Stories about: Open Source Initiative

Running a network without monitoring it is like playing with fire: Sooner or later you're bound to get burned.

Open-source software may not make major inroads into industry-specific enterprise applications, according to an IBM open-source guru.

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

Microsoft's Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving's door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft's representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises.

Scouts honor, the 98-year-old Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization is adopting open source software as a path to building better software that supports the almost 3 million scouts and 1.1 million adults who make up the group.

It was just over a year ago that Microsoft dropped a bombshell of a claim: users of Linux and open-source software were unwittingly violating as many as 235 Microsoft software patents.

Aras was a small, struggling software maker that stirred up a hornet's nest early last year, when it made a pair of seemingly contradictory decisions.

On January 2007, the source code of the client viewer for the online virtual world community Second Life was released as Open Source. It was seen in some circles in the Second Life community as questionable, raising concerns about security and speculation as to why Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, would do such a thing. The popularity of, and media hype for, their virtual real world was huge at the time. So why did the company feel the need to do it?

Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit.

A group of US universities is blazing a new path in open source software. They're building a set of enterprise applications -- the big, important, mission-critical ones that have long been the exclusive domain of software companies such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead.