At the Linux Foundation's annual collaboration summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Executive Director Jim Zemlin kicked off the event with some interesting perspectives on the state of the Linux marketplace today.

The short version: Linux is going strong and getting stronger.

According to Zemlin, the macro-economic trends have played to the strengths of Linux and open source. Few can dispute that Linux is cheaper to procure and run in comparison to proprietary platforms. This applies not only to end users but also to device manufacturers and development shops building platforms.

Would Google be the company it is today … Read more

IBM released new analyst data on Monday that shows Big Blue is the market share leader for service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, capturing nearly 75 percent of the market. This follows news last week detailing IBM's 31 percent overall middleware market share.

And while it's not surprising that IBM has a large share of the middleware market, what's notable is that much of the company's recent success has come with an added bonus--taking away Oracle customers.

Oracle introduced its Fusion Middleware product roadmap in 2008, which included the amalgamation of several acquisitions, including BEA and Plumtree. However, … Read more

Many media and technology pundits are convinced that the impending release of the Apple iPad will herald a change in the way we consume computing resources.

And while the iPad may usher in a new way to interact with computing devices, it's far from a perfect device. Perhaps it's the promise of what a device of this type can offer that's the message, rather than the actuality of what the initial iPad will deliver.

In fact, according to a new survey by development tools maker Appcelerator, developer interest actually waned during the past three months, primarily due … Read more

When Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems nearly one year ago, one of the prime areas of consternation for developers was what would happen to the Java programming language.

Perhaps putting some of those fears to rest, a new report from IDC (subscription required) suggests that Java can thrive more under Oracle than it did at Sun itself.

In making the strategic commitment to Java in its next-generation Fusion applications, Oracle says on its Web site that the future success of Java is "fundamental to the success of Oracle as a vendor of anything other than databases.&… Read more

It's hard to believe that it's been 25 years since the first dot-com domain name was registered. With 668,000 dot-com sites registered each month and an estimated 80 million dot-com names in use today, it's a complete understatement to say that the Web has come a long way in the last quarter century.

Generally speaking, the raw technology that allows us to develop and serve Web pages hasn't changed dramatically in the last 10 years. What's changed is the way users interact with sites and how much easier it's become to publish content … Read more

If there is one underlying theme of this year's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, it's that the cloud, in all of its forms, represents a very different way of consuming software than we've embraced in the past.

In fact, the cloud has largely displaced open source as the "next big thing" in the enterprise computing landscape, but it's important to recognize that open source provides much of the underlying software infrastructure for the majority of commercial public clouds.

In a press meeting Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and vice president of corporate development Mike Evans discussed how open source is at the basis of cloud computing and how an open architecture and layered approach to infrastructure is the best path forward.

According to Evans, if you choose open-source components to base your infrastructure on, you are way ahead of the game. Red Hat believes this to be true for a number of reasons, with an emphasis on the fact that in order for cloud computing to become mainstream software vendors will have to start certifying their products to work on-premise and in a cloud environment, typically running in virtual machines.

Red Hat's virtualization engine, based on the open-source KVM project, received a big endorsement earlier this week when IBM announced that it had based its latest cloud offerings for test and development on the Red Hat commercial product.

Virtualization is a critical component, and Red Hat considers it to be a component of the operating system similar to how TCP/IP. What was once a separate component is now part of the core.

Whitehurst told me that this is an important step in the evolution of KVM; as to date many users felt that the software wasn't quite ready for prime time. But with the vote of confidence from IBM and with NTT already on board, it looks like there is finally an alternative to VMware's dominance. … Read more

IBM is expected to announce Tuesday its plans to go online with its commercial cloud service for software development and testing, allowing enterprise and government clients to access to IBM cloud services.

Testing services are an excellent use-case for cloud services, and a number of start-ups including Sauce Labs and SOASTA have offerings that allow customers to test their applications without having to build a massive test infrastructure.

According to IBM Research, the average enterprise IT department devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, with up to 90 percent of the available test … Read more

Just as open source has made it easier for developers to distribute software, the cloud has ushered in a new wave of consumption, turning on-premise IT from a necessity to an option.

Next week at the annual OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) in San Francisco, I'll be moderating a panel discussion on March 17 at 3 p.m. PST about open source and the cloud, and how the two play well together. (Note: fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart is a panelist.)

While open source offers users a great deal of control over their applications and data, the cloud requires … Read more

A few months back, I searched high and low for a few decent Mac games in preparation for a series of long flights and found myself looking at titles that were long surpassed by their PC brethren. Titles for the Mac are a dismal representation of what's going on in gaming.

But it looks as if that's about to change.

Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP of developer marketing, confirmed to MacNewsNetwork that the company is planning to port some of its most popular games to the Mac. And while details remain thin, most in the gaming community view … Read more