Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Open-source programmer Bram Cohen on Monday released version 4.0 of his popular BitTorrent client for Windows and Linux. BitTorrent is an ad hoc, P2P (peer-to-peer) protocol. Cohen created it to address the problem of transferring popular, large files over the Internet. Instead of using the client-server model of traditional Internet file distribution systems, such as […]

Microsoft went public on Thursday with a number of proposals designed to overhaul the U.S. patent system and make it better suited to the software industry. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith presented Microsofts proposed reforms during a day-long seminar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Microsoft has a vested […]

What could have been an ugly public brawl over the firing of three Canopy executives has come to a quiet, out-of-court settlement early this week. The fight between The Canopy Group, parent company to the SCO Group Inc., and former CEO Ralph Yarro, Chief Financial Officer Darcy Mott and Corporate Counsel Brent Christensen began when […]

Let me open my kicking the tires of Googles new desktop application by saying that I love desktop search programs like a fat man loves doughnuts. Although, Im one of those people who file documents and correspondences religiously in directory structures like C:correweek2004manuscripts, I still cant find what I need when I need it, as […]

I love Firefox. It is, without a doubt, my favorite browser ever, and Ive used almost every one that ever rendered a Web page. No matter what the operating system—Windows, Linux, heck, even NetBSD—one of the first things I do now with any of my boxes is to install Firefox on it. Im not alone. […]

The open-source world was caught by surprise this week when Russ Nelson, the newly elected president of the Open Source Initiative, resigned his office retroactively to Feb. 23. The OSI (Open Source Initiative) is the body that approves open-source licenses. Nelson, a founding member of the nonprofit group and president of Crynwr Software, a high-end […]

SCO announced on Thursday that it would be restating three of its quarterly financial statements for 2004 because of accounting errors. The SCO Group Inc. is facing delisting from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market stock market because of its failure to file its annual report, or Form 10-K, for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2004, […]

Forget reality television. The real action is starting to play itself out in the enterprise operating system arena. The players in question are IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. What drew my attention to the drama were some executive comments at the recent LinuxWorld rollout of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Paul Cormier, executive vice […]

Adobe recently released some source code under the open-source MIT License for creating computer interfaces. This code from the ASL (Adobe Source Libraries) at Adobe Systems Inc.consists primarily of two C++ libraries: Adam and Eve2. Adobe is not currently using this code in any of its shipping products. An earlier version of Eve2, Eve (Express […]

The SCO Group, unable to turn in its late financial reports, has staved off immediate delisting from the Nasdaq stock market by filing an appeal. The SCO Group Inc. has ended up fighting for its place on the stock market because it failed to file a Form 10-K for its fiscal year ended Oct. 31, […]

Open-source advocates from the Apache Foundation, Red Hat Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. are demanding that the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards change its new patent policy. With the new OASIS intellectual property rights policy, OASIS members working on specifications can choose to license their submissions under either a RAND (Reasonable and […]

BOSTON—The news that The SCO Group Inc. is facing the possibility of being delisted by the NASDAQ stock market did not come as a surprise to attendees of LinuxWorld here. NASDAQ warned SCO on Wednesday that the company was in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ SmallCap Market stock market because it has first […]