Stories about: Linspire

One of the first commercial Linux distributions aimed at the average computer user, Linspire, has just been sold to Xandros and undergone a name change to Digital Cornerstone. Xandros may not be very commonly known, but it is the distro being used by Asus on the EeePC.

New York-based Linux company Xandros on Wednesday bought Linspire, another open source distributor in a bid to increase its presence in the enterprise, an executive said.

Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option.

The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community.

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.

Linux visionary Hans Reiser has been convicted of first-degree murder for killing his estranged wife in 2006 and faces life imprisonment.

In the second part of Computerworld's analysis of the Office Open XML debate, platform strategy manager for Microsoft, Sarah Bond, and several Microsoft gold partners offer their views on why the OOXML format should become an internationally approved standard.

There's a scene in the 2004 movie Mean Girls in which the most popular girl in the film's fictional high school finds out that a friend who now is a fast-rising social rival plans to throw a party without inviting her.

Microsoft is offering updates on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).

Microsoft and Turbolinux., a Tokyo-based Linux distributor, are cozying up with a patent cross-licensing deal and agreement to work more closely together, the companies said this week.

Cross-platform virtualisation is top of the list of projects that a new joint development lab operated by Microsoft and Novell will work on, executives said.