Today at its Lotusphere 2011 event in Orlando, IBM announced tech preview of LotusLive Symphony, a Web-based office app duo to extend its Lotus Symphony productivity suite. I reviewed the desktop-bound edition of Symphony a few months back, and Andrew Garcia took on the LotusLive online collaboration service. It’s interesting to see IBM add a Web app component to Symphony, much as Microsoft has done with its own Office 2010 and Office Web Apps offerings. I tend to use a…

About four years ago, I wrote a blog post (since lost, apparently, to the sands of blog platform migration) entitled “What Is Fedora’s Prime Directive?” At issue, more or less, was whether it was appropriate for the Fedora project to push an Xorg modification that stood to deliver benefits to users of open source graphics drivers at the cost of disrupting the systems of closed-source graphics driver users. Less important to me than the particulars of that issue was the…

Lately, I’ve had Mac on the brain—a state that’s stemmed in parts from P. J. Connolly’s coverage of Microsoft’s Office 2011 for the Mac, from Apple’s recent “Back to the Mac” event at its Cupertino headquarters, and from Apple’s disclosure that the increasingly consumer-oriented company plans to drop its most enterprise-oriented product, the XServe. In particular, I’ve been considering where Apple’s insistence on tight(ening) control of its hardware, software, and third party application stack makes sense in an enterprise context.…

From an IT columnist perspective, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems is a gift that keeps on giving. As the enterprise software giant works its way through digesting Sun’s many hardware platforms, software products, intellectual property holdings, and open source communities, there’s no shortage of fresh topics to cover. Last week, another such topic presented itself, when a group of vendors and individuals launched LibreOffice, a fork of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite that Sun first shipped in 2002. The group also…

The recent wave of vertical integration among enterprise IT vendors appears headed for another crest: There are reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that Novell is preparing to split itself in two, selling its SUSE Linux operations to a strategic buyer and the balance of its properties to a private equity investor. The most likely suitor for SUSE Linux appears to be VMware, which has been busily amassing middleware and application acquisitions such as Zimbra and SpringSource to…

Google announced Aug. 4 its intention of killing off its Wave project before the end of this year, citing poor user uptake.

Over the past year or so, there’s been a lot of discussion in open source software circles around so-called open core software business models, in which the “core” of a product is freely available under an open source license, typically with a “community edition” label, while some amount of features are withheld from the free version and made available in one or more proprietary licensed “enterprise editions.” The specific features that an open core vendor holds back depend on the…

This week I’ve been testing out OpenGoo, an open source online office project that’s meant to provide a more open alternative to Google Apps. Specifically, the code that comprises OpenGoo is freely accessible, and, as a plain old LAMP application, OpenGoo gets to leave the confines of its makers’ firewall and live in your data center, or desktop, or hosting service of choice. As I’ve written in the past, I’m a big fan of Google’s Apps. However, I’m also a…

Brian Prince is reporting today that Google is considering enforcing SSL encryption by default for its Google Apps users. It’s a good idea–as eWEEK Labs’ own Andrew Garcia discussed recently, your on-the-go applications can have an awful lot to say about you. In fact, enforcing HTTPS encryption for Google Apps by default is such a good idea that you shouldn’t wait for Google to implement it. Whether you administer a Google Apps domain or are an individual user of the…

The best and the worst attributes of Linux as a desktop operating system involve acquiring and maintaining software applications. For me, the positives outweigh the negatives, making Linux the best desktop operating system option I’ve encountered, and the one I choose at work and at home. If Linux is to pile up more desktop adherents, the vendors and communities that back the open source platform need to work together to accentuate those positives and shrink down the negative aspects of…