Stories by: Scarlet Pruitt

IBM claimed one of the largest European deployments of Linux on the mainframe on Wednesday, adding that it was testimony to the continuing vitality of its mainframe business.

The U.S. Army has tapped IBM to provide a high-performance computing system using Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), in a project that aims to create one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

In a sign that Google is moving closer to launching its much-anticipated initial public offering (IPO), the search giant opened a Web site on Friday where investors can register to bid for the company's shares.

Skype Technologies, which offers software that allows users to make free phone calls over the Internet, said Friday that it is closer to launching a new prepay service in which users can make cheap calls to any phone around the world from their PCs.

Open standards and interoperability consortium The Open Group is calling on software developers and the IT industry at large to declare their independence from proprietary technology, in what the group is touting as a virtual call to arms against closed standards.

Sun Microsystems has said it is thinking about offering some of its Java Enterprise System (JES) under an open source license, although no final decisions have been made.

Two and a half years after launching its Trustworthy Computing initiative Microsoft is finding its products the target of escalating attacks, to the extent that some security experts are even warning that the company's Internet Explorer (IE) browser is simply not safe to use.

The Mozilla Foundation made an updated version of its Firefox Web browser available this week, offering new extension and theme managers, a changed default look and improved migration capabilities, in what it says is an important step in the anticipation of the group's Firefox 1.0 release.

Cisco Systems is investigating the possible theft of proprietary source code that drives its networking hardware, a company representative confirmed Monday.

Sun Microsystems Inc. began sinking its teeth into the "new" European Union this week, saying that it has signed a no-charge education licensing program with the Hungarian government that will make its StarOffice 7 productivity suite available to 5,500 schools and 67 higher educational institutions in the country.

Embattled Linux-based software vendor Lindows.com formally changed the name of its desktop operating system from LindowsOS to "Linspire" on Wednesday, after a two-year trademark dispute with Microsoft.