Enterprise

A surge in demand for netbooks is helping drive business for Linux, as the devices are designed to be low-cost with smaller storage, according to Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for Linux.

Mozilla has released an add-on to Firefox that enables the browser to automatically pinpoint a user's location by communicating with Wi-Fi signals so Web sites can provide customized content to users.

David Kernell is facing five years in prison for allegedly hacking into Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account, but lawyers watching the case say that the felony charge against him is a bit of a stretch.

Wikia Search, an open-source search tool launched early this year by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, today opened its platform with a new application programming interface (API) that allows individuals or business to create interactive search results.

Red Hat is expanding its open-source JBoss SOA platform with the unveiling Wednesday of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1.

As we've seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there's no free ride.

Over the last few years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other organizations looking to eliminate the illegal swapping of digital media files have attacked the problem through the courts, publicity campaigns, and other means. But while they've managed to close down some peer-to-peer operations, and have successfully (and not so successfully) sued individuals who were uploading movies and music to the Web, there is one part of the Internet that has, until now, been operating under their radar: Usenet.

Oracle's annual OpenWorld show is usually a showcase for its enterprise software. This year, however, it was all about hardware, as CEO Larry Ellison introduced a new family of database/storage products last week that it had been working on with partner Hewlett-Packard for three years.

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly nongeek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two most well-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

The purpose of this article is to examine the long-term effects of the Unix vs. Windows decision with respect to the business needs of a hypothetical medium-size auditing and related services firm.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and CTO at the Linux Foundation. Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena versus Linux.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World.

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO - a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst's chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open-source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.

Jonathan Oxer is technical director of a Web application development company called Internet Vision Technologies and for the past couple of years has been president of the Linux Australia community group. At January's Linux.conf.au in Melbourne he presented a tutorial entitled Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World. Computerworld recently spoke to Oxer about how he is knocking down the boundaries between the real and virtual world. Oxer also sheds light on his how his lifetime obsession with electronics has transformed his home-life into a software controlled environment.

T-Mobile, HTC and Google launched the "world's first Android-powered mobile phone" today and proudly announced that this phone was going to be "game-changing". But after reading details on the phone, the service and some of the new applications, I'm left wondering where the game is actually changing.

Service-oriented architectures are helping companies do everything from automate business processes to increase agility, but implementing the technology is not necessarily forthright.

I'm not above engaging in a little shameless name-dropping, especially when I know the dropped name will spark a reaction. So while chatting with attendees at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week, I made no secret of the fact that I had interviewed Richard Stallman a few days earlier. I marveled at the awe and admiration on the faces of many of my listeners.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says, "Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the "suing Linux users" jig is up.

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

As the window to the Internet, the Web browser is arguably the most important application ever developed, and it will only become more important in the coming years, as applications continue their retreat from the local system and into Web frameworks built on Apache, IIS, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and countless other languages and tools. Against this backdrop, today's official introduction of Firefox 3 may in fact be a watershed event in the history of computing.

Open source observers can argue until the end of time over the validity of developing and enhancing free software for Windows, but the fact remains OpenOffice.org is thoroughly committed to the platform and continues to produce a top-notch, cross-platform office productivity suite that work perfectly well on Windows. In this article, we take a look at getting the latest OpenOffice.org 3.0 developer build up-and-running for Windows XP.

It might be heresy to try to manage a Linux server from a Microsoft platform . But that is what QCD Microsystems has attempted with its InterStructures Microsoft Management Console (MMC)-based series of applets. With these plug-ins, Linux services such as DHCP, DNS, SAMBA and Squid Web proxy (and soon Apache 2.0), are managed from the familiar look and feel offered by the MMC. Our tests showed that the InterStructures modules are simple to install, and provide a single, convenient, drag-and-drop interface to manage a combined Windows/Linux infrastructure.

It wasn't that long ago that Linux made for a decent server and a geek's workstation. Now, Linux makes for an enterprise-class server.

Do any of these situations describe your company?