After IBM yesterday announced the sale of its PC business for $1.25 billion to the Chinese group Lenovo, the industry has begun wondering whether HP's PC business - worth at least $2.5 billion to the right buyer - might be the next to be sold.

JBoss has released a number of advances designed to position it as the premier open source provider of middleware solutions.

A new Nielsen/NetRatings study shows kids 2-11 making up largest demographic for number of Web pages viewed. Entertainment leads the content type boys and girls are most likely to seek out. The top five sites for girls are, in descending order, MSN Messenger, AOL ...

It's official. According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, and confirmed by Reuters reports from both San Francisco and Beijing, China's personal computer giant Lenovo Group Limited today signed an agreement with IBM to take over the latter's personal computer ...

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will ...

According to ClickZ Stats, the trends and statistics analyst that was formerly called CyberAtlas, the worldwide Internet population in 2004 reached 934 million. In the US, the total of online citizens is 185 million out of a total population of 290 million; in Chi...

'The OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux,' according to Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, the industry's First Blogger Extraordinary.

Tim Berners-Lee has been appointed a professor at Southampton University, England. He'll become chair of computer science at the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Google Scholar is the latest search engine from Google, designed to provide access to scholarly articles and abstracts available through open access publishing.

British Columbia has created a dynamic Web service called Court Services Online. The system can handle the dynamic nature of court appointments, and provide selective access to data.

Microsoft has signed a number of agreements with integration solutions provider, Vintela. The move is a clear indication Microsoft intends to fully develop infrastructure integration, in enterprises employing its management tools with other platforms.

'Secret-source software probably isn't going away, but in an increasingly open world, it looks weirder and weirder,' wrote XML pioneer Tim Bray last week in his blog. The days of wrapping the engineering in a veil of secrecy, says Bray, are gone; customers want to...

While with the Java Community Process there are '900 participants out there who are happy,' according to Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz last week, he says that all is not rosy in the Linux garden. With Linux, Schwartz contends, there are companies unhappy...

A new Web mail service from ICQ will challenge major players in the field. The fee-based service includes advanced features, but falls short on storage.

'Based on the numerous conversations we have had with our largest stockholders over the past ten days, the Board believes that a majority of our stockholders agree that Oracle's $24 offer is inadequate and does not reflect PeopleSoft's real value. We are confident...

'SCO...twisted my relationship with OSRM to say that it proved that I believe there are substantial IP risks in Linux.' This is FUD, Pamela Jones stresses, but it posed a dilemma: 'I kept coming back to the same thing. If my working for OSRM is doing harm by creat...

SJ Namo is challenging Macromedia by releasing its own version of Macromedia Flash. Priced much less than what Macromedia sells it for, FlashCreator is letting people work with Flash, who in the past were kept at bay due to price.

The latest version of Identify Software's flagship product, AppSight, records the exact screens users see when running applications. This is being put to use to further application error resolution.

'Jean helped lead the movement to make XML a core component of many Microsoft products, such as Office and Windows, as well as the foundation for integration between systems with XML-based Web services,' said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software archi...

A round-up of early responses by analysts and commentators, in the week that Sun announced that it is making Solaris free to download for commercial use.

Hewlett Packard is returning to the open source marketplace, through an expanded relationship with JBoss. HP will now offer both hardware and software support to corporate customers running JBoss' software on HP machines.

'The number one donator of open source code is (UC) Berkeley,' Sun's CEO ranted, in a rebuke to Canadian journalists last week. 'We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix before Linus Torvalds was out of diapers,' he added, as he contended fiercly that Sun is in no way...

'Novell seeks to blame Microsoft for its own mismanagement,' says Microsoft in a public statement released in response to the suit just filed in federal court in Utah by Novell alleging that Microsoft unfairly dislodged WordPerfect from its market leadership posit...

For the first time in Intel's 36-year history, a non-engineer - Paul Otellini, its current president and COO - has been named chief executive. He will take up his position when current CEO Craig Barrett retires, in May of next year.

Tarantella's Secure Global Desktop Appliance for BladeCenter, creates a centrically located server environment that can not only enhance security, it offers easier management and cost savings. Morse will build and distribute the system in key European markets.

It is being widely reported that Microsoft is close to announcing the availability of its own browser. The company has been at work on such a tool, which it said would be ready by year's end. Yesterday, chairman Bill Gates, told shareholders this timeline over estimated things.

The PeopleSoft board today recommended to its shareholders that they give Oracle the cold shoulder and reject its $24 per share bid for the company, seriously undervaluing it - says PeopleSoft - at just $8.8BN. Larry Ellison issued a statement saying that the offe...

Version 1.0 of Firefox, the free browser, is officially released today, after more than 7 million people downloaded it during its 'preview release' period. The Mozilla Foundation, which inherited much of the underlying software code from Netscape, hopes Firefox wi...

Phishing attacks, online fraud, and chaotic confusion - the current state of e-commerce on the Internet, according to the CEO of RSA Security, is not conducive to growth. Something needs to be done, he believes, and fast, to overcome widepread fears of identity ...

Microsoft Corp. just announced it is paying $536 million US dollars to settle with Novell Inc. the antitrust dispute between the two companies. Under the terms of the settlement, Novell has agreed to withdraw its claims over the damaging effect of Microsoft produc...

E-voting vendors were ordered by the Election Assistance Commission to submit their electronic voting machines' source code to the National Software Reference Library. This federal order is to ensure the validity of e-votes if audited.

Richard Monson-Haefel, now Burton Group's senior analyst but familiar prior to joining Burton for his well-regarded books and articles about Java and his open source projects like Apache Geronimo, has just published a report - J2EE: A Standard in Jeopardy - which ...

Spare a thought for a poor suppressed CEO. Scott McNealy has told reporters that the reason Jonathan Schwartz has become Sun's unofficial blogger-in-chief is that McNealy himself is not being permitted to start one. 'They won't let me start a blog,' he said, refer...

As Gartner's ITXpo symposium gets under way, predictions and speculations about what the Web will evolve into have been in the air. Gartner sees a future Internet which will use standardized data enabling today's dissimilar networks to speak the same language.

The Publisher of Linux Business Week, launched February 8, 2001, writes: 'We have been proudly bringing Maureen O'Gara's investigative reporting and news to our readers since December 13, 2002 and we will continue to do so.'

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't ...

'I've got the same job, the same big mouth.' In vintage McNealy fashion, that was the Sun supremo's answer to USA Today this weekend when it asked him whether - with Sun president and COO increasingly becoming the public face of the company - he was 'stepping back...

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by Web...

'I didn't come back here to sell to Oracle,' PeopleSoft co-founder Dave Duffield, who replaced Craig Conway as CEO, wrote in a company-wide memo this week. 'Rather, I'm here to beat Oracle in the marketplace, increase our revenues, re-energize our employees, and d...

'To call Sun proprietary is as big a lie as you could put in your newspaper,' Sun's CEO Scott McNealy told a reporter this week. 'If I were to say IBM is bankrupt and you were to publish that, that would be the same as saying Sun is proprietary.'