Vienna hobbles open-source migration, Jun 06, 2008

In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.

Novell has extended a set of development tools so they can be used to write applications and other software for rival Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

The days of the monolithic upgrade are over. Five years, $6bn later and what do the ingrates do? Ask for a downgrade to Windows XP.

Michael Meeks has a tough job. Anyone who's struggled with making documents not created in the Word interface with Microsoft Office should be able to sympathise.

Very few people lie awake at night fretting over their choice of mobile operating system. In fact, very few people even know what operating system their handset uses.

Security experts have discovered TIFF-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in OpenOffice.org that could allow attackers to remotely execute code on Linux, Windows or Apple Mac-based computers.

IBM is tackling Microsoft on several fronts, including office productivity, email clients and groupware.

Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, said he is "not ruling anything out" as the company assimilates a landmark judgement by the European Court of First Instance.

Microsoft's claims that open-source software infringes its patents do not apply in the UK, according to a top lawyer.

Eric S Raymond, a founding member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), labelled Microsoft's behaviour in pushing Office Open XML (OOXML) for fast track ISO certification as "egregious", and said that he was almost ready to recommend that Microsoft not receive approval from the OSI for the Microsoft Permissive License.

HP and Red Hat have started selling a new Linux-based desktop PC targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

GPLv3 will help FreeBSD take some users away from Linux, according to the founder and vice president of The FreeBSD Foundation.

Oracle has announced the availability of its Oracle Database 11g on the Linux platform and, at the same time, released new capabilities for its existing 11g Enterprise Edition offering.

UK users will have to pay a premium for Dell's Linux PCs, despite Dell's claim to the contrary.

From Wednesday, UK customers will be able to buy two desktop models with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

There's been much fanfare about Linux replacing Windows on desktops but we've yet to see any major adoptions take place. This may have something to do with the fact that none of the major PC manufacturers have offered Linux as a pre-installed option.

Acer is planning to sell Linux-based PCs to the UK market, the company told ZDNet.co.uk.

Acer will not release Linux-based laptops in the UK due to a lack of demand, despite launching an Ubuntu-based machine in Asia.

A German court has ruled that Skype violated the General Public License version 2 by selling a Linux-based phone without access to the source code.

IBM is granting universal access to over 150 patents, mostly for web services, in what it believes is the biggest-ever release of this kind of intellectual property.