Ahh, it seems that Novell didn't know until two weeks before its infamous deal with Microsoft was announced that there was a sine qua non patent component to the thing. The poor little innocent thought Microsoft was negotiating interoperability for the sake of interoperability until Mi

The previous CTP of Acropolis felt bloated, slow, and the development was tedious. I kept telling myself that the suffering is for the greater good because a composited, loosely coupled, building-block style application will be easier to maintain and easier to upgrade and be more relia

Vista is getting some traction as a client OS now and that means developers are starting to see on the horizon that they should begin to support it. This is good and bad. Good because there are lots of cool things for developers in Vista, but bad because Vista changes the game quite a

As you probably know, Silverlight is Microsoft's new RIA technology platform. It purports to provide a single development platform that will allow you to deploy WPF-like rich applications to multiple operating systems through multiple browsers. For example, you can write your XAML and

Bloomberg reports being told by three knowledge albeit anonymous people that the European Commission has sent a second questionnaire to Microsoft's rivals asking for specific evidence of Microsoft abusing its monopoly in word processing and spreadsheets and withholding technical data a

Tools like Astoria are a fantastic tool by which we can expose data in a way that jives with the vision of the semantic web. The problem is that there are business concerns to exposing data on the web, not the least of which is of course -how do you charge people for that data? How do

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has confirmed that it will rule on Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's pricey 2004 antitrust decision on Monday September 17, the day before the head of the court Bo Vesterdorf retires. Reuters got the date early last month so this

Everex is taking a different tack with this open source stuff and is going to sell a $298 Vista Home Basic-based back-to-school PC at Wal-Mart's with OpenOffice 2.2, saving the user the cost of Office and letting him get used to the idea of running open source software in the protected

What I really like about Bonjour isn't that you can use it to discover nearby iTunes libraries for music sharing (that's how iTunes actually does use Bonjour) or that you can use Bonjour to discover nearby printers (also a legitimate use, that's how I discovered my HP scanner-fax-print

Three CIOs later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was going to ditch Microsoft over its proprietary formats and gave the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) a lot of credibility, has in hand a draft proposal recognizing Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format as an open standar

Turbolinux CEO Koichi Yano is quoted as saying, 'We support the work the Sourceforge open source community has done to date and felt it was important to become a part of this amazing collaborative effort. Our hope in joining this project is to not only contribute our own expertise in w

Microsoft was pretty transparent when it called Longhorn Windows Server 2008. On Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver COO Kevin Turner said Windows Server 2008 would launch on February 27, 2008 at festivities in Los Angeles that reverberate worldwide and also c

Samba, the open source networked file and print project, and one of the biggest burrs under Microsoft's saddle, particularly with the European Commission, has adopted GPLv3 for all future versions of its code. It is the first major win for the Free Software Foundation outside FSF's ow

The rewritten GPL 3 license, modified to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, has been released and Microsoft's reaction has been to issue a statement saying it's not a party to it, has no legal obligations under it, and that the Free Software Foundation is on shaky legal grou

In justifying his deal with Microsoft in an open letter and explaining that there's market demand for functionality that can only be filled by proprietary widgetry, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that 'some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground'

Mandriva says it won't follow Novell, Linspire and Xandros into Microsoft's lair and wants no part of any stinkin' Microsoft patent protection scheme. CEO Francois Bancilhon says he has seen 'no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagandists that Linux and open source applications are

The Reader's Choice Awards recognize the best tools, solutions, and education offerings in nine categories. The category Winners and Finalists were selected through reader-submitted nominations, followed by online voting at .NET Developer's Journal (http ://dotnet.sys-con.com), the worl

The controversial GPLv3 rewrite came into effect at noon New York time on Friday, putting key pieces of the GNU Linux operating system off-limits to friends of Microsoft like Xandros and Linspire if they ever want to upgrade. Novell's hackles-raising deal with Microsoft was grandfather

In short, unless my findings are incorrect, Silverlight, as it stands now, with no support for data binding, service consumption, or basic UI controls, is a worthless steamy pile. I just took a huge step in Flex's direction.

