Articles by Keith Regan

While declaring that open source has limitations, Sun Microsystems nevertheless is moving to capitalize on the method's popularity, saying it will develop an open-source desktop environment that is a low-cost, easy-to-use alternative to Microsoft Windows. Sun unveiled its Project Mad Hatter at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, b...

Leading Linux vendor Red Hat has filed suit against The SCO Group, aiming to prove that Red Hat software does not infringe on SCO patents and to stop SCO from making what it called "untrue" statements. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based firm also announced plans to establish a US$1 million legal defense fund to help smaller firms battle SCO in cour...

Newsflash: Apple is the market leader in digital music downloading, with more than 6 million song tracks sold in less than four months through its iTunes Music Store. That's good news for the computer company, which usually has to resort to the cold comfort of knowing that while people think its products rock, they don't buy them in nearly the numbers they do competitors' inferior machines.

IBM has become the latest computer services giant to score a billion-dollar outsourcing deal, signing a 10-year, US$1.1 billion agreement to handle the computer infrastructure needs of Switzerland-based power-services company ABB. In the race to ink high-profile services deals, this is just the latest in a string of victories for IBM's Global Services division...

Saying their combined assets can drive down the cost of deploying real-time collaboration software, Sun Microsystems and Oracle have announced plans to work together to spread the word about the benefits of their alternatives to Microsoft's dominant Office suite Oracle said the push will include joint sales training and telemarketing campaigns on t...

Microsoft says it plans to spend nearly US$7 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year and will add as many as 5,000 jobs, including at least 3,000 in the United States, as it pushes toward what it sees as a bright future for software despite the tech downturn. "We believe that we're just at the beginning of what we can do wit...

Microsoft says it plans to spend nearly US$7 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year and will add as many as 5,000 jobs, including at least 3,000 in the United States, as it pushes toward what it sees as a bright future for software despite the tech downturn. "We believe that we're just at the beginning of what we can do wit...

Microsoft says it plans to spend nearly US$7 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year and will add as many as 5,000 jobs, including at least 3,000 in the United States, as it pushes toward what it sees as a bright future for software despite the tech downturn. "We believe that we're just at the beginning of what we can do wit...

Hewlett-Packard has purchased a Swedish software firm that specializes in interactive voice solutions, saying it will roll the smaller company's VoiceXML-based products into its own OpenCall offerings, which are geared toward the telecom industry. HP did not disclose what it paid for PipeBeach AB, a privately held firm with headquarters in Stockho...

Pity the people with summer birthdays or anniversaries. Their milestones often go overlooked amid the rush to beat traffic to the beach or get the barbecue fired up. July is also the month in which Intel was born, and while it may have been easy to overlook this milestone in the past, the chip giant turned 35 in 2003. It's not exactly 50 or 100, b...

Offering a reminder of just how quickly things can change in the world of business, AOL Time Warner booked a US$1 billion profit for the second quarter -- just six months after posting the largest-ever one-year loss by a U.S. firm. The company said asset sales, its $750 million settlement with Microsoft and some blockbuster movies helped it post t...

While enterprises face all kinds of security risks, including vulnerabilities that must be patched and viruses that bombard corporate firewalls, the threats that strike the most fear into the hearts of chief security officers and their employees are the ones nobody has thought of yet. After all, any known threat can be at least minimized, but a ne...

Chipmaker Intel has forged an alliance with Linksys, the home and small office networking provider recently acquired by Cisco as part of that company's push into emerging markets. The partnership calls for Intel and Linksys to share technology and combine their efforts to sell products to the small- and home-office market. The effort will focus on...

Microsoft plans to announce that the two largest cable television providers in the United States, Time Warner Cable and Comcast, will test its interactive program guide (IPG) software in their set-top boxes in limited markets. The test marks a milestone in the software giant's push into the home entertainment arena....

Nothing Microsoft does goes unnoticed or underanalyzed -- and, true to form, the company's purchase of an obscure but well-regarded Romanian antivirus firm last month has sparked a torrent of speculation about its intentions in the security arena. Established antivirus firms, such as Symantec and Network Associates, were quick to downplay the thre...

With server software sales booming, Microsoft recorded a 26 percent gain in earnings, to US$1.92 billion, for its recently ended fourth quarter -- but the software giant also posted a rare miss of analysts' profit targets. The company said its profit was dented by nearly $800 million in charges, largely tied to the settlement of the Netscape antit...

Apple Computer outpaced expectations with its latest earnings, posting a profit as strong sales of non-desktop machines led the company to its best revenue-generating quarter in more than two years. Apple posted a profit of US$19 million for the quarter ended June 30th on revenue of $1.54 billion, an 8 percent increase over year-ago figures. Both ...

In a sign that one of the main combatants in the browser wars is ready to lay down its arms, AOL has cut workers from its already shrunken Netscape division and has cut loose the Mozilla open source browser project AOL did arm Mozilla with some cash, pledging to donate US$2 million as well as other resources to help support the Mozilla Foundation, ...

The tech world's pie-eyed optimists want us to believe that the helter-skelter past few weeks on the mergers-and-acquisitions front is a good omen, a sign of great things to come for the economy in general and technology in particular. That may be so. After all, with actual deals and would-be deals taken into account, some US$10 billion has been t...

No. 2 chipmaker AMD has unveiled a joint venture with Japan-based Fujitsu, creating a US$3 billion global company bent on mastering the market for flash memory products. Known as FASL LLC, the new venture is made up of the two companies' flash memory businesses, with a combined workforce of 7,000. It will market flash products under the brand name...