Linux Gram articles from April 2007

Linux Gram archives from April 2007

FSF Takes its Best Shot at the Microsoft-Novell Deal.
April 2, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) finally delivered itself of the third draft of the GPL rewrite known as GPLv3 on Wednesday. This is the draft that got held up for months because of the surprise Microsoft-Novell rapprochement in November...

GPLv3 Section 11, Paragraph 4.(General Public License)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... "If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license providing freedom to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of...

GPLv3 Section 11, Paragraph 5.(General Public License)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... "You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the...

Dell Finds 'Evidence of Financial Misconduct'.
April 2, 2007... Dell won't be getting its 10-K out any time soon. It's gonna blow through April 3, the day the 10-K is due, and April 18, the extension date. It's gonna add the annual report for the year ended February 2 to the pile of paperwork it already...

Oracle Licenses OIN Patents.
April 2, 2007... Oracle, which of course has Linux ambitions - and anti-Red Hat ones at that - has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), the non-profit IP house set up by IBM to acquire patents and make sure they're available royalty-free to...

Dell To Factory-Install Linux.
April 2, 2007... After 70% of the people who wrote into its newfangled IdeaStorm suggestion box said they would use a Dell with Linux, Dell said Wednesday that it will start offering Linux pre-installed on select desktops and notebooks. It hasn't said yet...

Red Hat Earnings Down, Revenues Short Expectations.
April 2, 2007... Red Hat says "one of the largest shifts in IT spending" is going on and that it's benefiting but apparently the shift's contribution to Red Hat's coffers wasn't that big in the company's fiscal fourth quarter that ended in February. It...

Linux Foundation Names Board.
April 2, 2007... The new Linux Foundation, the combination of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group, has installed a new board of directors that is supposed to represent all stakeholders: the Linux kernel community, Linux vendors,...

Netezza Files To Go Public.
April 2, 2007... Jit Saxena, who started and took Applix public in 1994, is trying again with Netezza, which filed its S-1 papers with the SEC the other day. Netezza, which is still losing money, is looking to pick up about $100 million, less than it's...

Penguin Picks Up Round.(Penguin Computing)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... Penguin Computing has closed on $9 million of what it calls "Series 2" financing led by vSpring Capital with existing backers San Francisco Equity Partners, Weber Capital and Convergence Partners. The last funding it saw was $10 million in late...

Novell Catching On: Yankee.
April 2, 2007... As much as it may pain Red Hat, Oracle, the Free Software Foundation - and maybe now IBM - it seems that Novell is actually in resurgence. According to a new survey by the Yankee Group due out next week, 14% of the nearly 1,000 IT managers...

Intel To Copy Some More of AMD's Moves.
April 2, 2007... There are times when it looks like AMD is running Intel's design department. This is definitely one of them. Intel disclosed Wednesday that it'll be following AMD down the path of squeezing its previously separate memory controller onto the...

Vista Numbers.
April 2, 2007... Microsoft says consumers bought 20 million copies of Vista in February, the first month it was out. The number includes copies exchanged for the upgrade coupons Microsoft started handing out last year ahead of the software's availability, OEM...

Sun Microelectronics II - The Sequel.
April 2, 2007... Sun is going to reprise its standalone Microelectronics unit - the one that was melded into its server operation when the wolf came knocking on Sun's door - in the expectation of selling some Sparcs outside the company, something it tried once...

Intel Name Change.
April 2, 2007... Intel will create a new-ish brand for Centrino when it launches Santa Rosa, the next Centrino platform, It'll call it Centrino Pro and bundle its vPro widgetry into the thing. The brand should be announced before Santa Rosa launches likely in...

Dell Takes Up Designing Chi-Chi Data Centers To Order.
April 2, 2007... Dell, in its search for new revenue sources, has set up a new business unit, a Data Center Solutions Division that, to start, will offer a solution called the Dell Cloud Computing restricted to what it calls "hyper-scale" computing environments...

Intel Confirms Chinese Fab Plans.
April 2, 2007... Intel confirmed Monday that it is going to build a $2.5 billion politically sensitive plant in China. Plans have been in the works for over 18 months. The only way Intel was able to get the US government to countenance the deal was to ensure it...

HP Launches its First AMD Uniprocessor Server.
April 2, 2007... HP Wednesday announced its very first AMD tower server, a low-cost/low-end box that's targeted at SMBs not only in the US but in the developing world in countries like Brazil, China, Russia and India where SMBs are accustomed to using a...

Microsoft Reorgs Search.
April 2, 2007... Microsoft has combined its search and AdCenter online advertising operations, units that are supposed to compete against Google, and named the head of its Dynamics CRM line Satya Nadella to run it, reporting to Kevin Johnson. This after...

SOA Specs Sent to OASIS.
April 2, 2007... The Open SOA Collaboration, a group of 18 vendors, is going to turn its Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specification over to OASIS to standardize the widgetry. The SCA spec is supposed to simplify...

IPhone Prospects Hinted.
April 2, 2007... In a speech AT&T COO Randall Stephenson said Tuesday that the company's Cingular Wireless unit had gotten about a million inquiries about Apple's still unavailable $500-$600 iPhone since Steve Jobs showed off the device in January. Cingular has...

