Linux

Despite years of investment in its Symbian operating system, Nokia has picked the Linux-based MeeGo instead to go head to head with Apple's iPhone and other higher-end smartphones.

The Nokia N8 will be the last of the flagship N-series smartphones to use Symbian, Nokia told CNET Australia, and confirmed the move in a Reuters interview. "Going forward, N-series devices will be based on MeeGo," a Nokia spokesman said, though it will continue to offer Symbian lower down the product line.

Years ago, Nokia was the dominant phone maker, but it's struggled to reclaim its past glory. The N-series change indicates the company's bets on Symbian--including Nokia's acquisition of full Symbian control from other partners and its subsequent release as open-source software--weren't sufficient to make the operating system a top-end competitor.

In contrast, the iPhone 4 appears to be increasing Apple's considerable clout in the mobile market, and application developers' products also run on the iPod Touch and iPad devices that also use the iOS operating system. At the same time, Google has been making steady gains with its Android operating system, with 160,000 new Android phones activated daily, and various partners plan Android-baesd tablets and other devices. … Read more

SCO's long-running campaign against Linux may have finally been dealt a death blow.

Late Thursday, the judge presiding over the company's legal battle with Novell rejected SCO's request for a new trial and upheld an April jury decision that determined Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of key Unix copyrights.

"SCO argues that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law because the 'verdict cannot be squared with the overwhelming evidence and the law,'" Judge Ted Stewart wrote in his decision. "The Court respectfully disagrees. The jury found Novell's version … Read more

VMware will standardize its virtual appliance-based products on Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server, a move intended to help ward off a growing threat from Microsoft.

Under the partnership, announced this week, customers buying certain vSphere licenses will be eligible to receive a subscription to Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) patches and updates for SLES instances deployed in vSphere virtual machines. The companies are also working to make it easier to port SLES-based virtual machines across clouds.

VMware offers virtual appliances--self-contained virtual machines preconfigured with an OS and the application--as a way of making them easier to deploy and maintain. … Read more

The open-source Eclipse development environment has become one of the mainstay options for developers thanks to its extensibility and support from a broad range of organizations, both open-source and private.

Every year, the Eclipse Foundation publishes the results of its community survey and this year's report shows that open-source adoption is continuing to grow, with a number of projects emerging as clear leaders among Eclipse developers.

The primary takeaway from the results is the shift in how engineers are choosing to develop and deploy. Linux, especially Ubuntu, has taken market share from Windows on an ongoing basis, and is … Read more

Two million businesses have "gone Google," according to the search giant's latest marketing. To date that has meant embracing Google Apps. Will it come to mean embracing Linux, as well?

Google, after all, is reportedly moving away from Microsoft's Windows operating system and is now requiring employees to choose Mac OS X or Linux. It's not a stretch to believe that Google's sales force will talk up Mac and Linux while talking CIOs out of their dependence on Microsoft Office … Read more

On Thursday Novell reported another poor quarter with fiscal second-quarter earnings down 5.4 percent to $204 million and a declining cash balance of $980 million. That's bad for Novell investors, of course, but it may portend something even worse for the wider industry.

Patent lawsuits. Lots of them.

As reported, as many as 20 organizations have registered bids for Novell, most (or all) of them private equity firms. While an Oracle or a Cisco might acquire Novell for its maintenance streams and product portfolio, it's unclear that private equity firms will have the same motivation. For at … Read more

Most companies struggle to reinvent themselves, so shackled by their pasts that they can't reorient themselves toward the future.

Novell, once the king of the software world, is like that. Over the years it has built up a broad portfolio of software (with associated revenue streams) in repeated attempts to regain its glory days. That portfolio now stifles its ability to focus on other areas with the most promise.

But Novell's management may be about to get a lifeline. Twenty of them, actually.

According to Thursday's Wall Street Journal, up to 20 bidders, most of them private … Read more

In the Soviet Union oil leaks get nuked. That's not a Yakov Smirnoff joke, it's apparently history. So we discuss whether we should do that in the Gulf of Mexico. But Steve in the chat room points out it might summon Cthullu. We also discuss the impending release of Office 2010, and the appearance of a second lost Apple iPhone 4G prototype. Those people can't keep anything in the lab anymore can they?

Microsoft Office 2010 takes aim at … Read more

In an attempt to copycat Apple's hardware-plus-software vertical approach to the mobile market, the Linux industry is fragmenting fast and risks undermining its best chance for beating the iPhone.

The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. Whereas Linux has been a rallying force in the enterprise server market, with diverse competitors and partners collaborating on a common code base to save costs and boost innovation, in the mobile market Linux has tended toward entropy.

Such entropy … Read more