CIO.com’s James Turner has reported on a big, new development from Cisco Systems: the announcement of Etch, a “messaging protocol intended to allow developers to integrate client/server applications without the overhead of traditional protocols such as SOAP”. The biggest part of the release, however, is that it will be open source. Like Facebook’s Thrift messaging [...]

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A study of UK developers indicates that most of them prefer to use open source technologies. IT market research agency, Kingpin Intelligence, asked 200 developers using Open Source and 200 that use alternatives, about the choices they make. Results indicate that most non-Open Source respondents would prefer to use Open Source for work, but agree that [...]

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Sun is to open source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions. Rich Sands, Sun’s group manager for developer marketing, confirmed on Friday that Sun expects the work to be completed by the end of this year. Most of Java has [...]

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Details are starting to emerge about the new version of OpenOffice 3.0, due to be released in five or six months’ time. Judging by the screen shots it looks as if it will be a serious challenger to Microsoft’s Office suite. Up to the moment OpenOffice has been playing second fiddle to Office, but release [...]

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Microsoft has announced changes in its business practices to work better with software from other providers, including open-source communities. Specifically, Microsoft said it will publish the documentation for the application programming interfaces and communications protocols in its “high-volume products”. Developers do not need to buy a licence or pay a royalty to access the information. [...]

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