So I was watching a bunch of video clips from the Transformers movie the other day (pretty much what I do every evening...) and I got to thinking : it would be ridiculously cool to have a Transformers MMO. If you think hard about it, it could have everything that a gamer could ever wan

At this point, we should think about the permissions our component needs. We're creating our own code group and permission set, so we start from scratch: this means that we'll have no permissions at all to start with. So, in addition to the permission to call unmanaged code (which we n

StateMirror offers a technology solution that complements server-side storage mechanisms provided by Microsoft. The central tenant of StateMirror technology is the concept of ?mirrored state servers.? Each of the mirrored servers is implemented by a Windows service that can run on any

Having bowed to the Linux enthusiasts - at least in America - and having given them PCs with Ubuntu installed at the factory, Dell is now being pressured to sell the boxes worldwide, offer the same discounts as it does on Windows machines, make the Linux boxes cheaper than the same con

Canonical's billionaire CEO Mark Shuttleworth took to his blog to squelch speculation that Canonical and Ubuntu would be next to follow in the steps of Novell, Xandros and Linspire and cut a patent deal with Microsoft, deals he calls 'trinkets in exchange for air kisses.' That of cours

Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government and is going modify Vista to hush Google's complaints that it discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own desktop 'Instant Search.' The move comes after Google charged Microsoft with violating its

I have been poking around inside Acropolis for a little while now and have been attempting to make it work for some sample, proof-of-concept style apps. Basically whenever I get a new technology in my grubby little hands, I don't stick to 'Hello World' apps, I try and simulate a real-w

Recursion Software a provider of intelligent middleware and distributed computing solutions, has announced a powerful, mobile application development and .NET interoperability for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Building on its partnership with Red Hat?s JBoss Division, Recu

You think that everything is going your way today, but you're wrong. Happily listening to your music- noise-cancelling headphones blotting out the screeching whine of nearby co-workers- you are unaware of the impending doom. You're kicking ass and taking names, the code is compiling, p

A reported 150 Penguinistas gathered last week at Google at a three-day first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that ended last Friday and, according to Reuters, after they emerge from their closed-door meetings they're supposed to 'issue a consensus statement this week on wha

In case you've been living under a rock, or you don't spend all day hitting Refresh on Microsoft sites waiting for new stuff to come out, Acropolis is a new framework currently in CTP (Community Technology Preview) from Microsoft. Basically Acropolis is a framework providing support fo

Recently, I posted an article that basically pointed out that online journalist Mary Jo Foley had posted an article that was really a bunch of sensationalist clickbaiting, claiming that Leopard was ripping off Vista. Anybody that uses 'Cupertino, Start your Photocopies' and 'Leopard lo

The crazy people are far more interactive in SF than they are in NYC. Most of the crazy folks in NYC just kind of talk to themselves and generally mind their own business. Their San Francisco counterparts actually step in front of you and attempt to engage you in conversation about the

OK. Bottom line here is I'm dissapointed. I've considered Mary Jo's articles to be unbiased and relatively objective in the past. What I'm looking at in her article is basically a piece of imflammatory nonsense. If she had taken the time to do some more digging, she would have found th

My goodness, they're starting to fall like nine pins. Linux distributor Linspire has followed Novell and Xandros into a patent protection deal with Microsoft despite the fire-breathing, contract-scorching wrath of the Free Software Foundation and its GPL 3 spoiler. Microsoft might have

Parasoft Corporation announced the upcoming release of Parasoft .TEST 4.0, an integrated solution for automating a broad range of best practices proven to increase software development team productivity and software quality. Parasoft .TEST ensures developers that their .NET code works

Intel is working with Taiwan-based Asustek Computer on a counter to One Laptop Per Child's AMD-based currently $175 XO notebooks. The full-fledged Intel-Asustek PC will start at $199 and go to $299. Other than a low-end Intel chip, the widgets will have a seven- or 10-inch screen, Wi-F

At this point, it feels as though Acropolis is a layer of abstraction on top of WPF itself. Basically when you build an Acropolis (I'm going to call it AFX , since that's a crapload easier to type, and all the controls are prefixed as 'AFX') you get an Application and a main window. In

Microsoft has bought a little privately held Cincinnati firm called Engyro. A Microsoft partner, Engyro extends the interoperability of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Its Product Connector Suite lets Operations Manager share alert/event information with different enterprise man

Mono version 1.2.4 has just been released. Typically source code for a release is branched off for final clean up and bug fixing, with the release coming a few days to a week later; for this version, there were almost 25 days between branch and release. This may have been due in part t

'We consistently hear from customers that they spend too much time and budget maintaining the systems they have, which leaves limited resources to focus on innovative solutions,' Muglia said. 'With Dynamic IT, we are bringing together the capabilities of the core infrastructure and the