Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Hands up, everyone who remembers when portals were the be-all and end-all of Web development. Just what I thought, pretty much everyone who was around in the late 1990s and early 2000, aka the days of the Internet bubble. Here it is, 2005, and what do I see? Why, its Microsoft trying to revive that […]

Its one thing after another for Novell, as the company announces a new president one day, and that its cutting staff the next, but what do its customers and analysts think of all this change? The week started with a bang when Novell Inc. replaced longtime CEO, president and chairman of the board Jack Messman […]

Over at the Novell public relations blog, theyre wondering if Red Hats Matthew Szuliks conversation with Geoffrey Moore at Vortex on avoiding lock-in has anything to do with BusinessWeeks recent article about Novell. The gist of the discussion is that there are those who eternally see Red Hat as being on its way to becoming […]

It came as no surprise on Wednesday when Novell cut approximately 600 positions, more than 10 percent of its worldwide workforce, but that was far less than the 20 percent many Novell insiders had been predicting. This move is expected to reduce Novell Inc.s run rate expenses by more than $110 million. The company anticipates […]

SCO finally revealed to the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City some of what it claims IBM stole from its Unix intellectual property and placed into Linux last Friday, but there is still no smoking gun. The SCO Group Inc. did not, however, reveal any of the specifics of these violations in public. Instead, […]

Novell announced on Tuesday that the previous day its board of directors had promoted Ron Hovsepian, executive VP and president of global field operations, to president and chief operating officer of Novell. Hovsepian will have direct worldwide responsibility for product development, marketing and field operations, which includes sales, consulting and technical services. He also, along […]

When I was a kid, one of my jobs was to pick the ticks off our hound dog, George. It was an ugly job, but someone had to do it. As I survey the software patent landscape, Im reminded of those fat, blood-sucking ticks once again. Eolas has won a major victory in its seemingly […]

The Web is built on open standards. Until recently, XML was considered one of them. Now, Scientigo is claiming that two of its patents cover one of XMLs fundamental principles and is looking to benefit from XMLs broad usage. Charlotte, NC-based Scientigo specifically claims that its two patents on a “method for modeling, storing and […]

When the U.S. Supreme Court denied BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd.s attempt to stay NTP Inc.s patent infringement judgment against the company, it also set the scene for BlackBerry service to be potentially turned off for over a million users. In August 2003 a Federal judge ruled for NTP in its patent infringement case […]

The only person who has written more about SCO than yours truly is Pamela Jones of Groklaw. So, when PJ—a real, live person by the way, lest any of you still have doubts—says that SCO is probably not going to show any long promised proof that Unix code has been ripped off and used in […]

The rumors never stop. Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. will release a Web-based StarOffice desktop suite. Google will soon announce a new operating system. The truth isnt anything as dramatic, but it does show a company that not only supports open source, but relies on it every day to keep the best-known search engine […]

IBM announced Tuesday a new member of its WebSphere application server family: the WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. WAS CE (WebSphere Application Server Community Edition) is built on the Apache Software Foundations Geronimo open-source application server and includes code from Gluecode Software. IBM acquired Gluecode last May. WAS CE also includes IBMs Cloudscape database, which […]