The lead developer of the OpenBSD operating system says that he believes that a government contracting firm that contributed code to his project "was probably contracted to write backdoors," which would grant secret access to encrypted communications.

Chip developer Rambus has filed patent infringement lawsuits against six chip makers including Broadcom and Freescale Semiconductor in the U.S., and said it is also seeking to ban the import of products that infringe its patents.

While many Oracle customers are interested in running IT services on private clouds, most are still in the early stages of development, a new study from the Independent Oracle Users Group has found.

Microsoft has started letting developers build and release applications for Windows Phone 7 using Visual Basic, potentially opening the door to more applications on the new smartphone platform.

Some of the developers behind Google Wave have submitted their software to the Apache Software Foundation for inclusion.

Cloud Sherpas, a provider of services and software for Google Apps, has closed a funding round worth US$1.6 million and will use the money in part to develop vertical-market applications for the cloud-hosted collaboration and communication suite.

Microsoft appears to be preparing to launch a new website called "Next" where it will share information about new technologies it and others are developing.

Oracle may own the Java trademark, but VMware is touting its own Spring framework as the best programming model for enterprise Java developers.

Some developers of the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite announced a break from Oracle on Tuesday, introducing a new name for the project and establishing a new foundation to guide its future.

Dell on Thursday said it is considering the development of devices beyond PCs that would stream Internet content to regular television sets.

Nokia has named Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business software group, to become its new CEO effective from later this month.

Google has made its fifth acquisition since the start of August, this time scooping up SocialDeck, a company that develops games that people can play against friends using iPhones, BlackBerry devices, or via Facebook on a PC.

Motorola appears ready to do more development on top of Android, with its acquisition of 280 North, a company that develops Web applications.

As it starts transitioning to Microsoft's Bing search engine this week, Yahoo has decided to drop Search Monkey, a developer platform designed to let external coders create applications that enhance Yahoo search results.

Analysts are developing a short list of possible candidates to replace former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd, who resigned Friday. But it's worth noting that Hurd's name didn't come up often, if at all, as a contender in 2005, when he was tapped for the HP job.

Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.

Intel on Tuesday announced it had developed a prototype interconnect that uses light to speed up data transmission inside computers at the speed of 50 gigabits per second.

Adobe Systems has started work to bring 3D to its Flash platform, and will preview the technology at the company's upcoming developer conference in October.

SAP is segmenting its emerging cloud-computing strategy across multiple development platforms, including one code-named "River," which will support lightweight extensions to its on-premises ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

Virtualization and open development frameworks are squeezing out operating systems in data centers, VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz said Wednesday at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco.