Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

On May 31, Novell had both good and bad news for its investors as it announced a net profit of $3 million, or $0.01 per diluted common share, for its second fiscal quarter that ended April 30, 2006. Although Novell reported that fiscal second quarter revenue had declined year-over-year, from $297 million in the second […]

Red Hat is the worlds best-known Linux distributor, but with its acquisition of JBoss, completed on June 5, it also wants to become a well-known service-oriented architecture company. The Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux distributor announced on April 10 that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the open-source Java middleware company after months of […]

OK, so it is rather neat that Google is releasing a Web-based spreadsheet, but come on, is it really that big a deal? According to the United Kingdoms Guardian newspaper, when you compare the spreadsheet to “Writely [Googles online word processor], Googles existing blogging tool, Instant Messenger service, e-mail product, calendar and Web page creator, […]

Linux is insecure. Open source is insecure. Windows is insecure. All software is insecure. Deal with it. People keep having this delusion that security is a product. That, if you just buy some magic box, youll have a program or an operating system thats as secure as Fort Knox. It doesnt work that way. Security […]

Perhaps the most widely anticipated Linux distribution of the year finally arrived on June 1: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Service), aka Dapper Drake. Already number one on DistroWatchs latest seven-day download tracker, the Dapper Drake runs the GNOME 2.14 desktop environment on top of the X.org 7.0 window system and a Linux 2.6.15.6 kernel. […]

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—If you were looking for new products at Red Hats second annual Red Hat Summit, you came to the wrong place. But, if you were interested in bigger and better development tools, you came to the right place. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik introduced the companys new open-source developer community Web site, “108,” in […]

In one corner, we have the champ—Windows. Come January, it will come out swinging with what Microsoft tells us is the latest and greatest version ever—Vista. In the other corner, we have the challenger—OpenSUSE 10.1, the latest shipping version of Novell/SUSEs community Linux. Sometime this summer, its commercial version, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, will come […]

Another attempt to tie down a standard with a patent has gone down in flames. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a patent that Forgent Networks was asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts Group, better known as JPEG, images standard. In the reexamination proceeding initiated late last year by the PUBPAT (Public Patent […]

Google and CodeWeavers have released the first Google program, the popular beginner-level photography program, Picasa, for Linux. Although the Linux Picasa implementation includes most of the feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology […]

Following its recent Mainz, Germany meeting, the Portland project has now decided on its next moves. Portland, an ad hoc group of commercial and community Linux desktop developers, aims to create a common set of interfaces and tools to allow all applications to easily integrate with the Linux desktop. After this latest meeting, John Cherry, […]

Novell announced on May 24th that it has sold its shares in Celerant Consulting, its management consulting branch, to Caledonia Investments, a UK-quoted investment trust, for $77 million. Celerant was part of Cambridge Technology Partners, which Novell Inc. acquired in 2001. This acquisition never worked well for Novell. As Novell CEO Jack Messman said in […]

My current favorite desktop Linux is OpenSUSE 10.1. I can say all kinds of good things about it, except when it comes to the package manager. Unfortunately, the package manager, which the administration tool YaST uses for adding new programs and updating old ones, currently has serious problems. The default package management software in SUSE […]