Open source solves UK cancer charity challenges, Jun 22, 2008

There are hundreds of software implementations completed every day, but since it’s a sunny day in London, here’s one to warm the cockles of the rest of the open source fraternity…

Wavecom, a developer of embedded comms infrastructure for automotive, machine-to-machine and mobile professional applications, has launched a plug-in to its flagship software platform enabling developers to work in the Lua programming language.

Notch it up as a victory for open source over enterprise software. Zenoss, a provider of open source IT management software, has beaten off competition from four leading commercial software providers to land a deal at global technology firm UTStarcom.

Novell has announced that it has made modifications to its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution that will better enable it to run as a virtual machine on VMware technology, and that the modifications will be added to the Linux kernel at a later date.

Over a year ago CBR published a look at the UK's adoption of open source software in the UK and promised a later update. That update is long overdue, and is also timely given that tomorrow some of the leading open source advocates in the country will gather in Westminster to debate the future of open source in this country.

SCO Group's breach-of-contract and copyrights claims against IBM have been annihilated by the decision that Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of the Unix copyrights, according to IBM.

Linux-based application platform vendor Trolltech expects a higher growth rate in the second half than the first six months but said growth for the full year may fall below the approximately 40% recorded for each of the three previous years.

Following Judge Kimball's declaration that the Unix System V copyrights belonged to Novell, Steven Vaughan-Nichols speculated about what the decision might mean for Sun, which updated its Unix license to System 5 Release 5 in February 2003.

According to the Judge’s memorandum, there is some doubt as to whether SCO ever truly believed it was the owner of those copyrights...

The recent announcement that Microsoft intends to submit licenses for approval by the Open Source Initiative indicates that the company has come a long way since its chief executive Steve Ballmer dismissed Linux as 'a cancer' in June 2001.

Linux distributor Turbolinux has announced that it has joined the Open XML Translator project, an open source development effort sponsored by Microsoft to create interoperability between the OOXML and ODF formats.

Open source isn’t religion; it’s an evolution of the software industry. I say ‘an evolution’ rather than ‘the evolution’, because the beauty of evolution is that is creates a great many answers to the same question

Novell and Microsoft have announced another dozen customers signing up to their interoperability agreement through which Microsoft is distributing vouchers for SUSE Linux Enterprise support.

Dell may have thrown open-source fans a bone when it started selling Ubuntu Linux PCs last week, but it already appears to have diluted that geek cred by signing up to the controversial relationship between Microsoft and Novell.

Novell Inc's head of marketing for Linux and open source has apologized to the Free Software Foundation and the open source community after making misleading statements about the company's financial contribution to the FSF.

While everyone knows that Linux is now pervasive in IT organizations, the slippery nature of open source software makes it difficult to gauge how deeply it has penetrated into the data centers of the world.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is preparing itself for an initial public offering, and could even be ready to go public before the end of the year, according to its CEO Marten Mickos.

Desktop Linux gained new features and functionality in 2006 that will stand it in good stead for growth in 2007, according to the first end-of-year report by the Open Source Development Labs' Desktop Linux Working Group.

Novell Inc might have signed a patent and interoperability deal with Microsoft Corp but it is not about to give up competing with the software giant and last week released a study that suggests its Linux desktop product is better value than Windows Vista.

The Linux operating system is the recipient of 75% of all vendor investment in open source software, according to a new report from the Harvard Business School