Articles by Nancy Cohen

The Linux-based mobile device marketplace is growing and thriving, and Nokia is but one beneficiary, though a strong one indeed As a sign of the times, Nokia's Thursday launch of the "Internet Tablet" device N810 represents a move away from phones and into new opportunities in mobile devices where chatting, finding airports, capturing the moment, h...

Thursday marks the official stable release of Ubuntu 7.10, but by Wednesday -- with the Ubuntu community Web site ticking off the time as "1 day to go" -- the Internet was awash in glowing tributes to Ubuntu's latest advancement Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for desktops, laptops and servers. In preparation for the event, developers got to work wi...

If Chris Gladwin has his way, how health, research, oil, multimedia and other companies with heavy storage demands choose to store their data will never be the same again Gladwin is CTO of Cleversafe. His company's software is now in its most advanced stage to date, from an open source project at developer stage to "advanced-alpha" status, download...

Linspire released its Linspire 6.0 Linux distribution, which contains a mix of open source and proprietary drivers and software and is the first commercial offering from Linspire to provide customers with Microsoft patent covenants There was only one word missing that could have made the announcement complete: controversial....

Heavy construction is under way to create an open playing field of interoperable technologies for users to navigate the so-called 3D Internet of the future Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, and IBM announced Tuesday that they will work with other partners to drive open standards and tools where protocols and formats speak the same language....

MSNBC Interactive, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, will buy Seattle-based startup Newsvine, a participatory news site that carries news from media outlets and from individual users who are paid for their writing Newsvine uses the so-called "social model" of user-driven ranking of the news....

Research forecasts that Linux will be the top operating system for mobile computing began to look a little more fully baked with the announcement by ARM that it will collaborate with six vendors to finesse a standards-based, Linux-based platform for next-generation mobile devices The company, known for its 16/32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics p...

Adobe this week released its Flex Builder for Linux in alpha mode at the sold-out Adobe Max show in Chicago "Judging by the applause in the auditorium when they announced it during the 'Sneak Peeks' session at Max, Adobe made a lot of developers happy campers," said Forrester analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond, who tracks application development....

A long-simmering debate among top Linux developers has boiled over recently, resulting in a flame war of sorts on a kernel forum Linux creator Linus Torvalds and kernel developers working to harden Linux systems with security modules have been exchanging heated words over a security application slated for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel release....

Turbolinux, one of the first-generation Linux vendors to enter the business arena, on Monday announced a new online storage service for its Wizpy device, which was first introduced in June The Wizpy, which behaves as a Linux operating system as well as media player, now provides an online storage service fromOmnidrive, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based s...

MontaVista Software this week released two new versions of its Linux software, one for mobile platforms and another for embedded Linux installations The new MontaVista Mobilinux 5.0, an operating system used mainly in smartphones, has support for SE Linux (Security-Enhanced Linux)....

Sharp's announcement Wednesday that it's launching Blu-ray disc recorders, including a model that sports a one-terabyte hard disk drive, has one catch for Americans planning early Christmas shopping: You can't get them because they're only being launched in Japan ...

Despite a press release by the defendant indicating its desire for a quick settlement, the licensing beef between BusyBox and Monsoon Multimedia is in fact still alive and well ...

TheOne Laptop Per Child organization, which seeks to bridge the digital divide for poor children in developing economies, is kicking off a deal that allows charity-minded consumers to buy two laptops -- one for a child in a developing country and one for the buyer to keep The two-laptops promotion, with a limited-time price of US$399, will kick off...

Firefox users had a recent rude awakening about a vulnerability in the way Apple's QuickTime plug-in interacts with their Web browser. Far from grumbling, however, Mozilla supporters say their patch for the vulnerability says more about Mozilla's strengths than its browser's weakness "It seems that QuickTime media formats can hack into Firefox," wr...

The Mozilla Foundation is spinning off its open source e-mail client, Thunderbird, into an independent company. The new company, MailCo, plans to develop Internet communications software "based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand," Mozilla said David Ascher, CTO of ActiveState, will lead the new mail-focused company. ActiveState is centered...

A proprietary behemoth like IBM giving away enterprise-rich office applications for free? That was the news from IBM this week, but Big Blue's motives aren't entirely altruistic IBM is presenting a set of enterprise applications -- word processing, spreadsheet, presentation applications -- called "Lotus Symphony," as freely downloadable application...

Sun Microsystems is stepping up its rebranding mission as the Java company, throwing off its workstation cloak in exchange for an identity as the vendor of powerful systems and tools for developers Sun on Monday announced the immediate availability of its GlassFish V2 application server, an open source version of Java System Application Server 9.1....

In the aftermath of the SCO Group filing for bankruptcy on Friday, reactions from analyst and community quarters are less gleeful and more sober about lessons learned There weren't any champagne corks popping at the headquarters of the Linux Foundation following Friday's announcement....

In a busy two days of announcements last week, MySQL, the Sweden- and U.S. West Coast-based vendor of the open source MySQL database, said that business users can expect an enriched Enterprise Edition collection of software, service and support, called "MySQL Enterprise." The other leg of the announcement is that alpha and beta versions of open sou...