Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

ORLANDO, Fla.—With the demise of Comdex, the most important fall trade show for the enterprise may be Gartner Inc.s Symposium/ITxpo taking place here this week. Gartner expects more than 6,500 attendees at the trade show for high-level IT managers, CIOs and CEOs. It will include almost 200 exhibitors and numerous panels on issues of concern […]

Black Duck Software, an information services company offering IP (intellectual property) risk management and mitigation solutions, will announce on Monday the immediate commercial availability of its first comprehensive source-code services program, protexIP/license management. This is the next product in Black Duck Software Inc.s suite of development IP tools. It will be officially unveiled Monday at […]

SCO is sick and tired of being “dissed” by online bloggers and journalists, and its not going to take it anymore. So, its launching its own Web site to tell its side of the story concerning its many legal disputes. The SCO Group Inc. is launching the site, Prosco.net, on Nov. 1 to give its […]

When I first started using Unix, my favorite “desktop” was the Korn shell. Its still my favorite command line interface. As the years went by and interfaces grew graphical, I grew fond of SCOs Open Desktop. Or, as I sometimes called it on days when my top-of-the-line ATI Ultra card with its 1MB of RAM […]

On Tuesday, Novell Inc. announced that it will use its patent portfolio to protect its open-source software offerings. In a policy statement, Novell said it will utilize its patent portfolio to defend against potential intellectual property attacks on its open-source products. Software patent issues have increasingly become significant in both open- and closed-source programming circles. […]

According to AT&T CIO Hossein Eslambolchi, the telecommunications giant is considering Linux or the Mac to replace its Windows desktops. Or is it? Is AT&T, as one report had it, looking to “throw Windows out?” No, not according to AT&T spokesman Michael Dickman. “The bottom line is that Eslambolchi has set up a team to […]

Open-source and proprietary developers have at least one enemy in common: software patents. This latest mess with Kodak and Sun is just one of many, many examples of software patents gone amok. In this most recent example, one of Kodaks patents—by way of Wang Labs—covers when applications “ask for help” from another application. Can you […]

When Eastman Kodak Co. won the initial round of its Java lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc., it sent shock waves through not just Sun and the Java community, but in the legal community as well. On Oct. 1, the U.S. District Court of Rochester, N.Y., found that Sun infringed on three of Kodaks patents when […]

How significant is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offices initial rejection of Microsofts FAT (file allocation table) file system patent claims? Is it, as a Microsoft representative describes it, “one step in a long process”? Or has the patent office “simply confirmed what we already knew for some time now: Microsofts FAT patent is bogus,” […]

Weve got to find a better way to settle open-source disputes than fighting them out in the press. In the latest tussle, Furthermore and Miro, the copyright owner to the open-source Mambo OS content management system, are fussing over whether some Furthermore copyrighted code was improperly placed in Mambo. The OSSI (Open Source Software Institute) […]

Red Hat Inc. announced Thursday that it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with America Online Inc. to acquire its Netscape Security Solutions software assets. Specifically, Red Hat is acquiring Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. Red Hat plans to open-source both server programs within the next six to 12 months. […]

In a heavy blow to Microsofts intellectual property rights, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has initially rejected Microsofts patent claims on the universally popular FAT (file allocation table) file system. The request to re-examine Microsoft Corp.s FAT patent was first made in April by PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation), a nonprofit organization that describes […]