Stories by: Elizabeth Montalbano

Red Hat Thursday unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs, the company said.

Linux distributor Red Hat invested in open-source business-intelligence vendor JasperSoft on Wednesday as part of a US$12.5 million round of funding for the company.

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

Amazon Web Services Thursday launched a public beta of its cloud-computing service running Windows Server and SQL Server, marking the first time developers and businesses can use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to build and host applications on Microsoft's software.

The release of a new version of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite hit a snag Monday when the community experienced Web site problems that made downloading the suite extremely slow and at times impossible for users.

Mozilla has released an add-on to Firefox that enables the browser to automatically pinpoint a user's location by communicating with Wi-Fi signals so Web sites can provide customized content to users.

Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday.

Countries whose appeals were dismissed regarding the ISO/IEC's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as an international standard are questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have given the green light to publish the Microsoft-backed Office Open XML (OOXML) specification after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard.

Red Hat and project contributors have released alpha code for Fedora 10, the next version of the community-sponsored, free and open-source Linux distribution that will include enhancements to the audio, security and wireless-connection features of the OS.

While most people know Flash as primarily a multimedia delivery and development technology for Web sites, it is catching on as a front-end user-interface (UI) technology for business applications, an Adobe manager said Wednesday.