Free Republic

Hewlett-Packard has no plans to preload versions of the upcoming Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 on PCs but will certify the operating system. Plans call for HP to certify SLED 10 for select notebooks--including the nx6310, nx6320, nc6320, nc2400, nx6315 and nx6325 models--before the year's end, a spokeswoman for HP said in response to questions from CRN.

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10...

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...

BRUSSELS (MarketWatch) -- A U.S. court in New York on Thursday quashed a Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) subpoena for International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM) documents related to the software company's European anti-trust case, Microsoft said Thursday. Judge Colleen McMahon said Microsoft's subpoena amounted to a "blatant end run" on the European Commission's authority. The judge noted that the Brussels-based regulator strongly opposed Microsoft's request and said enforcing such a subpoena could harm U.S. sovereignty if a foreign court were used to obtain documents in a U.S. proceeding. Microsoft says the commission is colluding with IBM and other rivals and denying...

I'll leave a fuller examination of Vista's broken promises for a later date. For now, let's look at the most current builds we do have--build 5308 and 5342--and see where Vista just completely blows it. As with the broken promises, Vista's failures are legion, but I'll just focus on a few examples here and leave the full list for a later time.

Oracle is studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world, according to Larry Ellison, the software company’s chief executive officer. Such a move would redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long rivalry with US rival Microsoft. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ellison said that Oracle wanted to sell a full “stack” of software that, like Microsoft, included both operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a complete stack,” he said. “We’re missing...

Last November I described the Free Software's Surprising Affinity with Catholic Doctrine. Since then, several important things happened, from feedback by Stallman and other Free SW users to the birth, or acceleration, of some projects specifically based on the concept that Christians have even more reasons than others to adopt Free Software.

A picture is worth millions of words.

Microsoft today lobbed three massive bombs into the server virtualization market. First off, it will now support - wait for it - Linux, when the OS is running on top of its Virtual Server product. Secondly, Microsoft has made Virtual Server free. And, in a move few thought possible, Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware.

Over the next five years, Oracle is predicting annual growth of 12 percent for the open source OS Linux adoptions are to grow in the next three to five years at nearly triple the rate of Windows, according to Oracle. In an interview at the LinuxWorld conference in Sydney, the database company suggested Linux deployments had grown beyond an adoption phase, and were now becoming ubiquitous in small and large businesses alike. Monica Kumar, director of Oracle's Linux programme office, pointed to the open source operating system becoming mainstream as "businesses are looking to Linux as a way to save...

Dell will be partnering with Novell in April to provide server customers with a single console to manage hardware and software on Linux servers.

Sun Microsystems plans to release on Tuesday the underlying design of its UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor under the terms of the General Public License. The move fulfills a commitment to employ the widely used open-source license that Sun President Jonathan Schwartz made at the Open Source Business Conference in January. David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's Sparc server group, is expected to discuss the move at the MultiCore Expo, which runs Tuesday through Thursday in Santa Clara, Calif., where Sun also has its headquarters. Sun's UltraSparc T1 has eight processing engines, called cores, each able to run four simultaneous...

This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer."

IBM switching to Linux destops in Germany according to a Linux Forum 2006 presentation by their head of open source and Linux sales in Germany. Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement... "Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM...