Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Corel Corp. recently released a new version of its WordPerfect Office Suite, WordPerfect Office X3. This latest edition of the venerable office suite looks good for Windows users. As PC Magazine Editor Ed Mendelson wrote, “Think of an annoyance in Microsoft Office, and you probably wont find it in Corel WordPerfect Office X3.” /zimages/6/28571.gifClick here […]

Would you believe that Wine, the open-source program that enables you to run some Windows programs on Linux, is faster than native Windows XP on the same hardware? I have trouble buying that one too, but according to the Wine crews latest benchmark runs, its true. These were primarily graphic tests. Both systems, Windows XP […]

The first draft of the new GPL is out and lawyers are beginning to form their impressions of this open-source license. This first look at the GPL (General Public License) 3 came at the First International Conference on GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This new revision of this seminal license tackles the issues […]

Its kind of funny. Everyone is excited about the new Intel-powered Macs, but perhaps the most excited of them all are the Windows users who want to run Mac OS X and Windows together on one. Can they? Cant they? They dont know, but boy do they want to find out. For XP users, the […]

Theres a certain class of programs that I refer to as the “cranky” ones. They may work great when all is said and done, but getting to that point can be really hard. For me, these include sendmail, QuarkXPress, and now Drupal. As you may know, I started looking a few weeks ago for an […]

I dont pretend to be a lawyer, but I do know a bit about open-source licensing, and I, for one, am greeting the arrival of the first public draft of the GPL Version 3 with a great sigh of relief. In the years since the last GPL (General Public License) revision, intellectual property has gone […]

Fedora Core 5 is getting closer and closer to its official release date, March 15, and this Monday, the Fedora Project showed the way by announcing its second beta release of the Fedora Core 5. Fedora is a community-supported Linux distribution. It also serves as the basis for Red Hat Inc.s enterprise Linux distributions. The […]

What color is the sky in Microsofts world? Green? In a recent eWEEK story by Peter Galli, Bill Hilf, who is director of Microsofts Platform Technology Strategy and heads its Linux and open-source lab, said that “patching, particularly for security, is not a Microsoft problem, but something that affects all operating system and platform vendors.” […]

The new and improved Thunderbird e-mail client took flight Thursday. While not as well-loved as the Mozilla Foundations Firefox Web browser, this open-source e-mail client has had more than 18 million downloads since its launch in December 2004, according to Mozilla. Thunderbird 1.5, as we expected from our review of the December beta of the […]

On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reaffirmed a pair of patents held by Microsoft covering the File Allocation Table, but sources close to the Public Patent Foundation indicate that this will not be the end of the story of efforts to overthrow these patents. Sources said, “The re-issuance of the patent is based […]

On Tuesday, Novell Inc. announced the creation of the AppArmor project, a new GPL open-source project dedicated to advancing Linux application security. Novells AppArmor is an intrusion-prevention system that protects Linux and its applications from the effects of attacks, viruses and malicious applications. AppArmor is based on technology that Novell acquired from Immunix, a leading […]

Microsofts most recent anti-Linux FUD efforts are perhaps its most pathetic ever. In a recent eWEEK story by ace operating system reporter Peter Galli, Microsoft Challenges Linuxs Legacy Claims, Bill Hilf, director of Microsofts Linux and open-source lab, claimed that the labs tests of Windows and Linux on legacy hardware found that when both were […]