KDE SC 4.4.0, Codenamed "Caikaku", has been released and has had many changes since the 4.3 release in August 2009. More than 7000 bugs fixed and 1433 new feature requests implemented, including a new interface for netbooks and touchscreen devices. We take a visual tour of KDE SC 4.4 and highlight the technologies well suited to consumers and IT departments.
The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office, depending on your requirements.
The steady rise in people using IP telephony to communicate -- for personal and business reasons -- has led to the development of a number of different VoIP "softphones" that can be used on a PC or notebook.
Collecting money from customers should be the easy part of your business, but a contrary billing system can make life unnecessarily difficult for CIOs. In this edition of 5 open source products to watch, we take a look at billing systems. They’re open source, Web-based and can be extended and integrated to suit specific needs.
On its fifth birthday, Firefox must be considered both an incredible success and somewhat of a failure. The open source Web browser is a great product and quite an achievement, but has not tremendously advanced the cause of "free" software.
In addition to the well-known Asterisk, there is a vibrant community of open source software PBX systems that can be used for internal and service provider IP telephony. Here are five exciting open source VoIP and UC projects to keep an eye on.
In the insurance business, everyone's headed into the hinterland. But the cost of every new branch can bite deeply. Here's how going Open Source helped ING Life save US$1.7 million and funded its expansion plans.
Open source virtualization app QEMU has reached version 0.11 and brings some 1400 changes from 90 contributors.
Collaborative editing of Web documents has brought a new dimension to enterprise knowledge management. The architecture that made Wikipedia famous can now be applied to internal processes. And because of the long association with open source projects many of the most popular wikis are themselves open source. Here are five open source wikis to keep an eye on.
Five open source project management tools to help CIOs and IT project managers keep their projects on-track and on-schedule -- without blowing the budget!
Every year InfoWorld painstakingly selects its Bossie Award winners -- the best open source software for business -- and every year we have shamefully neglected the very cream of the open source crop. While we've awarded the Dojos, Xens, and SugarCRMs, we've ignored Linux, GNU, and the *BSDs -- because, well, don't their excellence and importance go without saying? In other cases, where open source giants did receive our award (Snort and Wireshark come to mind), a "mere" Bossie almost seems like faint praise.
Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company's future. That decision: to toss away his upcoming product's Gnu General Public License (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. "We initially started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer to move the license to Apache," Haynie says.
Under the glare of Microsoft's historic Linux kernel code submission this week is the fact that the software giant on many levels still lives in a community of one much more so than a community at large.
Microsoft Monday made an historic move by submitting device drivers to the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. Microsoft has had a checkered past with both Linux and its open source GPL licensing structure, so the move was a jaw dropper. Here is a look at some of the milestones since Microsoft internal memos leaked in 1998 that attacked the open source Linux operating system as it began to pick up steam as an alternative to Windows.
The announcement a few days ago of Google's new Chrome OS was simultaneously shocking and expected. It's a typically understated and quietly ambitious move on behalf of Google. It's also proof -- if it were needed -- that Google people are supremely smart. They have their sights firmly set on the future as well as the here and now.