Linux Gram articles from April 2005

Linux Gram archives from April 2005

Groklaw Has Trouble Sharing Its Toys While IBM Tries To Take SCO's Toys Away.
April 4, 2005... Dear, dear, dear. Whatever happened to that share-and-share-alike philosophy that open source and its advocates are famous for? Groklaw and its followers got all exercised and bent out of shape this week when they discovered that the hated...

SCP May Shake its Scarlet Letter Soon.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... SCO thinks it's gonna file its belated 10K, covering the year ended October 31, any second now, maybe even today, having resolved those differences it was having with its auditor mostly over how to treat employee stock compensation. Once...

HP Hires NCR Chief To Clean Up Carly's Mess; Appointment Stirs Dreams of Compaq Spin-off.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(National Cash Register Company)
April 4, 2005... The fickle finger of fate has landed on Mark Hurd, the sales and marketing guy who's been CEO of NCR for the last two years, making him president and CEO of HP, a company more than 10 times the size of the one he's been running. Ironically...

Red Hat Numbers Solid, Stock Price in the Pits.
April 4, 2005... Red Hat's Q4 revenues hopped over the top of its guidance, coming in at $57.5 million when the company said the best it could do was $56.5 million. Guess it needs to wipe the fingerprints off its crystal ball. Revenues were up 56%...

Merrill Lynch, A Bad News Bear.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Merrill Lynch is predicting a slowdown in the server market later this year and next. It estimates that if revenue growth turns flat, Sun's earnings will take the biggest hit, down close to 25%, followed by HP, IBM and Dell. The...

GroundWork Attracts VCs, Claims It's a Trend.(Venture Capital Companies)(GroundWork Open Source Solutions Inc)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... GroundWork Open Source Solutions Inc, the two-year-old Emeryville, California start-up in the business of infrastructure management solutions such as network and systems monitoring, service desk management and IT dashboards, has picked up an...

Black Duck On-Demand.(Black Duck Software)
April 4, 2005... Black Duck Software, the outfit whose software tracks down open source code developers may be using in a project and makes sure a company is complying with all the various licensing requirements, has gone into the on-demand business, crossing...

Potomac, Twin Castle Launch Comes Off.
April 4, 2005... Intel expanded its 64-bit x86 portfolio Tuesday with five new sixth- generation Xeon MP processors for four-way or better servers. It's now "x64" from the desktop to the data center. Intel's newfangled Truland platform, Truland is supposed...

RLX Repotted with $9.1m More Fertilizer.
April 4, 2005... RLX Technologies Inc, the blade pioneer now in its post-hardware, software-only phase, has moved its headquarters to a converted barn in Old Town Spring, Texas, a snug little place in the throes of preservation north of Houston. The move...

Oracle Strikes Again.(Oracle Corp.)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Oracle said Monday that it had bought Oblix, the small nine-year-old privately held identity-based security house run by ex-Symantec CEO Gordeon Eubanks, for an undisclosed amount of money. Oracle is still digesting PeopleSoft and hasn't...

Ex-CSFB CIO Named to OSDL Board.(Open Source Development Labs)(Credit Suisse First Boston L.L.C.)(Chief Information Officer)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has named Frank Fanzilli, the former global CIO of Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and an ex-IBMer, to its board. He retired in 2002 after pioneering the use of Linux at CSFB, which deployed one of...

Deutsche Bahn Hops on the Linux Train.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Novell says that Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway, is going with Linux as its strategic server platform and that its IT arm DB Systems is currently running mission-critical apps on 300 Intel server fitted out with SuSE as part of a...

FFII Takes Over NoSoftwarePatents.com.(Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is going to take over the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign to prevent the spread of American-style patents to Europe from its founder Florian Mueller so he can get back to work...

NASA To Use Zend.(National Aeronautics and Space Administration)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Zend Technologies, the PHP company, says that Lockheed Martin is going to use Zend Studio 4 to develop an object-oriented code- generation framework for NASA space exploration. The widgetry is being used as what is described as a critical...

Lenovo Takes On Partners.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... IBM's new Chinese partner, the Lenovo Group, has sold off pieces of itself worth $350 million to three US equity firm the Texas Pacific Group (TPG), General Atlantic LLC (GA) and Newbridge Capital LLC. It needs the money to finance its...

