Stories by: Robert Mullins

High-performance computing centers are the Indy cars of the technology industry: built for speed and little else. Let the other guys build the Corollas and Civics for economy.

Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat and VMware.

Red Hat is updating its Linux-based server operating system and offering a number of other related improvements aimed at helping the company assume a leadership role in enterprise computing. The enhancements include support for software appliances, improved virtualization, and a partnership with Amazon's compute "in the cloud" service that lets companies tap additional computing capacity on demand via the Web and access software-as-a service offerings.

XAware, a provider of commercial data integration software, is now going the open source route, introducing the latest version of its product, XAware 5, under the GPL v2 license.

By developing a version of its open source desktop Firefox Web browser to run on mobile devices, Mozilla hopes to break the hold some handset makers and carriers have on what mobile applications consumers can use, an executive of the company says.

Oracle has released a database driver free to the open source community that improves retrieval of data from Oracle databases for Web applications developed using PHP.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Red Hat Linux uses intellectual property owned by Microsoft and that Red Hat's customers should pay Microsoft for it.

VMware, whose new VMW stock ticker symbol sounds remarkably like a luxury sports car, roared off the starting line in its first day as a public company Tuesday.

Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, speaks about the open-source movement and new products SpikeSource introduced at LinuxWorld.

The virtual appliance model could be a major threat to operating systems from major vendors such as Microsoft, says a cofounder of VMWare.

Hewlett-Packard's ambition to build the "next-generation data center" depends on Linux and open source, an HP executive said at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Wednesday.