open...

Open source lies at the heart of Google – it runs a modified form of Linux on its vast server farms, and uses many other free software pr...

It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape's 0.9 version o...

The office suite has occupied a very strange position in the world of open source. As a key software tool used by practically everyone on...

I've noted before that we are witnessing a classic patent thicket in the realm of smartphones, with everyone and his or her dog suing ev...

In the early days of companies based around open source, the questions were: would they make any money? Would they survive? Once it was clea...

In July 1998, the Frenchman Gaël Duval released his new GNU/Linux distribution called Mandrake-Linux. It was a fork of Red Hat using the KDE...

Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spre...

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As o...

One of the many sad aspects of Sun's disappearance into the maw of Oracle is that many will see this as “proof” that its strategy of bui...

So, it finally happened: We are pleased to announce that Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Sun is now a wholly ow...

One of the deep ironies of the free software world, which is predicated on freedom, is that it effectively requires people to become experts...

This interview about the EU's intervention on the Oracle-Sun deal made me chortle: Q: What is the motivation for the EC itself? Weiss: ...

Predictably, the EU's announcement that it would be conducting an "in-depth investigation into proposed takeover of Sun Microsyste...

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called “Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement“, which began: Can...

I've often written about particular instances where Microsoft has bullied competitors; it's a pretty sorry tale. But that story bec...

If you were looking for a sign of the times in computing, you could do worse than consider the trajectory of Scott McNealy. When he was runn...

Words matter, which is why one of the shrewdest moves was the labelling of copyright infringement - an act that, when carried out by individ...

...And probably didn't want to. Thanks to that nice Mr Mark Surman, I have been not only tagged but also subjected to fiendishly-cleve...

Hmm, not sure whether this is totally good news: The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technolog...

Free software has tended to serve the leading edge of the computing community - hackers, etc. - first. General users have tended to follow l...