opensource

Through one important piece of corporate computing jargon--"integration"--Oracle has found a justification for its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Now it will have to convince historically skeptical customers, too, that the idea makes sense.

The all-cash acquisition agreement--announced Monday, costing Oracle $5.6 billion with Sun's cash factored in, and expected to close this summer--puts the innovative but financially bumbling Sun out of its misery after IBM's move to buy it fell apart earlier in April. The way to fit Sun's technology into Oracle's business model goes back to a … Read more

In an attempt to better show what its software is up to, Google has released the source code of its Google Update software, a project code-named Omaha that can automatically install new versions of programs, including the Chrome browser and Google Earth.

"Some users can be surprised to find this program running, and at Google, we don't like disappointing our users. We've been working hard to address these concerns, and releasing the source code for Omaha is our attempt to make the purpose of Google Update totally transparent," Myles Jordan of Google's software engineering team … Read more

Hawkscope is a cross-platform, open-source project that provides alternative navigation through your files for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Still in beta, it's also extensible, so not only can you jump folders in a zippy, context menu-style tree, but you can search Google, check your Gmail, and post to your Twitter account from the Hawkscope interface.

Hawkscope appears as a hawk icon just next to your clock, so that's the system tray for Windows and the menu bar for Macs. For users with dark themes, the icon might be hard to see--look for an empty spot in between other … Read more

Danese Cooper, who spent more than three years as senior director of Intel's open-source strategies, has taken a similar job at Revolution Computing, a start-up that's commercializing the open-source R programming technology for data analysis.

Cooper, who took on the title of open-source diva at Sun Microsystems before her stint at Intel, plans to help Revolution expand its current community of developers and users to a broader group, she said in an interview. For example, she'll work on better user groups and new assets to help the community.

Intel, an investor in Revolution, "wanted me to … Read more

Mozilla Messaging released four bug-fixing patches for Windows, Mac, and Linux editions of Thunderbird 2 last night.

Three of them are marked critical. Two of those deal with crashes caused by memory corruption, and the third plugs a memory leak in the PNG library. The fourth, noncritical fix secures a hole that allowed for XML data theft.

Full release notes are available here.

Stranger things have happened, but there are several reasons why IBM buying Sun Microsystems could, to borrow a phrase from former Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy, be like two garbage trucks colliding in slow motion.

The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, which would amount to about $4 billion once Sun's cash and marketable securities are taken into account. On paper, the deal could make some sense: adding Sun's server market share would give IBM more clout in its competition with Hewlett-Packard, IBM would … Read more

Amidst the crowd of peer-to-peer file-sharing options comes an attempt to return file-sharing to its utilitarian roots and away from legal quagmires by emphasizing file-publishing. Free and open-source, LittleShoot is the brainchild of Adam Fisk, a LimeWire developer who wants LittleShoot to be "like Google for files instead of Web pages."

Where most P2P programs are standalone clients, LittleShoot is a browser plug-in like QuickTime or Shockwave that should work with all major browsers. It utilizes an AJAX-based interface at LittleShoot.org to search, publish, and download files. Once you've downloaded and installed the plug-in, it will … Read more

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they've begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That's key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X … Read more

Mozilla Labs on Thursday unveiled a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment its developers hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Bespin 0.1 is only an "initial prototype framework that includes support for basic editing features," according to the site, but Mozilla has high hopes for the project. "We're particularly excited by the prospect of empowering Web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own," said Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer in Mozilla's Bespin announcement. … Read more