Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Anyone who follows Linux at all knows that Ubuntu is currently the Linux communitys favorite distribution. But can Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, translate that popular success into business success? Certainly, under the leadership of Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical is trying to do just that. While Ubuntu will always be a free distribution, Canonical has been […]

Novell is once again trying to finish off The SCO Groups court cases by proving that Novell is the company that actually owns Unixs intellectual property rights. What makes this latest attempt different, is we finally see an explanation of how SCO ended up owning Unix without owning its copyrights. This is core to any […]

Web hosting company Verio chose a lucky day to introduce its new Linux-based managed private server offering for small businesses. The day before, April 17, Microsoft admitted that it doesnt have a fix for a serious security hole in its server operating systems. Windows 2000 and Server 2003 have both been hit hard by the […]

In Beijing, Bill Gates announced this week that Microsofts “Unlimited Potential” initiative will now include offering a software package, the Student Innovation Suite, to governments and students in emerging countries across the world at a price of just $3. This suite, available in the second half of 2007, will include Windows XP Starter Edition, Microsoft […]

Who needs Vista, when Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has just released the latest version of its popular Linux distribution: Ubuntu Version 7.04? Despite concerns that this release might be delayed by last-minute fine tuning of ATI graphic card drivers and the network manager panel applet, Ubuntu 7.04 made its release date. “In the […]

What operating system do the heads of Fortune 500 companies run on their personal laptops? In the case of Michael S. Dell, president and CEO of Dell, its Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Yes, the head of Dell, with a market-capitalization of just south of $56 billion, isnt just saying that Dell will be selling Linux-equipped […]

For Linux business users, the most important Linux release of 2007 so far is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But for most other Linux fans, the upcoming release of Ubuntu Version 7.04 on April 19 demands more attention. This new v7.04 release encompasses five versions: Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu. Along with […]

Although Microsoft may claim otherwise, Vista, from both from a technical and business point of view, is proving to be a failure. Why not turn it over to people who have shown time after time that they can deliver the goods? Lets look at the facts, shall we? Microsoft claimed that more than 20 million […]

One of the goals of the GNU General Public License version 3 was be more compatible with other open-source licenses. There is some concern, however, that this goal has not been achieved in relation to the Apache License 2. As Allison Randal, president of The Perl Foundation, pointed out in a recent article on OReilly […]

A recent story on the “Boycott Novell” Web site reported that “Novells Linux is losing features which supposedly infringe on Microsoft software patents.” That, according to Novell Director of Public Relations Bruce Lowery, is not at all the case. The story got its start as a bug report on an openSUSE mailing list. This report […]

Now that Debian 4.0, Etch, has finally arrived, what do people make of it? Out in the blogosphere, some users like it. Over at Jeds Sandbox, this Gentoo Linux user finds that “Debian is stable, period.” Other users are also excited about a new and stable Debian. Still others, however, have found that Debian isnt […]

Over in San Francisco, my comrades in testing arms, the eWEEK Labs team, have placed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on the testing bench. They found that while RHEL is a good distribution in some ways, its far from a “ready, set, go” virtualization platform. While I havent done as much work with this distribution […]