Development

Lindows Inc. claimed a victory in its latest trademark tussle with Microsoft Corp. this week after a Dutch court denied a request by Microsoft that the Linux-based software vendor be barred from using the Lindows name in connection with sales of its products in the Benelux countries: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Microsoft Corp. is planning a number of moves that will increase and potentially consolidate its development activities in India, according to company officials and sources.

Although the South Africa (SA) enterprise application suite (EAS) market expanded by more than 50 per cent in 2003 when measured in dollars, growth was a more moderate 9.5 per cent in rand terms. Nevertheless, this was well ahead of the economy, which grew by just under two per cent last year.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has updated its Java Desktop System (JDS) to include central management capabilities and more security features, Sun will announced Tuesday.

BEA Systems Inc.'s decision to offer its WebLogic Workshop run-time framework under an open source format, through its Project Beehive effort, may prompt the company to reconsider its current stance of not participating in either the NetBeans or Eclipse open source tools programs, said BEA's Cornelius Willis, vice-president of developer marketing.

Let's settle this up front. Microsoft Corp. has let its developers down. During the past few years, the company has left a trail of broken promises: a .Net-centered operating system; a broad stack of managed, .Net-based server applications; effortless targeting of everything from servers to cell phones; an egalitarian approach to programming languages; and a new, revolutionarily productive, framework-aware IDE.

Microsoft Corp. trained its focus on concrete challenges facing IT at its TechEd 2004 conference last week, rolling out products designed to enhance security, productivity, and integration.

Sun Microsystems Inc. continues to place its focus on appealing to the developer community with a recent upgrade to its Java Web Services Development Pack 1.4, available online. The company also announced a new edition of the Sun Java System Application Server 7 for its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which is available as a free download.