James Niccolai

After careful consideration, PeopleSoft's board decided that Oracle's latest offer provides good value for PeopleSoft's stockholders, the company said. The agreement ends a long, emotional struggle, it said.

BMW AG is trying to clean up its act on the Web. The German car maker last month sent a letter of complaint to an adult search engine based in the Netherlands, asking it to remove references to its cars that appear in search listings for adult content.

Upcoming Microsoft operating system scaled down for impending launch.

Microsoft Corp. is developing versions of its Windows operating system with only a subset of the Windows code base, designed for specific server tasks, in a move that could reduce maintenance costs for customers and create products that are less vulnerable to attack.

ObjectWeb will begin distributing an open source BPEL server in the coming weeks, expanding the available options for a middleware technology used to link several applications and data sources into a larger business process.

Oracle Corp. released security patches this week that plug several vulnerabilities reported last month in its database software and other products.

Three weeks after the trial phase ended in the U.S. government's suit to block Oracle Corp. from buying PeopleSoft Inc., the judge presiding over the case continues to grill both sides as to why documents and testimony filed under seal should be kept confidential.

Oracle Corp. acknowledged the existence of multiple security holes in its database software Tuesday and said it would issue an alert to customers shortly. The U.K. security expert who found the holes criticized Oracle's conduct, saying that it has been sitting on patches that would fix the holes for about two months.