Open Source

As gamers are slowly abandoning their portable consoles in favor of smartphones and tablets, it might come as no surprise that GameStop, the top U.S. games retailer, is now turning to Android tablets to boost sales. The retailer announced a variety of tablets running on Google's mobile OS are on sale at more than 1,600 of its U.S. stores, from manufacturers such as Acer, Asus and Toshiba.

It's no secret that open source software is playing an increasingly prominent role in businesses around the globe, but a recent survey has uncovered a few surprising findings about adopters' motivations for choosing it.

With the new version of Linux Mint, released Wednesday, the developers behind the open source Linux distribution have put all energies behind Gnome, offering two versions of the desktop interface.

Just over two months after its last major release, Linus Torvalds has posted the newest version of the open source Linux kernel, which supports new graphics processors from Nvidia and Intel, improves file system functionality and comes with a new security module.

When Canonical launched its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix back in February, it was based on Ubuntu Linux 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot,” which was then the most current stable version of the free and open source operating system.

It was only a few short months ago that Mozilla put its Firefox browser on a memory “diet,” and this week it announced that it's doing much the same thing for Firefox add-ons as well.

Gary Kovacs of open source browser maker urges mobile industry players to embrace HTML 5 and level barriers to the developer community in their apps ecosystems.

SAP-steered proposal brings OpenJDK to new platforms

Dell has taken what you might call an on-again, off-again approach to offering Ubuntu-preloaded hardware over the years, but on Monday the company made an announcement that Linux fans are sure to cheer.

The market for software related to the Hadoop and MapReduce programming frameworks for large-scale data analysis will jump from US$77 million in 2011 to $812.8 million in 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 60.2 percent, according to a new report released Monday by analyst firm IDC.

Tibco has brought its Spotfire in-memory analytics software into the burgeoning ecosystem around Hadoop, an open-source framework for processing large sets of information, the company announced Monday.

Oracle has asked a judge to bar Google from using some testimony given by former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz in the companies' intellectual-property suit over the Android mobile OS, saying it has "no legal and factual predicate."