24 Days Ago - At the risk of coming off like TV's "Mad Men," Amazon Web Services really are New and Improved. The company today announced the addition of Amazon Relational Database Service, giving users of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) access to a virtual instance of MySQL. That's the New part.... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - It’s a new day for open source developers. A U.S. Federal appeals court yesterday ruled that someone releasing code under an open source license can control future use of that code using copyright law. That’s important because copyright laws carry stronger remedies—including court injunction—along... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2008 - A year ago last week, Facebook released the Facebook Platform, enabling users of the social network to create their own applications. Today, 400,000 developers and 24,000 applications later, the company introduced the Facebook Open Platform, which releases much of the Facebook Platform source code... (Read More)

May 27th, 2008 - Here’s a new twist on the open source craze. Fabless chip and system designer Via Technologies has released to the community OpenBook, a reference design for a low cost ultra portable laptop that runs Windows or Linux at up to 1.2 GHz and includes WiFi, BlueTooth and high-res 3D graphics... (Read More)

May 29th, 2009 - Busy this weekend? President Barack Obama and his IT staff are asking for ideas through June 3 to help make government more open. The call for ideas first went out on May 21. So far, there's 1171. People can vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the ideas. "Then on June 3rd, the most compelling... (Read More)

May 23rd, 2009 - Jason Perlow and I had the pleasure of interviewing Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong for the May 22nd episode of Frugal Friday to discuss the Kickfire appliance. The Kickfire appliance is a Linux-based, rack-mountable, database appliance tuned for Data Warehousing. Here's the real scoop: Starting at... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2008 - Alfresco released Alfresco Labs (Beta) 3 today and with it announced a new capability that enables businesses to leverage Microsoft Sharepoint functionality without buying additional Sharepoint licenses. Sound too good to be true? It’s not, and what has allowed Alfresco to do this is the 2004 EU... (Read More)

Mar 2nd, 2009 - Seems every time I write a piece suggesting open source as an option, I get a couple of comments warning readers about the scary complexities of open source licenses. So I decided to ask a guy who knows free and open source (FOSS) exactly what the deal was regarding FOSS licensing and whether they... (Read More)

Nov 18th, 2008 - In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing... (Read More)

Nov 6th, 2008 - Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer. Microsoft... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source... (Read More)

Apr 8th, 2009 - Just as the excitement started to hot up, first with the news that the controversial and increasingly popular legal free streaming music service Spotify was to open up with the release of a third party developer API, and then with the actual announcement of the availability of Libspotify itself, so... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - According to ChannelWeb a federal judge sitting in the US Court of Appeals has ruled that open source software licenses are legal under copyright law. This is a complete u-turn on a previous ruling which had thrown the not so small matter of open source licensing into something of a legal quagmire.... (Read More)

Nov 24th, 2007 - The new version of the GNU Affero General Public License has been published by the Free Software Foundation, based upon the existing GNU GPLv3 license but with one important difference: support for on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to... (Read More)

Nov 21st, 2008 - A few years ago, small businesses just needed a telephone line and maybe a single computer with a dial-up connection to set up shop. Now that technology has exploded, nearly every company needs a reliable phone system, a Web site, and maybe even a whole network of computers to stay competitive. ... (Read More)

Nov 17th, 2008 - If you've been clinging to the interoffice email and calendaring capabilities of Microsoft Exchange as your company's last vestige of proprietary software, it's really time to consider giving up the ghost. Open source collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange, Inc. announced recently it now... (Read More)

Nov 12th, 2008 - There's plenty of speculation that the current state of the economy will greatly benefit open source technology, and you know an idea is taking root when mainstream IT conferences include presentations about implementing FOSS solutions in enterprise. Desmond Atkinson, with UK-based capacity... (Read More)

Nov 11th, 2008 - There's a kerfuffle brewing in the Sunshine State over who owns the rights to the software that powers certain alcohol breath-test machines. The outcome may mean the difference between a valid or false DUI charge on your permanent driving record. The machine in question, the Intoxilyzer 8000,... (Read More)

Nov 3rd, 2008 - If the state of the economy has got you down and you're ready to stop throwing money at commercial software vendors, you might be overwhelmed at the amount of open source options that exist. Buck up, IT soldier, here are three applications that let you dip your toes in the pool without jumping in... (Read More)

Aug 26th, 2008 - There's an old and tired theory that open source solutions in enterprise are risky because there's no "single throat to choke" if things go wrong. It's time to retire that worn out idea. The process goes something like this: The IT department gets into a discussion with the big bosses about how... (Read More)

Sep 10th, 2007 - Qualcomm is best known for two things: making mobile phone chips and owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software. Or perhaps I should say once owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software as Qualcomm stopped selling it back in May and handed over the codebase to the... (Read More)