Stories about: General Motors

In offering an open source version of the Solaris operating system, Sun Microsystems' main intent was to expand the open source community rather than to grab business from the rival Linux OS, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz said at a conference on Tuesday.

IT infrastructure services giant EDS has drawn a line in the sand over the way it intends to drum up new infrastructure business, with selective sourcing, open source and IBM definitely not part of the equation.

If purchasing software were as straightforward as buying a car, users would not have to think twice about the risk of intellectual property lawsuits.

The chances of a user being sued for intellectual property (IP) infringement related to software usage are slim, industry observers say. But that may change, as some companies hoard patents for the express purpose of using them to extract money from sellers and users of software.

That was the message sent by users and other industry experts last week at the Enterprise Linux Forum Conference & Expo, where attendees swapped stories of Linux and open source usage in site-to-site VPNs, computer-telephony integration and Web services technology, among other areas.

The Liberty Alliance Project has released version 1.1 of its open specifications for federated network identity as a maintenance update to version 1.0 released in July, the business and technology consortium said Tuesday in a statement.

Sun Microsystems has released an open-source tool for developers that will allow them to begin testing network identity applications that use the Liberty Alliance specification, the company said Wednesday at the SunNetwork conference here.

General Motors has purchased 17 of IBM's p690 servers to create a powerful supercomputing cluster for the design of new automobiles, IBM said in a release Thursday.

Another 30 companies have thrown their support behind Liberty Alliance Project, an effort to create a standard technology that allows users to travel password-protected Web sites using a single user name and password.

Both Microsoft Corp. and the Liberty Alliance are moving forward at full force in the race to provide a secure single sign-on system for Web services.

In a move to increase revenue and its services business, Linux and Unix vendor Caldera will now offer global support for other brands of Linux, including those of Red Hat and SuSE Linux AG.