Enterprise software

Novell was secret acquirer of Commerce One patents

The New York Times has outed Novell as the mysterious buyer of a dozen E-business patents that Commerce One auctioned off last year in its bankruptcy case.

The auction, which took place in December in San Francisco, created quite a stir in Silicon Valley. Some major names in the tech business, including Oracle, Google and Sun Microsystems, were doing some nail biting for fear of being accused of infringing on the patents.

They can now breathe a sigh of relief. Novell, which paid $15.5 million for the patents, says it's not planning to seek licensing revenue for them. … Read more

Siebel speculators, take a chill pill

Several media outlets reporting that Oracle is about to buy Siebel Systems are way off track, according to software sage Rick Sherlund.

The Goldman Sachs securities analyst rained on the media's rumor mill parade Tuesday with a report outlining why Oracle, SAP or anyone else is unlikely to buy the struggling software firm anytime soon.

"We suspect that Tom Siebel and the Board believe they can turn (the company) around, having just put a new CEO in place," Sherlund said in his note. "If they wanted to sell the company, why undergo the management change and … Read more

Cracking into the business of social networks

In the merger of Oracle and Peoplesoft, hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of dollars walked out the door, claims Antony Brydon, CEO and co-founder of social networking company Visible Path. Each of the 5,000 people laid off left with a valuable network of contacts, which was not adequately considered before the ax fell.

Another example: because of the delays in finding the right people, Brydon's former company lost $40 million in value during the multi-month process of selling his company to a larger firm.

And here's another big number: one Fortune 1000 company evaluating Visible Path'… Read more

Code floats: Offshoring gets literal

A project that aims to put 600 software programmers out to sea in a refitted cruise ship is making waves, and headlines, this week.

Featured on the pages of everything from Forbes Magazine to the Boston Globe, the nautical programming effort dubbed SeaCode will anchor 3.1 miles off the coast on Los Angeles in an effort to attract software coders who cannot gain legal worker status in the United States. Sitting just out of reach of U.S. immigration laws, the project stewards believe the ship will still be close enough to establish itself as a welcome provider of … Read more

Download.com sets May 3 anti-spyware workshop in S.F.

Download.com, a sister site of News.com and also part of CNET, is hosting what should be an interesting and useful spyware workshop on Tuesday, May 3, in San Francisco.

Its Web site has all the details, but here's the summary: The workshop runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and takes place at CNET's headquarters at 235 Second St. The event is properly titled "The Anti-spyware Workshop" and features discussions of business models, what is legal and what isn't, and what Congress is likely to do.

Registration is free, but space … Read more

Longhorn: Now you see it, now you don't

Just when people were getting their first glimpses of Longhorn, Microsoft's often-mentioned, seldom-seen future version of Windows, the company has brought down the curtain.

Microsoft has asked several Windows enthusiast sites to remove screen shots of an early version of Longhorn, distributed at this week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, according to several blog postings.

Microsoft said it's taking the controversial action for legal reasons. Turns out there may be certain technologies in the early version of Longhorn for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications.

Paul Thurrott, who runs a site called WinInfo, told News.com's … Read more

The long view on XML trends

Jean Paoli has been working in the XML community since before XML existed. In the 1980s, he worked on SGML, the precursor to XML, and was instrumental in making the W3C standard.

Now the director of XML architecture at Microsoft, he delivers his take on the hot and trendy issues in the XML community with passion, sometimes nearly jumping out his chair. (For some hints on how XML will impact the next version of Office from Paoli, click here.)

What about the W3C's effort to create a binary XML standard? Bad idea, he says. Creating a formalized way to … Read more

Siebel mulls stock buyback

Siebel Systems may use some of the $2 billion in cash it's sitting on to buy up stock, as a group of disgruntled shareholders are urging it to do. Siebel is discussing the "buyback issue" with bankers and other advisors, Ken Goldman, Siebel's chief financial officer, said on Wednesday during an earnings call.

A group of shareholders that together own about a third of Siebel's stock are demanding the company buy at least $1 billion of outstanding shares. Unhappy with the company's declining stock price and profits, they're also asking the company to … Read more

Borland feels the Eclipse pinch

Borland Software's recent financial report lends credence to the conventional wisdom that the Java development tools market is rapidly commoditizing.

With JBuilder, Borland had one of the first successful visual development tools, or IDEs, specifically for Java. In the company's first quarter earnings call earlier this week, however, Borland executives indicated that its JBuilder business is under attack.

Financial analysts from both Piper Jaffray and Pacific Growth Equities estimated that Borland's JBuilder revenue declined 50 percent year over year.

The cause of this decline is Eclipse, the open-source development product that's popular with Java programmers, according … Read more