Showing headlines posted by ingridm

Microsoft claims that it did not warn Asian governments against Linux and was merely referring to a study done by an open-source group, but the author of the study says his report was misinterpreted.

The creator of Linux has urged the EU Council not to adopt a draft directive on software patents as he considers it 'deceptive, dangerous and democratically illegitimate'.

A report has predicted that more than one in seven ERP servers will be running the open-source operating system by 2007.

The City of Bergen is now midway through its migration to Linux on the server, and is looking forward to making very significant savings through moving away from Windows. Ole-Bjørn Tuftedal, the city's chief technology officer, said on Thursday that Bergen has evaluated the cost of running Windows or Linux on IBM Blade servers and found that Linux runs more efficiently. As a result, fewer Blade servers are needed to provide services to the same number of users.

Debian developers have completely rewritten the Debian installer for the next version of the Linux distribution, code-named Sarge. The update, due around the New Year, is the first major release of Debian since July 2002 when the current version, Woody, was released.

The next generation of Zope, an open-source application server, was released on Monday. Zope X3 3.0.0 has been written from scratch to improve the architecture of the system.

French Linux vendor Mandrakesoft announced on Tuesday that its revenue over the last fiscal year has reached €5.18m, representing a 33 percent increase year-on-year.

Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), which provides services to staff and students around the university, will complete its move to open-source PostgreSQL as the back-end database for most of its systems over the next year.

Merit Network, a not-for-profit network research organisation, says that Microsoft appears to be staking its claim to various Internet protocols, which may thwart future innovation in the technology -- but Microsoft claims that this is merely a misunderstanding, which it is trying to resolve.

The UK Patent Office (UKPO) has been criticised by anti-patent campaigners on Monday for an article it published last week on the software patent directive.

FreeBSD developers on Saturday announced the release of the final version of FreeBSD 5.3, the open-source operating system. The milestone release is the first stable version of the 5.x development branch, said FreeBSD developer Scott Long in the release announcement.

Microsoft has criticised the IP indemnification offered by Novell, Red Hat, HP and IBM -- the main vendors of the Linux operating system. It claims that Microsoft offers better indemnification than any Linux vendor and has highlighted specific problems with the indemnification policy of each vendor, although it has not yet divulged the specific details of its own policy.

Firefox supporters on Tuesday set up a Web site in Germany to raise funds for an ad in one of three German newspapers. This campaign has started only a few days after the New York Times (NYT) campaign finished, which raised a total of $250,000 dollars in 10 days. Michael Bona, one of the founders of the Web site, said he came up with the idea when he saw the press release for the NYT campaign.

Microsoft has clarified its IP indemnification policy, saying that it will indemnify claimants against damages as well as just legal costs, but some legal observers say the company still needs to spell out the small print on the protection it is offering customers. Questions on Microsoft's indemnification policy were initially raised after chief executive Steve Ballmer wrote an email to customers claiming that Microsoft offered better protection against legal action over IP violations than its open-source rivals.

Experts believe this latest customer relationship management product could force down the cost of CRM and make rival vendors such as Salesforce.com raise their game. Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is about to launch an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) product that it says will set busineses back just a fraction of the cost of Salesforce.com's offering.

The NHS has awarded a nine-year software contract to Microsoft, a week after the OGC sang the praises of open-source alternatives. The contract involves Microsoft providing its operating system, desktop products and bespoke software to the NHS. Microsoft is expected to create bespoke software which will allow the NHS' current clinical technology to run more smoothly on the Windows operating system.

Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has large-scale plans for deploying OpenOffice.org on Windows PCs, a MINDEF spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "MINDEF has already installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 desktop computers," said the spokeswoman. "We hope to deploy OpenOffice on 20,000 desktop computers by the end of March 2006."

A change in the voting weights of EU members means that the EU Council members which supported controversial changes to the EU Software Patents directive no longer have a majority vote, prompting some campaigners to call for a recount.

Microsoft says its IP indemnification provides better protection than that offered by rivals Red Hat and Novell - but not all lawyers agree. In a email, sent to Microsoft customers and partners on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer claimed that Windows was a better choice than Linux. His reasons included Microsoft's old favourites of total cost of ownership and security, but also included a relatively new weapon, IP indemnification.

The next version of Mandrakesoft's Linux distribution comes with Wi-Fi roaming capabilities, Bluetooth support and improved power management for laptop users.