Stories about: Viewpoint

Even before Red Hat bought the virtualization company Qumranet, with its Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform, Red Hat had made it clear that it was moving into virtualization in a big way. At its annual Red Hat Summit in June, the Linux powerhouse announced that it would be deploying its Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt, which is based on KVM in its server line. This lightweight, embeddable hypervisor currently enables users to run run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows VMs on Linux.

For a long time, Google has led a largely blissful existence, fostering a widespread perception -- sometimes in direct contradiction to the facts -- that it can do no wrong. Yet the company's controversial Android mobile platform venture threatens to seriously dent this notion, at least with some of the people it needs most.

Lulu Inc. CEO Bob Young is a major voice in the open source software industry, but according to him the entire community has been unjustifiably ignored throughout the Canadian government's copyright reform initiatives.

I've loved Firefox since version 0.93. It was so much better than Internet Explorer and the other alternatives that I couldn't imagine using anything else. But, then Firefox's memory leaks went from annoying me to ticking me off; I started having real stability problems with it on both Windows and Linux; and security holes started appearing far more often. I was about to switch to Safari on Windows and MacOS and Konqueror on Linux, when Mozilla got serious about not just fixing, but rebuilding Firefox. Now, Firefox 3 release candidate 1 was released early. Based on my quick look at it, I may end up sticking with Firefox after all.

After its initial submission for fast tracking through the ISO/IEC process for standardisation failed, the technical comments relating to Microsoft's Office Open XML document format are under review this week at the JTC1 Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva.

Is Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for prime time? IBM apparently thinks so as it prepares to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0 sometime in the second half of this year.

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.

IBM's move to develop its own suite of productivity applications to compete with Microsoft's Office software is part of a larger war the two companies are waging in the market for employee collaboration applications.

Someday robots will do more than vacuum your floors. They will train you, advise you and help you remember things as they strive to improve your quality of life.

Whitfield Diffie has been credited with making privacy possible in the digital age. As a co-inventor of public key cryptography, he is one of the most respected contributors to the field of computer security and is in constant demand as a speaker.

A Massachusetts Senate committee released a report Thursday criticizing the state's Information Technology Division (ITD), claiming that its "unilateral" plan to move all state employees to use software that reads and writes files in the OpenDocument format was poorly planned, ignored the needs of handicapped workers and violated state law.