open...

Remember MySQL? Most famous for being part of the LAMP stack, and thus powering the bulk of the innovative work done in the field of ec...

One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a glo...

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 am really quite relieved Google is trying to acquire Motorola Mobility. Not because I think it will solve all the problems of Android - it...

Android is under serious threat. Not so much commercially, where it continues to trounce its rivals and take an ever-larger market share aro...

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...

Regular readers of this column will know that I'm something of a fan of forks, but even I was surprised when OpenOffice.org was forked b...

Over on the RedMonk blog, there's an entertaining post by James Governor on the subject of forks, prompted by the imminent arrival of a ...

There's an important conference taking place in Brussels next week: "Tensions between Intellectual Property Rights and the ICT sta...

One of the most shocking aspects of Oracle's lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringement was its unexpected nature...

Last week I wrote a piece entitled “Are We Entering the Golden Age of Forks?” I concluded: I predict we are going to see plenty more forks i...

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...

This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Andro...

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...

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...