Linux/Open Source

Microsoft, one of the biggest rivals to open-source programming, has begun funding the Apache Software Foundation, one of open-source software's biggest supporters.

Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by donating cash to the Apache Software Foundation.

Zimbra is offering an office productivity suite. The Yahoo-owned provider of open-source messaging and collaboration tools announced Thursday a free beta of Yahoo Zimbra Desktop, which offers a centralized location for managing e-mail even when a user is not connected to the Internet, plus a tool for creating documents and spreadsheets.

San Francisco - The Open Web Foundation, a non-profit organization intended to help create an "Open Web," was announced Thursday at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore.

The Debian project's maintainer Luk Claes said July 21 he will freeze "testing" the "Lenny" tree "next week" as he prepares for the stable release of Debian Linux in September.

InformationWeek - The data warehouse appliance maker's software is typically used with Ingres' open source database, but could be easily be optimized for Microsoft's SQL Server.

One year after announcing its homegrown mobile Linux project, Intel prepares to hand Moblin over to the open source community.

A new open source project is develoing a new micro-kernel database based on MySQL, targeted at large-scale Web applications.

Open-source software, such as Linux, often claims enterprise-class capabilities, but it isn't adopting enterprise-class security standards, according to a study by security tools supplier Fortify Software. Fortify says the free software often comes with hidden costs because businesses end up having to fix unexpected security problems. The security concerns come amid increased adoption of open-source programs, with more than half of CIOs saying their enterprises run such software.

InformationWeek - Any release of Enterprise Linux is given a seven-year lifecycle of support, but the level of support drops back in the fifth year, then is reduced further in the sixth and seventh years.

San Francisco - Intel is readying a second release of the Moblin open-source platform for mobile computing, with plans set for an alpha-level version in a few weeks, an Intel official said at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. on Wednesday.

San Francisco - Ubuntu Linux Founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple has done in this space and aired a vision of software changing the world.

InformationWeek - Read this chapter of <i>A Practical Guide To Ubuntu Linux</i> and bring yourself up to speed on the open source operating system's desktop and its root privileges, and learn how to work with the command line and control windows.

San Francisco - Sun is announcing on Wednesday availability of Sun Web Stack, which puts the company???s own twist on the popular open-source LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python or PHP) stack.

InformationWeek - While open source mobile browsers will gain popularity, ABI Research says offerings from companies like Opera can still garner significant revenue.

InformationWeek - This is the sixth lawsuit the Software Freedom Law Center has filed on behalf of BusyBox seeking to uphold open source software principles.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Mobile Internet Device editions of Linux are gearing up to compete with Windows on mini-PC devices this year.

San Francisco - Intel on Tuesday will unveil at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, what it described as a substantial upgrade to Intel Threading Building Blocks. TBB 2.1, a developer tool that features a C++ template library for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, ??enables developers to add parallelism to C++.

San Francisco - Research and development efficiency, and not competitive concerns about the Google Android or Linux Mobile (LiMo) initiatives, was a chief driver in the decision to make the Symbian mobile platform open source, a Symbian official said Monday afternoon.

San Francisco - Linux is set to make a major impact in the mobile computing realm, the executive director of the Linux Foundation stressed at a conference Monday morning.

InformationWeek - The $249 Linux-based minidesktop consumes only 2 watts of power, compared with the 100 watts of some desktops.

As Linux continues to spread on phones and mobile devices, the annual open-source conference kicks off with an emphasis on mobility.

Intelligent Enterprise - Open source databases are being adopted for use with interactive Web apps, small portals, RFID applications, and other new workloads in the enterprise.

San Francisco - WSO2 is releasing on Monday WSO Mashup Server Version 1.5, an open-source product for deploying mashup services featuring Google Gadgets support and interfaces to relational databases and other data sources.

InformationWeek - The computer maker has launched two notebooks and a desktop with Hardy Heron, the version of Ubuntu Linux that was released in April.

The Mozilla Foundation on Wednesday released an update to the company's heralded new web browser, version 3.0.1, with fixes for security, stability, a printing issue, and problems involving running Firefox 2 simultaneously.

SALT LAKE CITY - The SCO Group has been ordered to pay Novell Inc. more than $2.5 million in royalties in a dispute over the Unix computer operating system.

InformationWeek - SCO, which is in bankruptcy protection, may have gotten off lightly. Novell believed it was entitled to more than $20 million in compensation.

A new open source project allows computer users to add surreptitious location tracking to their systems. Windows, Mac and Linux versions are available.