Pacifica Rises.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Well, out little chip groupie Nathan Brookwood was right about Pacifica. The AMD virtualization widgetry, basically hardware support for the technology, is close enough to Intel's Vanderpool stuff that virtual machine suppliers like VMware,...

IBM Promotes VMware.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... IBM is going to bundle six-month evaluation copies of VMware ESX Server, Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter with VMotion with its BladeCenter shipments worldwide. ESX is VMware's data center-class virtual infrastructure software for...

HP Launches Truland Servers.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Hewlett-Packard has launched two new servers, the ProLiant DL580 G3 and ProLiant ML570 G3, based on the new 64-bit Xeon MP Truland platform. The DL580 G3 is a rack-mount using the shiny new 3.33GHz Xeon MP (aka Potomac) with 8MB of L3...

Intel Folds in Japanese Antitrust Case.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Intel is taking the course of least resistance about the antitrust charges that the Japanese regulators made against it a few weeks ago. It's simply conceding and, without admitting anything or even agreeing with the facts behind the...

Remember, Downloads Are Not Commerce.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Sun said Monday that it had distributed "more than one million" registered licenses for Solaris 10 since January 31, when the code went up on Sun's web site. The company described the "interest" in Solaris 10 as exceeding its "highest...

My Dual-Core's Better Than Your Dual Core.(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... AMD figures its dual-cores will perform at least 20% better than Intel's dual-cores because they're better integrated. See, like most married people, Intel's Smithfield-style dual-cores, which are more like two processors inhabiting the same...

Ex-Newisys CTO Joins AMD.(Chief Technology Officer)(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Former IBM Fellow and former Newisys CTO Rich Oehler has joined AMD's Office of Strategy and Technology reporting to CTO Fred Weber. He's there to align AMD's multi-core enterprise-class strategies with the needs of the Fortune 1000. Oehler is...

Darn Non-Competes.(Virtual Iron Software Inc. falls short of one of its board of advisors)(Brief Article)
April 4, 2005... Virtual Iron Software Inc, the virtual computing platform start-up in Acton, Massachusetts, finds itself shy one of its anticipated board of advisors. Ex-Novell vice-chairman, the guy credited with Novell's purchase of SuSE and Ximian, was...

Intel's hard-won Fujitsu alliance produces 'open' mainframe.
April 11, 2005... The momentous alliance that Intel cut with Fujitsu, Sun's long-time Sparc buddy, two years ago bore its first fruit Tuesday when Fujitsu unveiled a so-called "mainframe-class open system" based on the slow-moving 64-bit Itanium chip. The little...

Canopy reportedly selling Vintela.(Canopy Group)
April 11, 2005... The switchboard at rumor central lit up the last couple days with scuttlebutt about Quest Software supposedly buying Vintela Inc, the Utah outfit financed by the Canopy Group and Microsoft whose widgetry makes Microsoft's widgetry support Linux...

CA Proposes Template License.(Computer Associates International Inc.)
April 11, 2005... Evidently Computer Associates wants to be considered a thought leader. Quickly despairing that Eben Moglen and the newfangled Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) will ever come up with a commercial open source license that the industry can...

Linux & Windows: Both Good Enough.
April 11, 2005... The Yankee Group says that Linux is having trouble displacing Windows Server, XP and Office in both the SMB and enterprise markets, a finding that isn't going to win it any friends among the open source zealots, who tends to treat such...

Sun's Community-Minded.(Sun Microsystems Inc. refused to open source Java)
April 11, 2005... Sun has set up a Community Advisory Board (CAB) that's supposed to - in Sun's words - "steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance." Whenever Sun starts talking about stewardship, people get edgy, remembering its...

Solaris Killer Expected or The Tale of a Better Mousetrap.(Spliced Networks LLC, management )
April 11, 2005... A stealth start-up in Athens, Ohio whose name is Spliced Networks LLC is on the threshold of announcing a new Linux distribution that its young CTO John Buswell describes as "unlike anything currently on the market." It's supposed to...

