CNET News.com | Tech news blog - Category: Open source

Web meeting provider Dimdim raises $6 million

Elinor Mills — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:01:00 GMT

Open-source Web conferencing provider Dimdim has raised $6 million in Series B funding, the company is set to announce on Wednesday.

The funding round, which was led by current investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, will enable Dimdim to introduce enhancements to the free service and expand ...

Bank of America may finally embrace Firefox

Steven Musil — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT

The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.

A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost ...

Reiser reportedly leads police to wife's body

Steven Musil — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:25:00 GMT

Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer convicted in April of murdering his estranged wife, has led police to what is believed to be her body, authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday.

The remains were found Monday afternoon buried next to a deer trail in the hills of Oakland, Calif.,

...

Yahoo looking to unleash its cloud computing infrastructure

Dan Farber — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:51:00 GMT

As part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers ...

Red Hat revenue jumps 32 percent in Q1

Matt Asay — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:31:00 GMT

Red Hat continues to impress with strong financial performance, delivering an impressive Q1 2009. Not bad when you consider the company gives away its products for free.

Red Hat pulled in $156.6 million in its Q1 (fiscal year 2009), a 32 percent increase over Q1 2008 and 11 percent growth over Q4 2008. Red Hat's operating income was also up 33 percent over the same quarter in 2008. But it's perhaps the deferred revenue (i.e., subscriptions and other services booked but not yet recognizable as revenue because they have yet to be delivered) that is most impressive: Up 36 percent to $491.8 million.

Clearly, Red Hat is doing something right. Many things right, in fact.

I asked the company specifically about JBoss performance, as rumors have swirled that JBoss has lagged under Red Hat's guidance. Quite the opposite. While there were initial hiccups in bringing the JBoss brand under the Red Hat umbrella, the unit is firing on all cylinders now, contributing a healthy amount to the Red Hat top and bottom lines. Red Hat wouldn't give specific numbers, but I heard the JBoss confidence from a range of different sources within Red Hat.

What about the cost side of the equation? Here there is perhaps even more cause for optimism, but also a creeping concern.

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Will everything eventually go to the cloud?

Dave Rosenberg — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:37:00 GMT

At lunch with Michael Coté from RedMonk on Wednesday, we talked a lot about how open source has really split into "free" and "open source," with the former typically associated with basement developers and Apache licenses, and the latter generally associated with the General Public License and some set ...

Unfairly indicting Sun for its SCO testimony?

Matt Asay — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:05:00 GMT

Pamela Jones of Groklaw rightly takes umbrage that Sun Microsystems apparently stood by while The SCO Group attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. Jones writes:

And what an icky role Sun played, to judge from (Novell's Greg) Jones' description ...

Better healthcare via open source, Harvard med school CIO argues

Matt Asay — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:36:00 GMT

In a clear indicator that open source is having an impact well beyond software, Harvard Medical School's CIO, Dr. John Halamka, recently went on the record at the Red Hat Summit arguing that open source points the way to better healthcare. In this, however, he wasn't talking about ...

Coders now can try mobile Ubuntu Linux

Stephen Shankland — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Canonical on Tuesday released its first publicly available developer edition of Ubuntu for mobile Internet devices.

One option for Ubuntu MID's user interface.

(Credit: Canonical)

Ubuntu MID works on two devices at present, the Samsung Q1U and the Intel Crown Beach development station for building devices using the ...

HP contributes Tru64 Unix file system to Linux

Martin LaMonica — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:02:00 GMT

Hewlett Packard on Monday said it is making its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System available under the open-source General Public License, version 2.

The AdvFS file system, which was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha Unix machines, can be adopted to Linux, the company said.

HP chose version 2 ...