A new study says past delays in Microsoft Corp.'s products are causing some businesses to think twice about renewing the long-term service agreements that include rights to upgrade to future versions of its programs.

Google architect Grant Allen joined Labor Senator Kate Lundy and analyst Sam Higgins at Open Cebit 2008 to debate how the open source community can compete with software giants in a market geared to splurging millions on IT in return for SLAs and vendor liability.

If you’re a managed service provider or software as a service (SaaS) specialist, here’s an interesting theory: Instead of purchasing dozens — or hundreds — of x86 servers, you’re sometimes better off virtualizing your applications on a mainframe.

The UK Government Service Design Manual says to "Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages." The policy is in place to move forward.

"...The definition of the term "Web service" is confused by popular marketing literature. Is the main Google Maps interface a Web service? Technically, it is not. Does the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) standard describe a Web service? Absolutely..."

"...The question the appeals court was asked to answer, in its own words, was: 'We consider whether a service provider may change the terms of its service contract by merely posting a revised contract on its website.' ..."

We just published an article about contribution agreements for free software projects from our president Richard Stallman.

Tough economic times are leading customers to scrutinize their Microsoft licensing agreements more than ever before — a fact that’s leading Microsoft to provide some substantial deals and discounts.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Thomas Erl, a leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) expert and the world's top-selling SOA author, has contributed IP in the area of service modeling to Red Hat.