The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3

'Stop saying that 'Java is not Open Source,' and realize that 'Sun's implementation is not open source.' Even better, stop saying that 'Our implementation is open source,' it is not you know that, and this is OK, we're not blaming you, we want to work with you.' As part of our end of y

The Eclipse Foundation announced that the TPTP release 3.2 would be available on the Eclipse Foundation website (www.eclipse.org) this week.

CA has joined the Eclipse Foundation and will contribute code to the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) Top-Level Project. 'Joining the Eclipse Foundation underscores CA's commitment to embrace the open source paradigm,' said Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president and chie

Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final 'cut' to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to twent

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i

Eclipse, originally intended to be a platform for developers, has grown over the years, and is now shifting its focus on end-user application development. A new cross-platform offering has been created in the process, called IBM Workplace Client Technology, Rich Client Edition.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revi

IBM announced the creation of a new consortium designed to advance Power-based processors. The organization is to be modeled around the structure IBM created for Eclipse.org.

IBM released a new plug-in for Eclipse that makes developers' jobs easier, by providing visualizations of Web services transactions.

Eric S. Raymond ('ESR') responds to Jonathan Schwartz's obervations the other day that the JCP development process behind Java is a 'Bazaar' while the Linux way of doing things is more like a 'Cathedral.' That's a woeful misappropriation of the bazaar model he first expounded in The Ca

Who Is David Litwack? Litwack is responsible for the development and advancement of Novell's secure Web services strategy, a position he assumed in July 2002 following Novell's acquisition of SilverStream Software, a company for which he'd served as president and CEO since 1997. He is

Swainson: 'Let's start by defining 'on demand.' First, on demand reflects what our customers are doing with their businesses - streamlining their business processes to make them more flexible and adaptive to new markets and opportunities. They use information technology as a tool to in

The Eclipse Foundation continues to grow and gather support. Aldon announced it has accepted Eclipse's membership invitation. Aldon was granted full membership to not only the Foundation, but with Eclipse Add-In-Provider and Membership At Large communities.

What are the five most important trends for the future of software tools, Alan W. Brown was asked recently. As a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Rational software responsible for future product strategy of IBM Rational's Design and Construction products, his choices - made from his conte

Telelogic has released an enhanced version of its leading change management tool, SYNERGY/CM for Eclipse 3.0. This is expected to add to the functionality of open source projects, and provide a usable change management (CM) tool for large enterprises.

Basel, Switzerland-based Canoo has released a new plug-in for Eclipse 3.0 that simplifies Rich Internet Application (RIA) development with the UltraLightClient (ULC) Java library. The new plug-in, says Canoo, provides a tight ULC integration into the Eclipse IDE, enabling developers t

A major release of its CoWare's SystemC-based ConvergenSC system-on-chip (SoC) design tools has been released. The release is expected to speed adoption of electronic system level (ESL) design methodologies.

Richard Monson-Haefel, now Burton Group's senior analyst but familiar prior to joining Burton for his well-regarded books and articles about Java and his open source projects like Apache Geronimo, has just published a report - J2EE: A Standard in Jeopardy - which suggests that LAMP tec

As Gartner's ITXpo symposium gets under way, predictions and speculations about what the Web will evolve into have been in the air. Gartner sees a future Internet which will use standardized data enabling today's dissimilar networks to speak the same language.

Privately held Canadian RTOS house QNX Software Systems is going to multi billion-dollar-a-year Harman International Industries Inc, the Washington, DC-based outfit best known for its high-end audio and stereo brands, for $138 million. QNX will become a freestanding Harman subsidiary ru

Since its original launch in February, multiple companies have used IBM's 'Autonomic Computing Toolkit' to implement autonomic functions into their applications and services, with some currently already on the market. A new version of that toolkit launched today will feature expanded E

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by WebSphere Journal, TMC ha

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't open-source or propri

In July IBM announced that the Rational tool set would be fully integrated within the Eclipse tool set and would provide an integrated set of tools to support the full life cycle of software development. Recently I was able to interview Lee Nackman, the CTO of the Rational division of

SAP plans to support a new distributed environment, with its NetWeaver platform, that will support many Java virtual machines running together and sharing resources. This approach differs from the access model in place today, whereby multiple users are tied to one virtual machine, whic

The Eclipse Foundation announced very strong gains within the organization. Growth occurred across all sectors, with increases in new Eclipse members, the number of companies using the Eclipse platform, and the number of new projects being developed.

Which application server will be found to most resilient and flexible? And which most secure? It didn't take long for the enterprise software community to start discussing the 'Application Server Shootout' outlined this week by SYS-CON Media as it tapped Burton Group to stage the shoot

The PeopleSoft board's worst fear at this point may not be that Oracle buys the company but that it doesn't - or that PeopleSoft won't go for the $21 a share currently on offer. is that why one of its directors testified last week that PeopleSoft might now be open to Oracle's overtures

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the 'Application Server Shoot-Out' due to take place at its upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge) - in which leading application server

It remains to be seen whether or not Delaware Chancery Court Judge Leo Strine this week will side with Oracle and declare void PeopleSoft's poison-pill strategy designed to stave off the hostile takeover bid. Before then it may become moot; if Oracle ups its current $21 tender offer fo

Visual Mining has released an Eclipse-based business intelligence-reporting tool that the company claims can provide clients more cost-efficient reporting solutions than similar Java-based applications. NetCharts Designer 4.5.3 uses guided, interactive methods that allow users, who oth

If Sun were ever acquired, what would become of Java? As the 16-month Oracle-PeopleSoft takeover saga comes to an apparent climax, and with the echoes of the Kodak vs Sun patent infringement decision still ringing in everyone's ears, that perennial vexed question has naturally bubbled

Brazil's largest Java community is supporting the country's government in its efforts to adopt nationally and abroad an open source version of Java. Brazil says the move is needed to prevent vendor lock-in. Sun meanwhile stands committed to ensuring compatibility of products running on

With the release of Sun's latest version of J2SE not yet a week old, Sun has already outlined elements of Java's next revision, code-named 'Mustang.' Company officials offered some very early schematics, pegging spring 2006 as a potential release date. Sun reaffirmed its belief in fost

A 'mystery candidate,' Maureen O'Gara reports, described so far only as a 'senior executive at a high-technology company,' has emerged in the hunt for a permanent CEO of beleaguered Computer Associates. Seems the CA board is setting it up to push interim CEO Kenneth Cron, who'd like to

CA is going to fire about 5% of its 15,000 employees in the next month, affecting 800 employees worldwide. 70% of the terminations are to be in North America, with 200 people dropped at the company's Islandia, Long Island headquarters.

'For years, the EJB and JDO specifications have evolved independently as they addressed different sets of requirements,' write Linda DeMichiel and Craig Russell, specification leads of JSR-220 and JSR-243, in an open letter to the Java community. 'The core of both specifications, howev

Every now and again a newsgroup deals with an issue so generic that it seems helpful to air it in a wider forum. A recent question from a VB.NET programmer - who asked a Java newsgroup 'I have been forced to conclude I need to learn Java' - is a perfect example. The Java community has

In the first of a new series of sneak peeks into upcoming Eclipse plugins, Mike Henderson bravely shares with the wider developer community his first cut at a plugin, a Tapestry Palette to browse the components available in a project. 'It's very beta right now,' he says. 'There is only