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Open-source software developers are seeing a lot of interest in their products in Europe -- but it's North American companies that are opening their checkbooks, said speakers at Paris Capitale du Libre, a conference organized by the Federation of Open Source Software Industry.

Engineers from Google and High Tech Computer (HTC) spent three years developing Android software and handsets before the launch of the G1 by T-Mobile on Tuesday, an executive from HTC said.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly nongeek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two most well-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers.

T-Mobile, HTC and Google launched the "world's first Android-powered mobile phone" today and proudly announced that this phone was going to be "game-changing". But after reading details on the phone, the service and some of the new applications, I'm left wondering where the game is actually changing.

A first look at T-Mobile's G1 Android phone.

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.

Chrome's share of the browser market is fading as users who abandoned Internet Explorer and Firefox start to return, an Internet measurement company said Tuesday.

The first Android phone looks a lot like the fuzzy pictures that have surfaced online for months, with a touch screen similar to the iPhone and a full slide-out keyboard.

I have conducted more security program assessments than I can remember over the past 15 years. Quite some time ago I conducted some of the first certification and accreditation efforts ever at the CIA. Those were interesting times. We had very little to go on and we tried to assess security controls to the few regulations and controls that existed at that time. By the time I left the federal space and started working almost exclusively in the commercial sector a number of security best practice standards had sprung up. Most recently, in the past 10 years or so, a slew of legislation pertaining to data security and privacy has given us more requirements with which to adhere.

Spam. It fills our in-boxes, wastes our time and spreads malware -- and it's only getting worse. According to Ferris Research, which studies messaging and content control, 40 trillion spam messages will be sent in 2008, costing businesses more than US$140 billion worldwide -- a significant increase from the 18 trillion sent in 2006 and the 30 trillion in 2007.

It was 9:30 on the morning of March 4, 2002, and something was terribly wrong at the offices of PaineWebber UBS. Computers in branches all over the country began showing disc errors. A logic bomb buried deep within the machines had wiped their hard drives clean, preventing 17,000 brokers from making trades.

Dear Bob

The pace of mobilization within many enterprises is increasing rapidly. Enterprises of all sizes and types are finding that going mobile can significantly increase the productivity of their employees, bringing added flexibility and cost reductions and helping many companies gain a competitive edge in their market.

In August Symantec released the results of its 2008 IT Disaster Recovery survey, reporting global business trends around disaster recovery planning (DR) and preparedness. Perhaps the most compelling (and certainly the most reported) finding in the report was the apparent decline in C-level executive involvement in DR planning.

Security experts speculating Thursday on how Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account had been hacked put forward several theories, with some skeptical of claims that the access was gained by a simple password reset.

The Webmaster of a proxy service called Ctunnel.com, which may have been used by a hacker to illegally access the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, is working with law enforcement authorities to track down the person behind the break-in.

Many IT security professionals still regard role-based access and identity management as hopelessly complex because the predominantly manual approach used to review and manage roles is not scalable and the dynamic nature of roles themselves often get out of sync with reality.

Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when traveling to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because US Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth US Circuit Court ruling in April.