Software Development

BlackBerry to sport Flash and Silverlight? Maybe next year

Research In Motion is set to bring full Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support to the company's BlackBerry phones. The BoyGenius Report blog claims RIM will introduce the new functionality sometime next summer, together with more powerful hand...

The greatest open source software of all time

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 SugarCRM...

We talk to the developers behind MenuetOS: an operating system written entirely in assembly language

The average PC user expects that their computer's operating system will consume a fair chunk of hard drive space. Windows Vista Premium can take 15GB of hard drive space to install and tax even modern desktop PCs and notebooks. Indeed, thanks in part...

Microsoft should develop for other mobile platforms

Microsoft will release the next incremental upgrade of the Windows Mobile platform this Fall, but for many analysts and experts it seems like the new Windows Mobile OS is virtually dead on arrival. Microsoft has done little to raise the bar for mobil...

Does GPL still matter?

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 awa...

Microsoft's Linux madness has a method

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/Linux milestones

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 lo...

Microsoft sacrifices Office to save Windows

Microsoft recently announced that its next Office suite will have a free online counterpart. It also just released Silverlight 3.0, which competes directly with Adobe Flash. While each of these products is competitive in its own right, they're coll...

Chrome OS could offend the open source community

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 ...

Open-source media player VLC hits the big time

For several years, the free, third-party media player of choice for many video connoisseurs was the open-source VLC media player. It worked on multiple operating systems, it worked on a bare install of Windows without any special codecs, and it was l...