When I wrote my book about Moore’s Law early this decade I knew there were many areas where Moore’s Law did not apply. Software for one. Training for another. (Picture from Yes-Minister.com.) Government is a third. In the U.S. Constitution this is a feature and not a bug. The three branc...

Maybe I’m showing my age, but once upon a time Microsoft was the scrappy little guy preaching openness and IBM was the big bad ogre trying to close things down. This was in the 1980s, during the dance between OS/2 and Windows. (Remember the MicroChannel bus? Good times.) It is amazing how comp...

Hard times make for hard choices. The loss of control implied by cloud computing, which may have been inconceivable in 2008, may become much more appealing in 2009. (My son took this picture on a hiking trip in the Smokies this summer. So credit John F. Blankenhorn.) The Yankee Group sent over an e-...

Bouncing along the bottom of a recession is not where most people think of doing long term planning. But open source doesn’t think first about money, so the Open World Forum has taken a long, hard look into the deep future of the year 2020. (I will be 64 when that year opens, hence the headlin...

Once again the folks at Ingres are out with a version of their open source, enterprise-class database — Version 9.2 this time. It’s filled with nifty new features and buzzwords. Best of all you can download it right now. Ingres is based on an implementation of PostgreSQL, which itself wa...

Industrial policy is a long-held conservative shibboleth. It’s a code word, government choosing winners and losers, government bad, government replacing the market, socialism, communism. How far you go down that slippery slope shows how devoted you are to the ideology. It has become clear to m...

After a three-year incubation period Sun’s long promised OpenSolaris, the third open source variant of Unix, was officially delivered Monday.  “It’s the first Opensolaris operating system that’s fully supported,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing for...

MuleSource has launched a major upgrade of its open source Enterprise Service Bus software that offers a new Eclipse integrated development environment, easier configuration and stronger Spring integration. Mule 2.0 Community Edition was made available on April 1. The company’s commercial enterpri...

Like it or not, Microsoft’s OOXML – now known as IS 29500 — has received the proper number of votes to become an ISO standard. And the Redmond, Washington company is wasting no time rejoicing the turnaround win. In his blog today, Jason Matusow, a key Microsoft executive responsible for OO...

Snark alert. Amanda McPherson, marketing director at the Linux Foundation, has taken apart Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’ arguments for Open Solaris on her blog. At his company’s Global Summit, Schwartz defended Sun’s open source strategy and said he will be targeting “Web 2.0...