CA To Buy Concord Communications.(Computer Associates International Inc.)
April 11, 2005... In its first sizeable acquisition under its new management, Computer Associates is buying network service management software vendor Concord Communications in a cash deal valued at $330 million, or $17 a share, to strengthen its flagship...

Red Hat Claims Bragging Rights.(BPU Banca)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Red Hat brags that BPU Banca, the parent bank of Banca Populari Unite, Italy's seventh largest bank and the first cooperative credit banking group, is pulling out Solaris to install red Hat desktops and servers. The bank is yanking out...

Linspire Claims To Flood Retail Stores.(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Linspire says the latest cut of its desktop Linux operating system, Linspire Five-0, is being sold at more than 1,000 major national retail stores, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Fry's Electronics, Micro Center and J & R Computer World. It claims...

CA Morphs into SBUs.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Small Business Units)
April 11, 2005... Computer Associates has reorganized into five strategic business units like it said it would, figuring the new structure, an IBM import, will make it more accountable and responsive, two qualities CA needs given its past history. The SBUs...

CA Recruits Chief Marketer.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Computer Associates, which has been hiring in some new senior folks lately, has named 30-year IBM veteran Donald Friedman as its chief marketing officer. Presumably he's an old crony of CA's new CEO John Swainson, also an IBM import....

What Have the Fates in Store for Ingres?(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... The rumor mill claims that Terry Garnett, the ex-Oracle, ex-Venrock half of Garnett & Helfrich Capital, the $250 million Sand Hill Road management buyout firm chartered to find "broken and orphaned" businesses neglected by their parent...

Chris Stone Finds a Home.(Appointments)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Erstwhile Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone, who is believed to have left the company after falling afoul of the personal ambitions of Novell CEO Jack Messman and then the board of advisors of virtual computing start-up Virtual Iron Software...

Greenplum Hopes for Greenfields.(Greenplum)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... A start-up by the name of Greenplum that's been flying under the radar since 2003 is pioneering the use of open source databases for enterprise-class business intelligence and data warehousing with a line of products called DeepGreen that...

AMD Can't Keep a Secret.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... AMD is supposed to use Opteron's second-anniversary party in New York on April 21 to launch its dual-core Opteron chip thereby beating out Intel, which isn't supposed to launch its dual-core widget until May. See, it's tradition in the...

Dell: $80b or Bust.(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Dell, which raised its limbo pole up to the $80 billion mark back in February, said at its analyst meeting Thursday that it thought it could reach that level in annual sales in three to four years. Wall Street likes the idea of three years, up...

Wonder of Wonders.(Electronic Filing)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Last Friday SCO finally managed to file its 10-K covering the year ended last October 31, a step on its path to rehabilitating itself with the Nasdaq, which has the company on its delisting watch list. Now it's got to post its first-quarter...

Linux the Polymorph.(Linux operating system)(Brief Article)
April 11, 2005... Red Hat executive VP Paul Cormier, the guy responsible for the Red Hat operating system, says we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that there's single Linux community. It's more like 1,600, he said.

SCO Claims Pamela Jones Is Not Who She Says She Is.
April 18, 2005... SCO CEO Darl McBride claimed during the company's Q1 earnings report Wednesday evening that Pamela Jones, aka PJ, the now-famous, albeit shadowy, voice of Groklaw, the web site that follows the SCO v IBM suit and has become a festering thorn in...

IBM Blows the Quarter.
April 18, 2005... IBM's first quarter lost its sizzle after a strong start when the bottom fell out in March and the computer giant had trouble closing deals, CEO Sam Palmisano said last night after the company rushed out the news of a shortfall in both sales...

SCO Loses Money.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
April 18, 2005... SCO lost money in its first quarter ended January 31, a revelation that's going to come as no surprise to anybody. Complaining of "continued competitive pressures" on its Unix line, a thinly veiled reference to Linux, which is supposed to...

QCD Makes Linux Look Like Windows.(QCD Microsystems Inc)
April 18, 2005... QCD Microsystems Inc, a little five-year-old company in New York, has made Linux look like Windows so it's easier to administer. It thinks it's the only Linux admin platform like it and that it's solving a problem that really needs solving....

