My Microsoft Watch colleague Joe Wilcox recently blogged about a Microsoft advertising campaign for its beginning developer-oriented Visual Studio Express Edition, in which a picture of a young Bill Gates sits beside a caption that reads, “Inspiration Starts Somewhere.” However, in light of the patent troubles in which VOIP pioneer Vonage now finds itself, it seems to me that for tomorrow’s tech entrepreneurs, a more important concern than where their inspiration is going to start is where and how their…

In my recent review of Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its brand-new Xen virtualization features a bit of a hard time with regard to the limitations of its management tools. Relative to the products of VMware, the current market/mind share leader in x86 server virtualization, Red Hat’s Xen implementation has a decidedly do-it-yourself nature–less pointing and clicking and more configuration file editing and documentation digging. During an e-mail exchange about the review, a reader challenged me on…

After a few months’ delay–during which the Free Software Foundation mulled over how to make the world safe for GNU-manity in the face of Microsoft and Novell’s patent, collaboration and baby-seal-clubbing accord–there’s a new draft of the GNU General Public License out for comment. For now, the most promising thing to report about the draft is that the leader of GPL 2’s most prominent project doesn’t hate it. While that sounds like pretty faint praise, the fact that Linus Torvalds–the…

At the end of 2006, ZDnet blogger Paul Murphy made what I thought at the time to be a poor prediction: That 2007 will see Sun’s OpenSolaris eclipse Linux in the size and activity of its developer community, and all OS development projects, save Windows, will adopt OpenSolaris’ organizational structure and licensing provisions. Now that we’re a few months into 2007, I still think that the prediction–if judged by the metric of whether it’s likely to come true–was a lousy…

When I learned that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which is a big release for Red Hat to which I’ve been looking forward for some time, was coming out on March 14, one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, “Great, when’s CentOS 5 coming out?” Even though Red Hat has always been very nice about providing us with entitlements to test their products, entitlements are a major pain to mess with. Sometimes our entitlements expire, and I…

In recent weeks, there’s been quite a bit of buzz surrounding Linux and its chances for earning a spot as a preloaded option on the client PCs sold by major computer OEMs. Buzzing most loudly has been Dell’s IdeaStorm customer suggestions site, which has turned up a ton of support for the notion–even though many are discounting this support as the ditto-headed diggs of Linux zealots who can’t be counted on to put their credit cards where their clicks are.…

Network access control schemes seem to be all the rage, with IT heavyweights and smaller players alike pushing them full force. While there’s no disputing that these NAC initiatives are aimed at worthwhile goals, what remains to be seen is whether and to what extent these initiatives are worth the time and money that enterprises must lay out to implement them. In other words, is NAC all it’s cracked up to be? I have my doubts, specifically concerning the portion…

We in the computer trade press remain ever poised to chronicle the next major battle between Microsoft and whatever company, governing body or new concept that seems even remotely positioned to challenge the Redmond giant. During the past few years, Google has been one of our favorite such challengers, even though Google hasn’t yet directly struck at Microsoft’s productivity application and client operating system core. However, with Google’s announcement on Feb. 22 of a premium version of its Web-based messaging,…

Microsoft and Novell have been making a big deal of their big deal to work together to soothe customers’ cross-platform pain points. But it remains to be seen whether and how far the deal will end up extending beyond the realm of press releases and presentation slide decks. In fact, vaporous cooperation pledges aren’t even the worst of what might come of the Microsoft-Novell deal. Many in the open-source world fear that the deal’s patent pledges represent a route through…

Among early adopters of Microsoft’s freshly minted Windows Vista operating system, the strongest reactions so far seem not to revolve around the system’s fancy new looks or its handy search facilities, but rather around Vista’s knack for asking permission to carry out operations that require administrative privileges. Summing up the annoyance felt by many Vista users so far, my colleague, Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox, recently suggested that if Vista were a car, flicking your turn signal would prompt a pop-up…