Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

When youre talking Linux development tools, chances are youre talking about decades-old programming editors like vi and EMACS. These are fine for an older generation of programmers, but todays developers, weaned on Microsoft Visual Studio, want integrated development environments. At the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, it was decided to start making Eclipse, the open-source […]

With KDE 4 due out in the fourth quarter of 2007, the KDE developers had their work cut out for themselves when they met in Glasgow, Scotland, for their annual worldwide meeting, aKademy 2007. Besides a lot of brainstorming and coding, KDE e.V., the official organization behind the popular Linux desktop environment, had to deal […]

We knew that in 2006, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik held talks with Microsoft concerning a patent deal. Once Microsoft and Novell signed an agreement, those talks were history. In fact, Red Hat made a point of spitting on the Microsoft-Novell deal. That was then. This is now. On July 3, according to Paul Cormier, […]

One of the most chilling concepts of George Orwells novel “1984” is “Newspeak.” In Newspeak, the language is constantly being cropped of words that might lead to “thoughtcrimes.” If you control the language, the logic goes, you control what people think. Microsoft is doing exactly this with its “Open XML.” Its meant to remind you […]

Ive been following the evolution of this latest version of the seminal open-source license since it was a twinkle in Richard M. Stallmans eye. I have no doubt that a lot of hard work by some incredibly bright people has gone into making this the best possible software license. Now that the GPLv3 (GNU General […]

As expected, the Free Software Foundation has released the long-awaited GNU General Public License Version 3, the third generation of the worlds most popular free software license. “Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the users freedom,” said Richard […]

The big Linux-business question of the latest financial quarter was: Would Red Hat be battered by Oracle? Knocked around by Microsoft and its new Linux partners, Novell, Xandros and Linspire? Daunted by a Sun revival? Or would the Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux company turn in a great quarter? And, the answer is, with total revenue of […]

Google has finally released a long-awaited native Linux application: Google Desktop for Linux. As with the already shipping OS X and Windows versions, Google Desktop enables Linux users to search for text inside documents, local e-mail messages, their Web history and their Gmail accounts. This first beta version doesnt offer the sidebar and gadgets, which […]

Microsofts partnership with Novell got a lot of people in the open-source community fired up. Since then, Microsofts Linux deals with Linspire and Xandros have just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now, it appears that Red Hat, the leading Linux company and the most vocal opponent to Microsoft wheeling and dealing, tried to make its […]

As Apple launches its iPhone today, a company attempting to build a similar touchscreen-based phone around an open, user-extensible Linux OS has acknowledged significant delays. OpenMoko now hopes to ship its first “mass market” model in October. The announcement came June 27, in an e-mail from OpenMoko leader Sean Moss-Pultz to several OpenMoko.org mailing lists. […]