Development

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) on Tuesday gained a little more market influence to convince corporate users to adopt Linux by announcing that Novell Inc. has joined the consortium to help drive both server and desktop initiatives.

ObjectWeb and the Apache Software Foundation, which each develop an open-source Java application server, have reached a technology sharing agreement designed to accelerate certification of their products under Sun Microsystems Inc.'s latest J2EE standard.

The Malaysian government is making renewed efforts to combat software piracy, spurred into action by the recent appearance of pirated copies of Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn operating system on sale for under M$10 (US$3) in the south of the country.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and the netbeans.org tools organization on Thursday released a road map for the open source NetBeans tools technology, outlining advances to extend development for the Web and Web services.

Discussions aimed at merging Sun Microsystems Inc.'s NetBeans Java development framework with the IBM Corp.-backed Eclipse group have broken down, Sun said on Wednesday. The news ends months of speculation about whether Sun, the company that created Java, would join forces with IBM, one of Java's biggest supporters, and unify the two companies' efforts to create a standard open-source development environment for Java.

Sun Microsystems Inc. of Canada is not only officially releasing its Sun Java Systems in Canada this week, but the software company also continued its six-city whirlwind trip across the country in an effort to promote Sun's new family of software systems.

The number of people using the Internet worldwide continued to grow in 2002, though the increase was slower than in 2001, according to figures released by the United Nations (U.N.).

Universal Business Language 1.0, which is intended as a common XML message format for e-commerce, is now available for public implementation testing in a beta format, according to an official of OASIS.