For decades the enterprise software industry has grown fat on outsized, upfront license fees coupled with ongoing, high-margin maintenance streams. Cracks in the model have threatened  to dismantle the system for years, as reported by The Wall Street Journal back in 2009, with CIOs chafing at paying for low-value, high-cost maintenance. But if Oracle's big earnings miss last week is any indication, one of three disappointing quarters over the past two years, the cracks have widened to a chasm. 

NEWS ANALYSIS: Dell‘s business is struggling and it’s thrashing about in search of a solution. The company needs to find a solution quickly if it is to survive as an independent IT company.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has taken to his blog to call out "fellow geeks" — from tech industry employees to Reddit denizens — for the crude responses, death threats, and DDOS attacks that occurred after Adria Richards tweeted a picture of several men who made childish, sexual jokes behind her...

 Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it's still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations. In the latest example of these reports, Dice.com and The Linux Foundation surveyed more than 850 global hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals, finding that Linux skills, in particular, are very much in demand.  "[Linux] is considered the most ubiquitous and popular free open-source operating system," The Linux Foundation reports. "And if you demonstrate IT skills in this field, you're setting yourself up for a lucrative in-demand career." At Baselinemag.com, you can look at a nice slideshow featuring results...