Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

The SCO Group on March 1 reported results for its first quarter ended Jan. 31, 2007. While it wasnt a pretty picture, the companys cost-cutting efforts seem to have placed profitability for the year within the realm of possibility. Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007 was just over $6 million. This was […]

The FSF (Free Software Foundation) is expanding beyond its software boundaries, and reaching out to hardware vendors to encourage them to “work with the free software community” to establish a “mutually beneficial relationship.” Its all spelled out in a just-published white paper. On March 1, the FSF released “The Road to Hardware Free from Restrictions,” […]

Terascala, a startup developing a next-generation Linux storage cluster architecture, announced March 1 that it has secured $3 million in first-round funding from Ascent Venture Partners. The companys initial product offering is “powerful, efficient, managed computing and storage Blades.” Each blade contains eight hot-swappable 500GB or 750GB disk drives, hardware RAID, an AMD Opteron multicore […]

Chances are your telephone calls and Internet connections will be running on Linux sometime soon. The Linux Foundation, the product of a recent merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, Feb. 27 announced the release of its new Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 (CGL) specification. The 5-year-old CGL Specification consists of […]

Along the lines of early efforts to derail SCOs claims that Linux infringes Unix copyrights, a gentleman going by the moniker “digduality” has decided to fight recent claims by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that Linux infringes on Microsoft patents, by launching ShowUsTheCode.com. As you might guess from its name, the Web sites theme is, “since […]

The public spoke and said, “We want a Linux desktop,” and Dell listened. On Feb. 23, the company announced that, as a result of “the communitys interest in open-source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice… we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux…” This will include “our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks […]

Alfresco Software Inc., an open-source enterprise content management software company, announced Feb. 23 that it will offer its next release under the GNU GPLV2 (General Public License version 2). The companys software was previously licensed under a variation of the MPL (Mozilla Public License), with a clause requiring attribution. Alfresco was far from alone in […]

Its no secret that Linus Torvalds, Linuxs founder, dislikes the GNOME desktop. In 2005, for example, Torvalds posted on the GNOME-usability list that “I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.” Torvalds feels this way, in part, due to his perception that “This users are idiots, and are confused by functionality mentality of Gnome […]

Last September, some of the Debian Linux distributions leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its Dec. 4 due date. So, the “Dunc-Tank” group decided to experiment with financially supporting some key developers to get Debian out the door on time. Whoops. Debian has a reputation for being […]

Like two very large men stuck in one small hotel room, Google and Microsoft have been bumping into each other, but still maintained at least a facade of politeness. Those days are over. With its just released Google Apps Premier and Standard editions, Google is taking a swing at its high-technology roommate. Specifically, Google is […]

In an attempt to boost its sagging fortunes, Dell, one of the leading PC makers in America, recently launched the Dell Idea Storm Web site to solicit ideas on how to get Dell back to the top. The most popular idea so far? Desktops with pre-installed Linux. Dell is taking it seriously. In a brief […]

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications. Though often disparaged by developers, Visual Basic remains one of the worlds most […]