software

SAP announced on Wednesday that it is snapping up Yasu Technologies, which creates business rules management software.

The India-based company was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees.

The deal is designed to boost SAP's business process management (BPM) offerings and will be tucked into SAP NetWeaver, which channels the ebb and flow of data to software applications via SAP's back-end middleware.

The Yasu announcement comes just a little over a week after SAP announced that it will acquire Business Objects in a deal valued at more than $6.8 billion, its largest acquisition ever.

SAP, however, … Read more

Microsoft is revealing more details about new features in its Office for Mac 2008 suite, due for a release early next year.

Excel 2008 for Mac will offer worksheet templates with baked-in calculations designed to make it easier to balance household finances, manage inventory and other common tasks. The new Ledger Sheets features will include a gallery of elements, shifting formulas to the background.

In addition, the Entourage e-mail client will offer more support for Microsoft Exchange, which traditionally has enabled non-Mac PC users to make appointments and share notes and files with each other.

Each version of Office for … Read more

Two Microsoft licenses have been given official open-source status by the group that bestows it, the Open Source Initiative. So yes, cue the tire-screeching, glass-shattering noises now.

The OSI has been working to reduce license proliferation, but evidently thought the Microsoft licenses not only met the criteria of the open-source definition but also merited approval.

"The decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open-source community that these licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the open-source definition, and should therefore be approved," the OSI said in a statement Friday. "In spite … Read more

Other than its first reported quarter of positive cash flow, Napster has enjoyed a relatively unremarkable year--at least on the surface. It is now apparent, however, that plenty of tinkering has been going on in the background.

The company on Tuesday announced a fairly significant redesign to its music service and software. The new Napster, version 4, is lighter and a bit simpler--and it definitely appears to take some cues from RealNetworks' Rhapsody.

Of particular note are the launch of a Web-based version of the service, which will enable Mac and Linux users to join in the fun, and the … Read more

Is Apple ready to embrace developers for the iPhone?

According to one report Tuesday morning, yes. BusinessWeek cites sources "familiar with the company's plans" who say Apple will officially release a software development kit for the iPhone in early 2008. Those sources say the official announcement could come during Steve Jobs' keynote at the annual Macworld Expo on January 15. Apple could be waiting to release an SDK until after Leopard, the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, is released. Apple said Tuesday that the official release date is October 26.

The report contains … Read more

Oracle has been known to play musical chairs with its executives and retool its operations with a jack hammer.

And in this latest go-around, the enterprise applications software giant is cutting loose John Wookey, Oracle's senior vice president of applications development, who handled its Fusion efforts, according to Dennis Howlett, who runs Irregular Enterprise, a blog on ZDNet.

Wookey, when reached at his home Monday night by CNET's News.com, declined to comment on his status. A spokesman for Oracle said Tuesday morning the company does not usually comment on executive changes.

Howlett, citing an e-mail sent throughout … Read more

Editors' note: The report cited in this article originally misstated the name of one of the Web sites studied. The correct Web site is RachaelRayMag.com.

The next big copyright battle may be fought in the kitchen.

Content tracking company Attributor recently conducted a study to get an idea of how frequently online recipes are copied and reposted to other sites. What it found might concern some recipe publishers.

Attributor collected all the original recipes that appear on Epicurious.com, Allrecipes.com and RachaelRayMag.com. The software then checked those recipes against what was available elsewhere on the Web, looking … Read more

Suddenly all those discussions about the discordant ways of open-source software and patent law have become a lot less abstract.

Companies called IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation sued Red Hat and Novell on Tuesday, claiming the top Linux sellers' software products infringe U.S. patent 5,072,412, "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects," and two identically named patents. The suit (PDF), in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, seeks damages and a permanent injunction prohibiting any further infringement.

Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday only that the company is … Read more

Two years after acquiring the company that developed the AppArmor security software for Linux, Novell has laid off team members behind the project, CNET News.com has learned.

AppArmor's founder and leader, Crispin Cowan, joined Novell in 2005 when it acquired his company, Immunix, which developed the software. But he and four others from the project lost their Novell jobs in Portland, Ore., on September 28, Cowan confirmed.

However, he plans to continue AppArmor development. He and two other laid-off AppArmor programmers, Steve Beattie and Dominic Reynolds, launched an AppArmor consulting company on Wednesday called Mercenary Linux.

"I … Read more