Wannabe Grid Commercializer Fields Early Access Release.(ActiveGrid Inc)
April 18, 2005... ActiveGrid Inc, the two-year-old open source start-up with $3 million in funding from ex-Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman and ex-Apple product chief Jean-Louis Gassee, both VCs now, has got an early access release of its newfangled LAMP-based Grid...

SCO Asks for Hearing Delay.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... SCO was making noises last week in one of its filings in its case against IBM about bringing more charges and now it's asking the court to delay the hearing set for this coming Thursday so it can add more claims to its key third amended...

Mandrakesoft Changes its Name.(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... Mandrakesoft and its recent Conectiva acquisition are changing their name to Mandriva, a synthesis of their two brands. Their distribution will be called Mandriva Linux and the web site will be mandriva.com. After what they suggested was...

Cisco Buys Topspin.(Topspin Communications Inc.)(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... Five-year-old Infiniband switch start-up Topspin Communications Inc has found the exit ramp. It's gonna get bought by Cisco, the perennial shopper and switch collector, for roughly $250 million in cash and options in a deal expected to close by...

Novell Courts Retailers with Optimized System.(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... Novell has announced what it calls the only Linux distribution designed specifically for retail point-of-service, a thing called logically enough Novell Linux Point of Service 9 and built out the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Linux...

Me First. No, Me First. Ah, The Perennial Intel-AMD Chip Race.(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... So AMD figured it'd leapfrog Intel's dual-core Pentium announcement by launching its dual-core Opteron at an Opteron birthday bash on April 21. Only Intel started delivering its 64-bit dual-core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chips a couple of weeks...

Venture Buyout Firm Buys into Wyse, Promises Huge Growth.(Garnett and Helfrich Capital)
April 18, 2005... Garnett & Helfrich Capital, the venture buyout firm dedicated to finding "broken and orphaned" businesses neglected by their parents, finally got around to admitting its interest in Wyse Technology the other day. It's had one of its boys...

Tiger Dreams of Having Longhorn for Lunch.(Product introduction of Operating system)
April 18, 2005... Apple says it's going to unleash Tiger, its highly anticipated Unix- based Mac OS X 10.4 operating system upgrade, on Friday, April 29 at 6pm. The server version, which is said to integrate a hundred-odd open source projects and...

Azul Ready with the Next Great Thing.
April 18, 2005... Azul Systems, the latest Stephen "Cobalt Networks" DeWitt start-up, is on the threshold of delivering what it swears is the Next Great Thing, the first system built from the chip up in 20 years. Azul calls its value proposition "network...

VMware Updates its Desktop.(Brief Article)
April 18, 2005... VMware has revved its six-year-old Workstation product and made the major release generally available claiming "groundbreaking functionality." It says the new Workstation 5, which virtualizes Windows and Linux, has been combined with the...

AMD Loses More Money.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
April 18, 2005... AMD came in Wednesday with a Q1 loss of $17 million, or four cents a share, on sales of $1.2 billion, down 1% year-over-year, and to balance the unhappy tidings said that its loss-making Flash joint venture with Fujitsu, Spansion, was going to...

Stupid Mistake.(Correction Notice)
April 18, 2005... For some reason known but to God, last week we decided to call Fujitsu's shiny new Itanium-based "open" mainframe the PowerQuest when its name is PrimeQuest.

Anybody Got a Tiara?
April 18, 2005... After last week's bout of papal mania, it might be suggestive to observe that the pope after St Peter was named Linus.

Court Orders IBM To Give SCO ALL Linux Discovery.
April 25, 2005... The federal court in Utah hearing the $5 billion SCO v IBM case has told IBM that it has 75 days to turn over to SCO ALL non-public information relating to its Linux contributions, a year-old order IBM has been trying duck. The caps and...

x64 Windows Imminent.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... A drum roll, maestro, please. Microsoft is going to launch its so-called x64 operating systems, the stuff that support the Intel and AMD x86 64-bit extensions, on Monday. Figure on both the client and the server, to wit, Windows Server...

