Ulteo, the online desktop firm set up by Mandriva founder and former-CEO, Gael Duval, has announced the ability to run the OpenOffice.org productivity suite within a web browser. In fact, this blog post was written using OO.org within Firefox via Ulteo. How well does it work? The best thing you can say about it is [...]

Sun’s plan to award open source developers with prizes is an interesting one and reaction has on the whole been good, but I can’t help wondering if it is the right way to reward community developers for their efforts. In May this year Sun’s executive vice president for software, Rich Green, had cast doubts on [...]

Just hours before it was due to announce its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007, Novell has postponed the announcement pending a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC’s concerns, it appears, relate to the company’s previous financial results. “Novell received a comment letter from the Securities and Exchange [...]

UPDATE – For more details on Likewise’s strategy, including insight from the company’s CEO, Barry Crist, see this follow-up. – UPDATE Linux systems management vendor Centeris has announced that is has changed its name to Likewise in a move that also sees the company re-branding its products for the second time in less than a [...]

With Australian voters set to take to the polls tomorrow to vote in the country’s Federal election, both iTWire and iTNews (I guess they have a thing for lower case i down under) are reporting the results of a survey by Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) that indicates that all the major political parties in [...]

“We have all run into cases where Windows refuses to load for one reason or another. The problem may be hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable. Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost.” Here (PDF) is a fascinating little document [...]

As I sat watching Larry Ellison’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday it occurred to me that something was not quite right. This is the end of a year in which Oracle released a major new version of its flagship Database product and made a number of acquisitions, including Hyperion, Agile and Coherence, not to [...]

Here at OpenWorld Oracle hosted a round table on its open source strategy earlier today. Here’s what happened as it happened, including Berkeley DB, Oracle VM, InnoDB, and what Oracle really thinks of MySQL. NB All comments are paraphrased unless direct quote marks are used. The players: Ken Jacobs, VP of product strategy, server technologies [...]

Here at OpenWorld Oracle hosted a round table on its open source strategy earlier today. Here’s what happened as it happened, including Oracle’s engagement with open source communities and contributions to Linux and open source middleware. NB All comments are paraphrased unless direct quote marks are used. The players: Ken Jacobs, VP of product strategy, [...]

VMware’s share price may have taken a hit following the launch of Oracle VM but the product has wider implications in the software market. To some extent it is a software appliance play: like Raw Iron without the iron. This question and answer from the Q&A says it all: “Does Oracle VM require a host [...]

So after all the hype, it’s not a Gphone but a Linux-based platform for mobile devices and an industry alliance. There are more questions than answers raised by the Android announcement, and from an open source perspective there are two big ones: How does this compare to the existing mobile Linux initiatives? It’s not as [...]

Perhaps a better title for my post from Friday (“The irrelevance of desktop Linux”) would have been “The irrelevance of the desktop PC”. The AP has published an interesting article about PC trends in Japan that provides some context and outlines the opportunity that does exist for Linux as a client operating system. “Japan’s PC [...]

Can Google save desktop Linux? Or more accurately, can online applications? I have previously been skeptical about the potential for Linux to ever make serious in-roads on the desktop market. The problem as I see it is that desktop Linux is stuck in a Catch-22 situation where ISVs will not support it if they don’t [...]

Red Hat and GroundWork Open Source announced an interesting expansion of their partnership today that sees Red Hat offering 24×7 telephone premium support for GroundWork products, as well as the sale of GroundWork training classes. At first glance the relationship seems like a good fit, with GroundWork’s IT and network monitoring capabilities complementing the Linux [...]

A few weeks ago I mentioned the amount of merger and acquisition activity in the open source sector in recent years and that it might worth trying to build a table of open source M&A deals. As it happened Raven was thinking along the same lines and by delving into the CAOS Theory archives and [...]

Perhaps I was a little quick to congratulate Neelie Kroes on a job well done forcing Microsoft to extend its interoperability protocols to open source software vendors and developers. It now appears that the terms of the agreement mean that it is incompatible with the GPL. “I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability [...]

I promise I’ll write about something other than Microsoft soon, but it does keep doing interesting open source-related things. This time, it has backed down and agreed to comply with its obligations following the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust decision, including sharing interoperability information with open source developers. As European commissioner for competition, Neelie, Kroes, told [...]

So far there’s been plenty of speculation about the patent infringement suit (PDF) filed against Red Hat and Novell, but little detail from the IP enforcement companies behind it about their intentions. It’s good to see Internetnews.com getting the story from the horse’s mouth, therefore, with Sean Michael Kerner getting this comment from Paul Ryan, [...]

“…across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells The South East Texas Record [...]

Given the fuss this week about Microsoft’s potential patent claims against Red Hat it is interesting to note that Novell updated its Technology Assurance Program yesterday to include its agreement with Microsoft. It is particularly relevant given that, according to Novell’s NTAP information, Microsoft’s covenant not to sue Novell users will be extended to “all [...]