Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Under a great deal of stress from all corners of the technology industry due to a structure and process that more closely resembles that of a club rather than an organization that can professionally lead and represent the interets of such a rapidly growing community, the Open Source Initiative has announced that it will restructure to meet the demands of a much more mature open source world.
On his Wi-Fi blog, Glenn Fleishman points to an article about the huge price disparity between wireless equipment for business and similar kits sold to the SOHO market. He offers this explanation: There is, of course, a price premium you pay for devices that handle VLAN switching, multiple broadcast SSIDs, and other enterprise-related features.
In response to my recent blog entry regarding Sun's OpenSolaris, its 1600 patents and whether they'll create a safer legal haven to which Linux developers will be drawn, the folks at Gentoo are disputing my characterization of their Portaris and Portage technologies as being Napster-like facilitators that can grease the wheels of open source license violation.
People are still talking about the recent news that the FBI's Virtual Case File system won't work after almost $170 million has been spent on it. A Wired News story has generalized the commentary to talk about government IT blunders.
Earlier this week, I chatted with WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar at a dinner set up by his PR firm, Antenna Group . Subrah was explaining some of the challenges for taking his company from four-nines to five-nines.
A student at the Institute of Information Technology in Ottawa, Canada, has invented the nouse, a piece of image-processing software that watches your face in order to 1) translate nose movements into mouse movements and 2) translate winks (left and right) into clicks (left and right). So what?
In a news story written by News.com's John Borland, Gartner analyst Michael King has what could so far be the understatement of the year.
After listening to Brian Green, Novell's European director of Linux solutions, give a keynote regarding the company's forthcoming marriage of NetWare's services to the SuSE Linux kernel (Novell calls this Open Enterprise Server), Novell's customers are worrying that the company will put some of its non-open source products such as Groupwise on the chopping block. The worries are not unfounded.
In issue #7 of ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (download the MP3, or learn how to have them automatically downloaded while you're sleeping), I interview the Enderle Group's principal analyst Rob Enderle about the damaging article that was recently published in Fortune Magazine (see Fortune on why Fiorina's big bet is failing) and what the prospects are for the futures of HP and its CEO Carly Fiorina.
Now that people in blogosphere and open-source circles have had two days to let Sun's OpenSolaris announcement sink in, the commentary is starting to show up. But before touching on that, first a quick review of what happened.