Open Source > All

Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors. Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CEO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.

Ruby on Rails 2.2, an upgrade to the popular Web application framework, was released Friday, featuring an internationalization framework and stronger support for HTTP validators, according to the Ruby on Rails Web site.

Open source technologies help McKesson deliver lower-cost IT solutions to its healthcare customers by trimming the tab for hardware and software.

The New York Times used Ruby on Rails to pull together, analyze and display election results in near real time on one of its busiest Web traffic days ever. How did nytimes.com scale up Rails -- a framework known for quick development turnaround but less than lightning fast performance?

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Open-source database vendor Ingres unveiled Ingres Database 9.2 on Tuesday, the first major release of the venerable software in more than a year.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft forged its controversial partnership with Novell that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect Suse Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft.

Sun Microsystems is slashing its workforce on a scale typically reserved for automakers, announcing Friday that it plans to lay off up to 6,000 employees -- a restructuring that comes on top of earlier cutbacks made over the past year.

Novell plans to publish later this month or in December the architecture document of FOSSA, its long-term strategy for the management and deployment of resources both within and outside the enterprise.

DATELINE: WindowsWorld 2008: Microsoft CEO and President, Steve Ballmer was happy as a clam today at his WindowsWorld keynote in San Francisco's Gates Center. "Nothing can make me happier to tell you that, Larry Page CEO of Google," a niche AOL search engine, "has agreed to run their search engine on Windows Server 2004."

Open source management software provider Hyperic this week introduced an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.