Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I recently received a letter from a computer pro whos nearing 80. Hes disgusted by “how [Microsoft] things have developed, and how most software is put out there full of errors and omissions. Help is virtually nonexistent. One really has to dig to find answers.” “So I am interested in learning more about Linux and […]

Ray Noorda, a giant of the computer industry, died Oct. 9 of Alzheimers-related illness. It was my pleasure to know Mr. Noorda during his best days, when, as CEO of Novell, he took an obscure network operating system, NetWare, and turned it into the first major PC network OS. He wasnt a developer. He was […]

The cat is out of the bag. According to BayStar Capitals managing partner Larry Goldfarb, Microsoft allegedly assured BayStar that it would somehow “guarantee” BayStars $50 million investment in SCO. Specifically, Goldfarb has testified to the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City that Microsoft senior VP of corporate development and strategy, Richard Emerson, “discussed […]

Massachusetts has a problem. The Commonwealth cant keep its CIO or pass an IT budget. Louis Gutierrez, the of CIO Massachusetts Information Technology Division, resigned earlier this week. Does this mean the end of the states pioneering ODF rollout? First lets look at why Gutierrez is leaving. As he said in his resignation letter, its […]

Everyone in the channel business knows that Red Hat has never done all that well by its system integrator, value-added reseller, and solution provider partners. Things are about to change, however, with the hiring of Mark Enzweiler as its VP North American Channel Sales. Enzweiler is extremely well regarded in channel circles. Enzweiler comes to […]

George Weiss, Gartners open-source analyst, recently said that Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of Linux over the next five years. Hes right. Microsoft will fall flat on its face all by itself, and Linux will pick up afterwards. Its very simple. What does any business want […]

On Sept. 25, IBM took its crack at ending its case with SCO by summary judgment. Now, its Novells turn, and the company appears to be attempting to cut off SCOs lifeline to its cash reserves. On Sept. 29, Novell filed for “partial summary judgment as to its Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Claims for […]

IBM swung a haymaker at SCO on Sept. 25. The corporate giant asked the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City for summary judgment against all of SCOs claims. The SCO vs. IBM case is more than three years old. Although The SCO Group has had little success in persuading the court or the buying […]

Red Hats total revenue for its fiscal 2007 second quarter may have grown, but when the second-quarter profit slipped 34 percent because of stock compensation expenses, the stock-market had a fit and Red Hats stock dropped 23.21 percent to $20.21 a share. Was the news really that bad? It doesnt look like it was that […]

In a move that some may have sensed was coming, Eric S. Raymond—one of the co-founders of the open-source movement—will become the newest member of the Freespire Leadership Board on Sept. 27. Raymond, perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the Open Source Initiative and author of such seminal open-source works as “The […]

For a while, Debian was the community Linux darling. In its heyday, Debian was known for its strong moral point of view and its outstanding code. Numerous important distributions, such as Linspire, Knoppix, and todays most popular distribution, Ubuntu, have sprung from it. Things have changed. Today, Debian is a troubled distribution. In order to […]

Like most Linux programs, Xen, the virtualization software, can run on almost any hardware. But, just like any program, it performs better when its been optimized for a specific platform. Thats exactly what Novell and Intel are doing with SUSE enterprise Linux, Xen, and dual-core Xeon chip sets. The two companies are hoping that their […]