open source - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Microsoft, Novell ponder opportunities in sour economy

  In separate discussions at InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) on Tuesday, executives from Microsoft and Novell cited opportunities presented by the current down economy.

• Open source PBXs make corporate gains; how much is a debate

  The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks.

• How the Kossacks conquered America

  Fresh-faced US President Barack Obama is, like his campaign maxim, an emblem of change. The traditional vehicles for the dissemination of information and influence on the public – the mass media and old-style campaign letter-boxing – changed in the years leading up to the 2008 election, as political Web sites received unprecedented popularity from wider audiences.
  

• Tories ignoring open-source security risk

  The British Conservative Party was wrong to slate the UK Government for its approach to open source, and US outfit Fortify Software has come up with research to prove it. The bottom line: open source is just too risky anyway.

• Microsoft may go open source with Danger

  Microsoft may do the unthinkable with Danger, the mobile software and services developer it purchased last year: Go open source.

• Microsoft releases Web Sandbox under open source

  Microsoft has made source code for its Live Labs Web Sandbox project for securing Web content through isolation available via open source under the Apache License 2.0, according to a report this week on Microsoft's Port 25 site.

• UK Tories consider open source and limit on size of gov't IT

  The Tories could order the wholesale introduction of open source IT systems if they are returned to office at the next election.

• Talend eyes master data management, parallelism

  Open source data integration vendor Talend is planning to release a master data management product by the end of the year, as well as to offer a massively parallel processing architecture in current products, according to company executives.

• Startup provides commercial support for Lucene-based search

  Startup Lucid Imagination is banking on the belief there's a market in commercial support for enterprise search applications built with the popular open-source Lucene and Solr projects.

• Wikipedia video gets boost with $100,000 Mozilla grant

  The proliferation of standards-based video sharing and collaboration is set to take off with a $US100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to fund the development of the Ogg Theora video codec and server-side streaming software.
  

• Microsoft contributes code to Apache SOA project

  Microsoft for the first time is contributing code to an Apache open-source project, continuing the company's softening of its attitude toward open-source software and the community that supports it.

• Open source developers ride the cloud

  Nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as Web services offerings using cloud providers, according to results of an Evans Data open source development survey being released on Tuesday.

• Google's Jaiku changes: Better or the beginning of the end?

  Open-sourcing Jaiku is either good news or bad news for users of the microblogging service, depending on who's doing the talking.

• Vietnam pushes open-source software for government use

  The Vietnamese government will move to several open-source applications by the end of next year as the country also tries to reduce the use of pirated software.

• Microsoft revising 'us vs. them' attitude toward open source

  When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.