Enterprise: News

Red Hat Thursday unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs, the company said.

Novell's OpenSuse project is becoming more open, as a new release due out Thursday includes licensing changes that make it easier to redistribute the Linux operating system, and a build service that will encourage more contributions from open source developers.

Linux distributor Red Hat invested in open-source business-intelligence vendor JasperSoft on Wednesday as part of a US$12.5 million round of funding for the company.

Open Invention Network, which buys patents related to the Linux operating system and licenses them royalty-free, Tuesday launched a program aimed at encouraging open-source developers to document information about their work so that it can be easily read and used by patent offices and lawyers.

Michael "Monty" Widenius, original developer of the open-source database MySQL, put a damper on Sun Microsystems' recent release of MySQL 5.1 with his now-infamous Nov. 29 blog post trashing the company's decision to give the update a "generally available" designation.

When people think of software pirates, they usually envision college kids downloading games off BitTorrent, or adults getting too-good-to-be-true bargains off eBay, or street stalls lined with DVDs in Third World cities.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a free plug-in for Firefox to translate Open XML documents, an update to its document translator and a toolkit for Java developers that was built under the umbrella of its Document Interoperability Initiative.

The terrorists that attacked various locations in south Mumbai last week used digital maps from Google Earth to learn their way around, according to officials investigating the attacks.

Google late last week claimed results of in-house data sorting tests bolster its claims that its MapReduce technology can manipulate more data faster than any conventional database.

CA is expected to announce a product and services initiative titled "Mainframe 2.0" on Tuesday at its CA World 2008 conference in Las Vegas.

Open source management software provider Hyperic this week introduced an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.