Linux & Open Source by Computerworld

Red Hat has announced the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which can take advantage of Amazon's cloud while at the same time offering excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday.

IBM has designed and helped to build a 900,000-square-foot data center in India that it says is the largest in that country in terms of size and power. It's also among the largest in the world.

Oracle has chosen a new trial in its lawsuit against SAP for copyright infringement, rejecting the reduction of a jury verdict by about US$1 billion by a federal court in September last year.

Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player for Firefox, which has better protection against vulnerability exploits because of a new sandboxed architecture.

Java is barely hanging on to its ranking as the most popular programming language, edging out C in this month's Tiobe index of programming language popularity.

Serious technical problems that have delayed the rollout of an upgrade to SAP's community portal are persisting, to the point where the company is no longer specifying a launch date.

Some critics have blamed Silicon Valley tech firms for the massive online protests last month against two controversial copyright bills. Other groups have trumpeted the grassroots nature of the protests.

Building a Web application today means using a variety of different software technologies, each executing in a different domain. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser; PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, or the like on the server; MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, or any of a growing list of database servers as your persistent storage back-end. With Opa, an open source Web development technology from the French company MLstate, building a Web application tomorrow could be much more straightforward -- and safer.

Oracle executives on Tuesday gave a more detailed picture of their plans to integrate technologies gained through October's US$1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, maker of cloud-based software for customer service through the Web, social networks and contact centers.

IBM on Tuesday announced plans to buy Worklight, a move that will give it a range of cross-platform mobile application development technologies. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter, were not disclosed.

Infor has rebranded and revamped its software support offerings in a bid to cement its profile as a potential alternative to rivals like SAP and Oracle.

A court in California rejected Oracle's bid to use a fraud claim to undo an agreement to support the Itanium processor, that it is said to have made with Hewlett-Packard.

Mozilla developers have given the green light to ship Firefox 10 on Tuesday.

Techworld Australia recently caught up with some of the developers of Rockbox to discuss the open source project, which is designed to replace the firmware shipped on MP3 players and portable media players.

Offshore outsourcing companies continued to make up the majority of the top 10 H-1B visa users in 2011, according to new government data. These offshore firms have been adding employees by the thousands as their revenues increase.

If a new proposal by Oracle is accepted, oversight of Java technical standards will fall under the auspices of a single committee, rather than the current system, which has separate entities for Java EE/SE and ME.

Hewlett-Packard says it will make its webOS mobile operating system available to the open source community by September.

SAP plans to roll out support for the ERP module within its flagship Business Suite product family on the HANA in-memory database platform in the fourth quarter of this year, executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said in an interview Wednesday.

IBM and NEC have partnered to offer OpenFlow-based networking products to joint customers.

Since InfoWorld published "Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed" on Jan. 17, we've received abundant feedback from Oracle users and consulted with Oracle representatives, who went through the story point by point, offering clarifications and additional details, including information about the patches that address the flaw.