News

Red Hat is stealing a page from the Second Life playbook and will host an online conference for users and partners of its JBoss Java-based middleware products in which people will have their own avatars and can virtually attend a conference as if it was a live trade show.

The Vietnamese government will move to several open-source applications by the end of next year as the country also tries to reduce the use of pirated software.

Taking aim at the Microsoft Office franchise on the Macintosh, IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony suite of personal productivity applications will come out of beta for the Apple Inc. hardware platform later this month.

Web sites saw visitors deserting Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in favor of Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome in December, according to Web analytics company Net Applications.

The Wikimedia Foundation has raised the necessary funds to operate Wikipedia until the end of June, the nonprofit organization announced Friday.

The Web development frameworks Rails and Merb have decided to end their rivalry and join forces in a single project, they said last week.

The Small Sister open source privacy project has released a first beta of its SmallMail application, allowing individuals to send e-mail messages that can't be intercepted or traced by governments or snoops.

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.

A "clerical error" by Mozilla Corp. omitted one of the security patches that was supposed to be included in the Windows version of yesterday's Firefox 2.0.0.19 release, a company executive said today.

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.

Palamida, a vendor that sells software and services around open-source software security and legal compliance, has named 25 open-source projects companies should not hesitate to use.

A recently-approved technology standard should help software developers to tap the latent processing power of graphics chips and transform regular computers into veritable supercomputers -- at least for certain applications. Poised to take advantage of the technology first is Apple.

Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers could do a better job of protecting passwords, according to a security researcher who released a study of browser password managers Friday.

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community on Wednesday unveiled an upgrade to the open source version of the Solaris Unix OS, OpenSolaris 2008.11. They also revealed plans to have OpenSolaris running on a line of laptops in 2009.

Window Snyder, the head of security at Mozilla Corp., will resign her position at the end of the year, she said in a blog post Wednesday.