Does the open-source development model work for business users?, Mar 05, 2008

When using open-source software, businesses usually choose between a free, community-supported version of an application or a fee-based enterprise version that includes support, service, updates and other features.

At the fifth annual JBoss user conference, James Whitehurst shares some of his vision and explains what it's like to switch from an airline to the open-source industry

IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0.

What do you see as the biggest danger to open-source software today? On the one hand, there's still a locus of resistance. Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and indeed necessary model. And so as long as a company that sells a billion dollars a week in software is in that sense fundamentally still trying to [fight] the free way of doing things, Microsoft remains a very dangerous party.

Is Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for prime time? IBM apparently thinks so as it prepares to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0 sometime in the second half of this year.

More laptop computers preloaded with Ubuntu Linux are coming from Dell Inc. in response to demand from potential customers around the world.

For the second time since October, a sub-$200 fully equipped Linux desktop PC is available for sale to U.S. consumers.

Beta users can access the OpenOffice.org suite using a Web browser on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X--no download necessary.

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices.

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software.

A new software development collaborative service for Ubuntu Linux is being launched today to give developers a consolidated arena to build code for Ubuntu on the desktop, server and for mobile applications.

Two months after launching the first beta of Lotus Symphony, its free OpenOffice.org-based desktop office suite, IBM today unveiled the second beta of the suite with a raft of improvements and bug fixes.

(RHEL) will include a fully compatible, open-source Java Development Kit (JDK) integrated into the operating system.

If the corporate Grim Reaper is truly knocking on the door of The SCO Group Inc., no one apparently told the company's CEO and president, Darl C. McBride.

In August, Darl McBride, The SCO Group Inc.’s president and CEO, declared it “one of the more exciting times” ever for the software vendor. But by last week, the excitement had taken on a whole new dimension.

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced the opening of their joint new interoperability lab in Cambridge, Mass., 10 months after the two companies unveiled a collaboration deal that aims to make it easier to run Windows and Novell's SUSE Enterprise Linux together in corporate data centers.

... a potentially more serious threat still exists, in the form of Microsoft Corp.'s claim earlier this year that Linux and other open-source technologies infringe on 235 of its patents.

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African into space, paying US$20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world. He is also the founder of HBD Venture Capital and the non-profit Shuttleworth Foundation.

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying $20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world. He is also the founder of HBD Venture Capital and the nonprofit Shuttleworth Foundation.

Using a specially equipped Knoppix Linux 5.5.1 bootable CD, companies looking to see how server virtualization might fit into their IT plans can now run OpenVZ virtualization software instead of having to install and configure the full program.