Jason Brooks

Once upon a time, the likes of Microsoft, Lotus and Corel fought it out for office suite supremacy in the boardrooms of IT decision makers and in the pages of trade publications. Microsoft Corp. handily won the battle, brandishing its Office suite. Now, driven by the emergence of the open-source development model—and a wider embrace […]

When eWEEK Labs recently reviewed StarOffice 8, we were impressed by its broad platform support and low cost—two measures by which the Sun Microsystems Inc. office productivity suite edges out Microsoft Corp.s market-leading Office 2003 but falls short compared with its open-source sibling, OpenOffice.org 2.0. OpenOffice.org is freely available and redistributable, and supports seven platforms: […]

VMWare Inc. just released a new product, VMWare Player, which enables users to run VMWare instances. Also, its free. Thats free as in beer—VMWare hasnt open-sourced its code, but by building this application, and making it available for free—as if it were Macromedias Flash Player or Adobes Reader—VMWare is moving to defend and expand the […]

StarOffice 8—the latest version of Sun Microsystems Inc.s inexpensive, cross-platform office productivity suite—stands up better than ever next to Microsoft Corp.s market-leading Office in terms of features, extensibility and compatibility. Click here to read the full review of Suns StarOffice 8. 2 StarOffice 8— the latest version of Sun Microsystems Inc.s inexpensive, cross-platform office productivity […]

Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Directory Server is an open-source, LDAP-based directory server descended from the popular and mature Netscape/iPlanet code base that Red Hat purchased from America Online Inc. last year. Click here to read the full review of Red Hat Directory Server. 2 Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Directory Server is an open-source, […]

Yesterday, at its Professional Developers Conference in Anaheim, Calif., Microsoft handed out copies of a new post-Beta 1 version of Windows Vista, dubbed Build 5219. The PDC build is to be the first of a series of roughly monthly Vista test builds that Microsoft Corp. plans to distribute to the same audience of developers and […]

My recent trip to Portland, Ore., for the OReilly Open Source Convention was quite enjoyable. Not only did I find a great fast-food place called Burgerville in the city, but I was also absolutely dazzled by Damian Conway and his conference talk “Fun with dead languages.” During the talk, Conway demonstrated (with running code) the […]

Weve had two opportunities this week to hear from eWEEK.coms David Coursey on why its a bad idea for Massachusetts to opt to use only “open” document formats by 2007. Coursey has gone so far as to suggest that only an ideologue or a fool would attempt to stand up to Microsoft in this way. […]

For organizations and individuals invested in the Solaris platform, Sun Microsystems Inc.s OpenSolaris project promises greater flexibility, faster innovation and closer attention to diverse needs through an eventual community of Solaris distributors akin to what Linux now enjoys. Thanks in large part to the collaboration-maximizing virtues of the open-source development model, Linux has grown from […]

Its been nearly four years since Microsoft Corp. released Windows XP, and itll be at least another year before the next-generation Windows client—the newly named Windows Vista—hits the streets. However, now that Vista has reached its initial beta release, we have a chance to see what Microsoft has been doing in all that time—and how […]