Media server debuts

A small start-up will debut at Computex in June with its open source software for an integrated media server and home router going up against giants such as Google and Microsoft, reports EE Times.

Amahi hopes to power a range of consumer systems that link to subscription online services.

Intel will demonstrate the Amahi Home Digital Assistant running on its Atom N270 and N945GSE chip set in a prototype system at Computex.

While in its early days Microsoft often ignored the open source movement, recently it has made a practice of embracing open standards and then "extending" them in ways that tend to tie them to the Windows operating system, according to critics, writes DailyTech.

Thus was the case with XML collaborative content standards developed by Toronto-based i4i. Microsoft took the approach and used it in Word 2003 and Word 2007 to provide a means of controlling the appearance of Word files via embedded tags. In doing so they modified the XML without permission, in what the courts decide was a clear violation of i4i's patent.

After a fierce court battle, federal court in Texas has found Microsoft guilty of infringing the patent and has ordered it to pay i4i $200 million in damages.

The division between commercial (proprietary) software vendors and open source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be, according to CXOtoday.

Open source is not a product but an approach to software development and its subsequent deployment.

Balaji Sreenivasan, CEO of Aurigo Software Technologies says, “We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice.”