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Inclusive, not exclusive
The change to SpringSource's enterprise maintenance policy for the popular open-source Java framework represents a gentle shift in emphasis.…
Debian: 'We're almost there'
Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.…
It’s all in the recipe
Reg Reader Workshop One criticism levelled at Agile methodologies for software development is that of scale. “It’s all very well for very small projects,” we have been told, “but for anything above 10 people, you can forget it.” So, how true is this?…
Key-swapping is optional extra
OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October to mark the eighth anniversary of the popular open source office software suite and announce – it hopes – the release of version 3.0.…
Oslo trio uncovered
As if you haven't got enough languages already, Microsoft is about to give you one more: M, part of its Oslo development and service-oriented strategy.…
You can't stop the port
On October 5, 1991, the young man who would one day become the world's most famous programmer - and the brand name and poster boy for the open source software movement - sent a message to a newsgroup announcing the birth of what would become the Linux operating system.…
No plans to migrate to unloved OS, despite Camwood claims
Londoners can sleep safe in their beds tonight after the London Ambulance Service confirmed that it has no plans whatsoever to migrate to Windows Vista anytime soon.…
Exposing the Strata
Another day, another cloudy name for Windows arrives, this time it’s all about Strata, apparently.…
Give or take 20 meters
Mozilla's virtual lab has unveiled an experimental browser add-on capable of identifying where you are. Give or take 20 meters.…
'Check out this restaurant...bitch'
Microsoft operation Force-feed Live Search is now making official use of the company's $240m stake in Facebook.…
Do you hear war drums?
Apple has patented the OS X Dock, nearly a decade after the operating system made its public debut with a new slant on the taskbar.…
Divide and Conquer
Reader Poll The question we asked on Monday - whether agile development could scale - certainly put the cat among the pigeons.…
Hot and SaaSy
Symantec is to buy the British messaging security firm MessageLabs for $695m in cash.…
'Rules suck', says MySQL co-founder
David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, has quit Sun Microsystems because he “hates” all the rules he has to follow at the company.…
'I've seen you in my dreams, I love you so much...'
The world is awaiting with tremulous expectation the forthcoming Professional Developers [sic] Conference, aka PDC2008, which Microsoft has dubbed an event "so hot, the t-shirts caught on fire!"…
'Economic Meltdown, we embrace you'
Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat hosted its annual analyst day in New York today, and as Wall Street continues to hemorrhage, the company couldn't have picked a gloomier time for the occasion.…
Can Mountain View end Beer Goggles?
The forward-thinking folks at Google have implemented a novel solution to prevent regretful drunken digital correspondence to friends, family, co-workers, and loved ones.…
Java acquisition coming
Exclusive SpringSource is updating its controversial maintenance policy three weeks after encountering a barrage of criticism.…
Incomplete strategy
Sun Microsystems has lost a key individual responsible for getting its aspiring open-source software included in leading Linux distributions.…
Struggles on AJAX interop project
The OpenAjax Alliance is once again finding it tough to enlist support for its projects, despite representing some of the biggest players - with the most resources - in software biz and on online.…
More reliance on compliance
In brief Enterprise software omnicorp CA has acquired Palo Alto, CA-based IDFocus to blend the firm's identity management software with its own CA Identity Manager.…
Yesterday's issues at 40
Forty years ago today, at the height of the Cold War, around 50 computing experts gathered in the southern German market town of Garmisch to change history.…
Bezos unreformed
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2010 or bust
Start your clocks and count the delays: Microsoft has named the first half of 2010 as the window for the next version of SQL Server - codenamed Kilimanjaro.…
Get your apps in the sky on the net
If there was an index for how many times a vendor hops onto a new buzzword and tried to slap it on every product in their catalog, then it is probably safe to say that IBM would be the most actively traded stock on the Cloud Computing Exchange.…
Class-action call up
Little did Microsoft executives realize when they blessed the seemingly brilliant wheeze of "Windows Vista Capable" as a way of flogging the operating system that the idea could turn into a bitter pill their company might have to swallow.…
The Ten Commandments or a waste of time?
