Jason Brooks

As my Linux-Watch colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting, SCO’s four-and-a-half year crusade to undermine the credibility of the Linux platform is now in its final throes. I realize that this choice of phrase doesn’t exactly convey supreme confidence that Linux is ready to leave its intellectual property FUD troubles behind, but that’s because the […]

Last month, Fortune magazine ran an interesting article about how Microsoft got its groove on in the massive Chinese market by striking deals with Chinas government and how Microsofts success in China appears to be coming at the expense of Linux and open-source software. The Fortune article points specifically to Chinas homegrown Red Flag Linux […]

VMware Fusion Melds Apple OS X with Windows While Apples OS X enjoys a healthy and broad software ecosystem of its own, theres no avoiding the fact that many vital applications, both commercial and in-house, will run only on Microsoft Windows. Enter VMware Fusion, a new product that enables OS X users to work around […]

As my LinuxDevices.com colleague Henry Kingman reported this morning, Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to acquire thin-client vendor Neoware. This looks like a smart move for HP. Endpoint security problems, including lost, stolen or otherwise subverted client systems, remain a major problem for enterprises, and thin clients offer one of the best solutions for limiting client […]

Recently, theres been a great deal of hand wringing over the possibility that Microsofts Office Open XML document format might be ratified as an ISO standard. The critics also have pointed out that the specification was crafted by Microsoft not as a standard but as a means simply of representing its legacy office file formats […]

When Microsofts Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux? When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of […]

One of the best things about free and open-source software is the flexibility it grants users for working around vendors or project leaders whove lost touch with the needs of their stakeholders. These users are free to take the code, branch out on their own and perhaps overtake their parent projects. Soon, the Free Software […]

Between the foundational free software components and licenses that the Free Software Foundation has made possible–chief of which are, respectively, the GNU Compiler Collection and the GPL–the FSF has laid much of technological and legal groundwork that underlies free and open-source software as we know it today. One of the features of free software licensing […]

Dell’s customer feedback-driven initiative for preloading Linux on some of the machines it sells is moving forward with a full head of steam. It’s been only a handful of months since the OEM began fielding Web-borne requests to add the open-source operating system to its preloaded platform mix, and Dell is already a few weeks […]

As my colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols is reporting, Intuit is opting to get a bit cozier with Linux. It’s an eye-catching announcement, considering that lukewarm Linux support from Windows-centric application vendors like Intuit remains one of the biggest strikes against the open-source operating system as a mainstream desktop platform. Curbing my enthusiasm somewhat is the […]