Robert McMillan

After three years of development, open source developers now have an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s .Net application development platform, thanks to Novell Inc., which this week released version 1.0 of its Mono development platform.

Microsoft Corp.'s Brazilian subsidiary has initiated legal proceedings against the Brazilian government official credited with developing the country's open-source strategy, saying he defamed the software giant in statements published in a magazine.

Just days after NEC Corp. announced plans to ship blade servers based on Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 microprocessor, Hewlett-Packard Co. on Thursday confirmed that it too expects to ship blade systems based on the 64-bit chips.

Dell Inc. is giving its four-way Itanium server a second chance. A year and a half after ceasing shipments of its PowerEdge 7150

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd. are to merge their Sparc-based server product lines by 2006, expanding a long-standing partnership between the two companies, company officials said.

The JBoss application server and MySQL database will both get a boost from Hewlett-Packard Co. on Tuesday, when the Palo Alto, Calif., computer company plans to begin offering technical support for the two open-source projects.

The Royal Bank of Canada is walking away from a US$30 million investment it made in The SCO Group Inc., in a move that may presage further legal and financial difficulties for the troubled Unix vendor, according to one financial analyst.

PeopleSoft Inc.'s board of directors on Wednesday rejected Oracle Corp.'s latest unsolicited offer to buy the enterprise resource management software company. PeopleSoft, in Pleasanton, Calif., also announced that it has settled a number of class action suits filed against it in connection with Oracle's bid.