The Great Dual-Core Race Takes Predictable Turns.(Product Development of Dual Core chips)
April 25, 2005... On Thursday night at its dual-core Opteron launch party, AMD moved up the schedule on its dual-core desktop chip to challenge the Intel entry that started shipping the weekend before last. The AMD chip, meant to create one-processor...

HP Goes with Dual-Core Opteron Blade Server.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
April 25, 2005... If you blinked, you missed this, but somebody at HP last week jumped the gun and prematurely mounted a web page indicating that HP would be selling dual-core Opteron boxes. Actually HP won't be able to deliver the things for another month...

Greenplum Harbors Great Ambitions for Postgres.
April 25, 2005... Greenplum is the San Mateo, California start-up trying to make an open source database good enough for enterprise-class business intelligence and data warehousing out of PostgresSQL. The words business intelligence, data warehousing and...

OSI To Create Caste System for Open Source Licenses.(Open Source Initiative )(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... Now that it's been convinced by an incipient revolt that it overdid the recognition of so many open source licenses, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) wants to sort through them and consign them to one of three castes: "preferred, approved or...

Linuxcare Co-founder Joins FSG, SpecOpS.(SpecOpS Labs)(Free Standards Group )
April 25, 2005... Art Tyde, a co-founder of Linuxcare, the once highly entertaining service start-up rehabilitated as a sober ISV, has popped up at the Free Standards Group (FSG), the keeper of the Linux Standard Base, as CTO. He's supposed to lead all its...

SCO Shucks Scarlet Letter.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... Much to the annoyance of its many critics who were hoping SCO had met its Waterloo, the company has emerged from under the threat of Nasdaq delisting and its stock symbol will no longer have to wear the telltale "e" indicating it was on the...

HP Changes the Name of its Linux Unit.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... HP has changed the name of its Linux operation to the Open Source & Linux Organization (OSLO) to advertise its open source sympathies, it said. It's supposed to signify HP's focus on open source beyond the Linux operating system. Martin Fink...

Red Hat & MySQL Get Cozier.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... Red Hat and MySQL says they are expanding their partnership in the name of optimizing scale-out solutions for the enterprise. They're promising "significant new joint initiative" and pretty much let it go at that. No details. Apparently they...

Will SCO Prevail Despite Itself?
April 25, 2005... Reports out of Utah say that IBM - despite all the money SCO is spending on its fancy New York lawyers - won all the style points at a crucial hearing Thursday over whether SCO should be allowed to file its key third amended complaint - the one...

Unisys Moves into Software.
April 25, 2005... Unisys is moving into software, initially in support of its massive Windows-based 7000 machines, but eventually it wants to be broader-based and support any Intel server. It's proposing to deliver a series of IT infrastructure solutions...

Intel Overachieves.
April 25, 2005... Intel hit a homerun that happened to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law, itself a resounding homerun. It came in Tuesday with Q1 earnings up 25% year-over-year to $2.2 billion, or 34 cents a share, on revenue of $9.4, up 17%...

AMD's Ambitions.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... AMD has been telling Wall Street that it expects to take its total share of the x86 market from 8% to 12% this year. It wants 25% long-term. Apparently it expects hand-to-hand combat with Intel in emerging markets. IDC and Mercury Research give...

Intel, Take Note.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... IBM, which was the first big OEM to back Opteron two years ago, but has never subsequently seemed very enthusiastic about it, was downright effusive about it at AMD's launch party in New York Thursday night. It waxed eloquent about the "strong...

AMD Proves Good with Furry Creatures.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... Evidently we're going to see DreamWorks' cartoon characters promoting AMD widgetry and AMD, now the animation factory's preferred supplier, promote DreamWorks Animation films and home videos in turn. AMD's Opteron chip is being credited with...

They're Blue in Armonk.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... IBM's stock seems to have found a bottom since its fall from grace last Thursday on the news that its first quarter came a cropper. At roughly $74, it's still down 10 bucks since then, 20 bucks since the first of the year.

Linux Networx Gets Patent.(Brief Article)
April 25, 2005... See that now, not all Linux companies are anti-patents. Linux Networx got a US patent (No. 6,862,187) on the hardware side of its Icebox clustering appliance, widgetry that monitors and manages thousands of nodes. It's also got a patent on its...