Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

If I had a billion dollars, I’d be rich (with my apologies to Barenaked Ladies). If I were trying to buy Yahoo, I wouldn’t even be in the running. Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, a 62 percent premium on Yahoo’s share price at the time, for Yahoo. And what did the Yahoo […]

I find it hard to believe that it was 10 years ago that Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens deliberately coined the phrase “open source.” To me, it seemed like only yesterday that Eric and I, who’ve known each other for-cough-30 years-cough-had talked about the need for a term for “free software” that didn’t carry all […]

When Firefox 2..0.0.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven others that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2..0.0.12. The Mozilla Foundation‘s press […]

Get over it. We are never going to see OS/2 open-sourced. If you want to run OS/2 today, the closest you’re going to get is Serenity System’s eComStation 2.0 RC4. But, it just might be possible for Linux desktop users to get one of OS/2’s best features: SOM (System Object Model). IBM, I’m told by […]

Blog-It’s not like anyone has asked for Windows XP to run on the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, but Microsoft is getting ready to deliver it to us anyway.In an eWEEK news story by Peter Galli, Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, said Microsoft is conducting field trials to […]

Just how stupid does Microsoft think we are? Well, I guess we must be pretty stupid, because Microsoft comes right out and tells us that it’s release to manufacturing Vista SP1 on Feb. 4 , except that if you read further down in the announcement letter, Microsoft says it’s not really releasing it for another […]

Microsoft’s plan is to start retiring Windows XP on June 30. Some users, however, want to keep XP around for years to come. According to Popular Science, there’s a grassroot effort afoot to force Microsoft to keep selling XP to customers in shrink-wrapped packages and to OEMs. What’s driving this movement? Two things: First, it’s […]

Linspire, the company behind the commercial Linspire and the Freespire community desktop Linux, announced Jan. 31 that it was offering a new custom desktop Linux Build Service to its partners. The service is designed to make it easier for resellers and white box vendors to quickly deliver affordable custom desktop Linux configurations to customers. Linspire […]

The shoe’s on the other foot. Microsoft has made a multi-billion dollar business from FUDing its competition, now Google is enjoying its chance to see how Microsoft likes the same treatment by objecting to its proposed purchase of Yahoo. It took Google less than a weekend to respond to Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo. By February […]

My long-time friend and colleague Mary Jo Foley recently talked with Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s director of platform technology strategy at the company’s Open Source Software Lab. The subject of their conversation was: “Exactly what it is Microsoft is trying to do with open-source software anyway?”The answer? “Our focus is getting OSS [Open-Source Software] on top […]