a terabyte of RAM in our systems, we’ll find a need for it. […]

For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it’s also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads […]

I would have liked to have been able to tell you in great detail exactly what desktops and laptops will soon be coming from Hewlett-Packard equipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.I’d like to tell you, but HP is still holding its Linux desktop cards close to its chest and not revealing any details. This […]

For far longer than any of its developers would care to recall, Wine, the best program to use in Linux to run Windows applications, has been in development. Now, at long last, Wine 1.0 is scheduled to be released.To be exact, Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.0 should appear June 6, on the project’s […]

Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP’s enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies. According to the press release, Novell and SAP will optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP’s data center applications, further promote SAP’s SUSE Linux-based Business All-in-One solutions […]

Over the weekend, the IT world was transformed. Chances are you didn’t notice. No, Vista SP1 wasn’t released, neither was XP SP3, nor the beta of Ubuntu 8.04. What did happen was that on Friday, March 14, the major Wall Street bank Bear Stearns collapsed. Bear Stearns has invested billions in two hedge funds that […]

Friends in business, enemies in the courtroom, Novell succeeded on March 17 in persuading the Supreme Court, over Microsoft’s objections, that its antitrust suit against Microsoft should go forward. While Microsoft and Novell have formed a strong technology and marketing partnership in the last 18 months, Novell has never given up its multibillion antitrust lawsuit […]

The future is today. When Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, looked into his crystal ball and predicted that parallel computing would be the next revolution in computing, he was quite correct. It’s just that he was looking into the past. Parallel computing has been here and changing the world for years. The […]

Red Hat’s next update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 5.2, with major upgrades to the desktop and virtualization, is ready for beta testing. If your business depends on RHEL, you’ll want to download this beta to get an idea what your servers are going to be working with in a few months. According to […]