Fail and You If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.…
Where’s the point of no return?
Reg Reader Workshop Who could fault the base principles of agility? I was recently talking to a CIO of a European telco, who was totally bought into the strategy of delivering services as fast as possible to customers. In this fickle, subscriber-based market time literally means money won or lost relative to the competition.…
Parity on C# 3.0 and LINQ
The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET is due to hit its second release today, with many .NET 3.5 features and a few notable exceptions.…
Jeff Kantor, on building and managing a 150 Petabyte database
Interview It makes for one heck of a project mission statement. Explore the nature of dark matter, chart the Solar System in exhaustive detail, discover and analyze rare objects such as neutron stars and black hole binaries, and map out the structure of the Galaxy.…
Some projects less open than others
Microsoft is posting code to its much-trumpeted CodePlex open-source projects site using licenses and conditions that go against the principles of open source.…
But is there hope?
Poll results The Reg reader poll run earlier this week as part of our agile development workshop produced a set of results that do not paint a particularly inspiring picture. When asked how distributed software development was managed within organisations, almost half told us things were not that great. About a third gave feedback indicating that they were just about doing okay, but only one in five said things were managed well.…
Schtop. This email client is not ready yet
Mozilla has pushed back its development schedule for Thunderbird 3, the next version of its email client. A planned beta of the package will now be described as a third alpha build.…
Buckling to OEMs?
Never mind that Microsoft has kicked off a hyped ad campaign to convince the public to buy Windows Vista PCs, - it's also given users more time to switch back to Windows XP.…
Not just 'idiotic' - 'misleading' too
IBM, EMC, Microsoft and others have been blasted by the father of Representational State Transfer (REST) for making "misleading" and "idiotic" claims about a proposed specification for applications to talk to different vendors' content management systems (CMS).…
More online bribery
Believe it or not, Microsoft has added a Vegas-style slot program to its Dutch search engine to lure users away from Google. If useful search results don't work, then money or prices probably will.…
Release candidate stealth
Microsoft has come a step closer to releasing the next version of its Silverlight browser plug in.…
Recovers from trip
WebKit - the framework that underpins Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome browser, and its Android phone platform - has become the first browser to pass the full Acid 3 test.…
Unix not the only fruit
Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) will let you run applications on Microsoft's Windows Server and SQL Server database from this autumn.…
Adobe handkerchief solves streaming snafu
Amazon has plugged a potentially revenue-draining flaw in its video streaming service by incorporating content encryption.…
Jobsian reality check
Apple is scrapping its controversial and unpopular "fucking" iPhone non-disclosure agreement (NDA).…
Making the most of distributed resources
Reader Poll We’ve had some great responses back on the article we posted earlier in the week, about how software development is becoming increasingly distributed with the twin prongs of outsourcing (vs keeping things in-house) and offshoring (vs keeping things local). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most spleen is vented on failed offshore projects.…
Microsoft prefers to 'obsolete ourselves'
Microsoft will let loose a new operating system, Windows Cloud, at the company’s annual developer conference later this month.…
Restful Dublin state
Microsoft is adopting REST and ATOM-based feeds in its application server to boost development and management of Windows server applications.…
Pull the other one
Why does the Open University set its students gibberish, Verity Stob asked here recently? We decided to investigate. As our enquiries continued at the Open University, it became harder to find anyone who took the issue seriously.…
Awaits Jobsian blessing
Adobe Systems could soon join the ranks of frustrated tech companies building versions of their software for Apple's Jesus Phone.…
The bug that wouldn't die
A Reg journo was bemused this morning when he rebooted his Mac and the machine decided that Safari - not Opera - should be his default web browser.…
'Classic' meets 'full,' fails to show
The long-awaited merger of Microsoft "classic" and "full" Hotmail services has got off to spotty and painful start.…
Anything for scripting
Corporate rivals have temporarily sunk their differences to find ways to fine-tune the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a variety of popular dynamic languages.…
'Look, we're over here...'
Microsoft yesterday updated its Windows Live versions of Hotmail and Maps, in its latest attempt to appear relevant in the online world.…