Stories by: Matt Berger

Looking to strengthen its position in the software development tools market, IBM announced Monday that an additional 13 vendors have agreed to join its open source project Eclipse, and will offer tools that plug into the development environment.

Developers from the loosely-knit Mono project this week made available more bits and pieces of their technology, as they slowly plug away at creating an open source version of Microsoft Corp.'s .Net initiative. Meanwhile, plans for a complete release of the technology have been put on hold.

RealNetworks Inc. on Monday delivered another component in its strategy to offer a complete set of open source software for creating, delivering and playing back audio and video files over the Internet.

A survey from research company IDC finds that organizations running Windows 2000 spend less in the long run for some tasks, such as print and file serving, compared with organizations running Linux.

Sun Microsystems will release a software development kit in the middle of next year that will allow businesses to customize applications in its open source StarOffice productivity suite to better suit their needs, an executive for the company said Wednesday.

Musicians might recognize the name Ernie Ball as an icon credited with being an electric guitar industry pioneer. Ernie Ball Inc., the global manufacturer of guitar strings, electric guitars and basses, that bears his name, is now making a name for itself as a software industry pioneer.

Linux vendor MandrakeSoft SA has appointed François Bancilhon chief executive officer of the Paris-based desktop and workstation Linux operating system vendor.

A standards body known for creating key technologies around XML (Extensible Markup Language) said Wednesday that it has launched an effort to develop a standard file format that would allow office documents such as spreadsheets and word processing files to be opened by applications from different vendors.

Four Linux vendors collaborating on a common operating system will announce Tuesday the availability of their first commercial release, called UnitedLinux 1.0, according to information from member companies.

A group of PC industry veterans Tuesday took the cloak off a new company called StepUp Computing LLC, and revealed its first product -- a low-cost, pen-based tablet computer that can run Windows 2000, Windows XP, and coming soon, a version of the Linux operating system from Lindows.com.

Desktop Linux operating system vendors made news last week as Xandros Corp. Tuesday reintroduced the Linux operating system formerly developed by Corel Corp. with a release called Xandros Desktop 1.0. Meanwhile, Lindows.com Inc. announced it would ship the final build of its operating system some time next month.