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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]