Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 percent over proprietary products, according to data collected by Forrester Research. Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester covering database management systems, estimated that average savings on the total cost of ownership are about 50 percent. The data is based on surveys and customer interviews.

In an interesting twist of irony, Oracle, which is taking aim at Linux leader Red Hat for being too expensive, is being undercut with an open source challenge to its namesake database. VoIP vendor Vonage Networks is deploying EnterpriseDB, which is built on top of the open source PostgreSQL database as an alternative to Oracle. EnterpriseDB Advanced Server adds Oracle compatibility to native PostgreSQL as well as performance improvements.

AVG has announced several new versions of their AVG antivirus offering for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD open source platforms. Avalanche will supply the AVG products to consumers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) in Australia and New Zealand.

For some people, when Novell recently made a deal with Microsoft, they might as well have sold their soul to the devil. At the same time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been mouthing off about how Microsoft signed the pact because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."

Speaking at the JBoss World Berlin conference here, Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) market for Red Hat, said JBoss momentum is very high in the EMEA region.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian today issued an "Open Letter to the Community from Novell," in which he defends his company's recent accord with Microsoft, and challenges recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents.

Organizing your favorite Web sites with bookmarks on Firefox can be tedious, especially when you want to keep your bookmarks synchronized across several computers at the same time. That's why I started using del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service now owned by Yahoo! Besides allowing me to access my bookmarks from any computer at any time, del.icio.us does a great job on keeping my bookmarks organized with tags instead of folders, and I can easily share my favorite Web sites with my friends.

"Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents. The agreement between our two companies puts in place a workable solution for customers for these issues, without requiring an agreement between our two companies on infringement.

If Microsoft is seeking for a courtroom collision with the world of free software, it may be disappointed. Novell's decision to accept $348m from Redmond in return for a patent agreement covering its SuSE Linux distribution won't be seen on CourtTV anytime soon, we learn. Instead it's adopting the stealthier strategy of changing the licensing terms under which Novell, which uses the community's code, receives the materials for its commercial product.

Red Hat today delivered more on the vision of Open Source Architecture, by announcing plans to combine a virtualized operating system and a full set of building blocks for building service-oriented solutions to provide a flexible, low-cost foundation for enterprise computing. Red Hat believes that virtualization and SOA are technology strategies that companies should adopt to realize long-term cost savings while increasing productivity and performance.

Multiple domain web hosting provider CirtexHosting has enhanced the developer tools available through its hosting packages and included options which will allow its servers to “record, convert and stream digital audio and video,” the company announced today. The enhancements have been added to all CirtexHosting servers and are available to customers at no additional charge.

Although its name sounds like that of a bacterium, Coccinella is a nice cross-platform open source Jabber client. While Jabber, and IM clients in general, are a dime a dozen, Coccinella sports a few nifty features that make it worth considering.

The South African competition commission has recommended that the acquisition of information technology services company Business Connexion (BCX) by fixed-line operator Telkom be prohibited.

This won't exactly smooth out strained relations. Red Hat's JBoss unit, a potential competitor with Oracle and IBM middleware, will announce this week that it's offering an enterprise service bus, continuing its rapid build-out of an open source middleware stack.

With all the hoopla it could muster, Sun Microsystems made Java, its portable programming language and closely held software gem, an open source commodity last week. The highly anticipated move means more technology products based on Java and more street cred for Sun.

Spreadsheets are primarily used online. For this reason, printing them can be challenging even to experienced users. However, OpenOffice.org offers more help than most spreadsheets with printing, starting with the introduction of page styles. In this entry, I'll explain how Calc page styles can help with printing spreadsheets. In Part II, I'll continue by explaining the other tools available for printing in Calc.

A few months back on Kairosnews, we had a long discussion with Michael Bruton, a representative of Turnitin, a commercial "plagiarism detection and prevention service." In short, the question was whether it was ethical for teachers to use the service, since it involves uploading students' essays into turnitin.com's database, where they will ostensibly be encrypted and then used to guard against its being used illicitly in the future. Students at various schools across the country have protested the software as well, arguing that (a) the service is very expensive, and student's don't want to pay for it, and (b) they feel it violates their "intellectual property rights."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KTorrent supports the creation of trackerless torrents, with work beginning on a web-based management GUI. Support for browsing the SHOUTcast webradio listings in Amarok. Work starts on a new Planner Summary plugin for Kontact. KDissert is renamed Semantik. Maps of more countries added to KGeography. Version 2 of Kallery, a web image gallery creator, is imported into KDE SVN. Qt3 and KDE 3 Java bindings are removed from KDE SVN, superceded by the developments of Qt Jambi.

A survey by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) commissioned by IBM, Novell and the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation (WRS) concludes that open source is on the ascendant and is stimulating the economy. Surveys by market research companies such as IDC and Gartner have come to similar conclusions.

The Firefox open-source web browser will soon be compatible with Microsoft's CardSpace identity-management technology, since Microsoft has vowed to write the browser a software plug-in. The plug-in will be written at Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab and released eventually to the open-source community, said Hank Janssen, the lab's program manager, at the TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona yesterday.