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Software company's decision to repurchase $200 million worth of shares follows recent, vocal requests for financial change.

Developers discuss whether Linux project needs to change policy in light of recent legal moves.

Less than two years after our initial launch, LXer has become a top news site in the Linux community. Continuing progress allows us to provide services to authors wishing to publish original material. Click to read more about the announcement.

By Year Six, U.S. Middle Managers Are Either Identified "Senior Management Potential" or a 'Career Middle Manager'

Strip away the hype and hyperbole and there are two factors driving mainstream businesses to adopt Linux Latest News about Linux and other open-source technologies: drastic reduction of hardware costs by swapping out expensive servers and fear of being locked into proprietary software.

Pablo Machon, a founder of the Free Knowledge Foundation(FKnK), told delegates at the second International FLOSS and Free Knowledge workshop yesterday that the successes of the free software movement had created a valuable example of how a similar free knowledge system could work.

Microsoft's Alan Yates steps in the manure in responding to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division's late-August declaration for OpenDocument and other open software standards.

IBM today announced that Bryant University, ranked the second most connected campus in America*, has committed to open-source computing by moving its entire data center from proprietary Sun Solaris systems to the IBM POWER™ microprocessor architecture with the open-source Linux® operating system. The IBM solution is the answer to Bryant's growing student body, providing the speed, reliability features and flexibility necessary to support the entire University's student information, financial, human resource, class scheduling and alumni applications. Consolidation to a total Linux on POWER infrastructure has also resulted in an up to twenty-five percent reduction in overhead costs.** Bryant University is following a general trend in academia to advance the capabilities of applications using the Linux operating system, considered to be critical to any organization looking to build a reliable, innovative and flexible technology platform based on open-source solutions. By using the Linux OS, students are collaboratively building their computer skills foundation for application development and as a result, broadening their technical expertise for future job opportunities.

The sedentary art of software development and the extreme sports of kitesurfing, sailplaning and canyoning would appear to have little in common. However, both are examples of a new force that could eventually affect a far broader range of companies and industries: the power of users to shape how products are developed.

Linux distributor Red Hat has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to create a new performance test lab to help customers deploy enterprise storage across Linux environments.

The leader of the Debian Linux distribution has called for changes to be made to the open source project's trademark policy, to ensure it has the appropriate level of protection against legal challenges. Debian's current trademark policy states that businesses can use the Debian trademark if they make a CD of Debian, but cannot use Debian in the name of their business.

Oracle is considering opening up its software to support other databases. Chief executive Larry Ellison told delegates at the OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco that the company is committed to work with open standards, and will compete on reliability and security. He says Oracle is thinking of making its software open to a number of other database standards, but has not yet made a decision on this.

The Linux kernel coding style document was recently upgraded to say "the preferred form for passing a size of a struct is the following: p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), ...);". Russell King [interview] disagreed with this suggestion, listing several reasons it was problematic. He was quickly joined by others including Al Viro, Robert Love [interview] and Alan Cox [interview], who agreed and added additional reasons why this coding convention could be problematic, suggesting instead to use "p = kmalloc(sizeof(struct foo), ...)". The reasons cited included the difficulty in grepping for such allocations and initializations, confusion over the fact the sizeof(*p) is the size of for example a void *, not the full space for the object allocated and overall readability.

As prospective developers learn more about the powerful new Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, the strategy to create applications for the next-generation chip may embrace the Linux and open source community, similar to what IBM did with the Power processor.

As many systems administrators will tell you, attacks from automated login scripts specifically targeting common account names with weak passwords have become a substantial threat to system security, especially via SSH (a popular program that allows remote users to log in to a Linux computer and execute commands locally). Here are some common-sense rules to follow that can greatly improve security, as well as several scripts to cut down on the computing resources wasted by these attacks.

The testing period for the next major KDE release has begun with the release of KDE 3.5 Beta 1, codenamed Kanzler. This will be the last major release in the KDE 3 series

You probably paid too much for the software you're using — not to mention the software company you've invested in. That's the growing consensus of analysts watching the rise of open-source software, built on the notion that software should be free for everyone to use, tweak and develop further.

The Linux Mark Institute (LMI), a non-profit organization that handles trademark issues and licenses for Linux, released a statement in response to an unfavorable court ruling to secure the Linux patent in Australia.

Yahoo! makes a huge leap forward with its new user interface. Some issues still need to be ironed out, and we'd like to see Yahoo! better integrate the calendar and contacts list with the mail application, but we're excited by what we've seen so far.

Do you hate to see a good computer go to waste? I know I do. I have half a dozen Pentium II machines, which came with Windows 98SE. If I trusted Windows 98SE to be even half secure, I'd still be using them. But I don't. So what to do with old boxes? Well one good thing is to run MEPIS' lightweight Linux distribution, MEPISLite.