Carly Headhunter Charged with Drug-related Homicide.
April 2, 2007... Jeff Christian, the guy who started Christian & Timbers and the headhunter who got Carly Fiorina the CEO job at HP, is going to be tried for reckless homicide and involuntary manslaughter in the drug overdose death of another executive...

Netflix CEO Joins Microsoft Board.
April 2, 2007... Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic and perhaps signal move, has recruited Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings for its board, where he will join the finance committee. Seems Microsoft values Hastings for "delivering innovative and disruptive...

Ex-ClearCube CEO Turns Up at Rackable.
April 2, 2007... Rackable Systems, beaten up lately after offering disappointing sales guidance, has named Carl Boisvert executive VP of worldwide sales and marketing. Boisvert, an ex-CEO of ClearCube who had also once been senior VP of sales at Stratus,...

Reiser Enters Not Guilty Plea.(Hans Reiser accused for murdering his wife)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... Linux file system creator Hans Reiser last Friday pleaded not guilty to charges that he murdered his estranged wife. His trial is supposed to start on May 7. He asked for a speedy trial. He's still in jail. He hasn't asked for bail, probably...

Circuit City To Terminate 3,500 Pricey Workers.
April 2, 2007... Circuit City is going to can 3,500 people it figures are making too much money, replace them with cheaper labor, turn its IT operations over to IBM and maybe sell off its Canadian stores.

Leopard Rumors Pooh-Poohed.(Apple Inc. delaying its release)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... Reports Friday that Apple would delay Leopard, its next-generation Mac OS X, until October as DigiTimes contended - thereby impacting its revenue stream - were dismissed out of hand Monday. If nothing else DigiTimes has a poor track record of...

Google and the Search for Ubiquity.
April 2, 2007... Google has bought Adscape Media Inc whose technology will let it start putting ads in videogames via the Internet. It also bought the Trendalyser software off of Sweden's Gapminder Foundation that generates interactive graphics from data.

SCO's Hunt for PJ Enters New Waters; Case May Push Courts To Address Internet Anonymity.
April 9, 2007... Pamela Jones, a k a PJ, the open source thought leader and author of Groklaw, the SCO-bashing web site, has so far managed to avoid the conventional subpoena-bearing process servers that SCO has thrown at her in an effort to depose her and...

GPLv3 Will Evidently Need a Sales Job.
April 9, 2007... In the wake of the Free Software Foundation releasing the third draft of the proposed GPLv3 license - the one that takes steps to prevent any more deals like the Microsoft-Novell alliance - and will remove the teeth of any patent lawsuit threat...

Has the EC Finally Bitten Off More Than It Can Chew?
April 9, 2007... The European Commission wants Microsoft to license its server protocols to rivals for nothing according to the Financial Times, which says it saw a "confidential document" saying so. According to the paper Microsoft wants a maximum of 5.95%...

OpenOffice Hits Rev 2.2.(business application suite)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... OpenOffice, the Sun-sponsored open source project, has hit rev 2.2, claiming it's "a real alternative to Microsoft's recently released Office 2007." Apparently they've enhanced the word processor, spreadsheet, presentations and database...

Users Hazy on Virtualization ROI, CA Claims.
April 9, 2007... CA had an independent survey done on server virtualization by the Strategic Council and the results suggest that virtualization may not be all it's cracked up to be despite the charge to virtualize. The Strategic Council says the study...

Vyatta Gets B Round.
April 9, 2007... Vyatta, which has a line of enterprise-style open source network infrastructure products like routers and firewalls, has picked up $11 million in B Series financing from Comcast Interactive Capital as well as ArrowPath Venture Capital,...

Sun To Sell SUSE-based Workstations.
April 9, 2007... Sun has certified and is going to support Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its Opteron-based Ultra workstations 20, 20 M2, 40 and 40 M2. Sun suggests they could go into EDA, CAD/CAM and oil and gas deployments. The boxes come with...

Linux Foundation Recruits Three More.
April 9, 2007... The Linux Foundation, the entity created in the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, says it's picked up three new members: Marvell, Nokia and VirtualLogix. All three are interested in mobile and embedded...

And That Makes 11.(Intel Corp. introduced Xeon 5300 DP quad core processor)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Intel Wednesday introduced its first quad-core embedded chip, the Xeon 5300 DP, good for 80W 2GHZ or 2.33GHz with prices starting at $690. Being embedded parts, Intel is promising availability for the next five to seven years. It's Intel's...

Sun's Advanced Product Line on Tap.
April 9, 2007... A lot of water has run under the bridge in the three years since Sun and Fujitsu vowed to replace their respective Sparc/Solaris-based Sun Fire and PrimePower machines with a "co-developed" Advanced Product Line (APL) - using a 90nm 2.4GHz...

Lenovo To Chase Consumers.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Lenovo, which like Dell has been focusing on commercial accounts while HP walked off with the PC market thanks to its retail sales, is going to set up a consumer unit to expand sales outside of China and regain lost market share. The new unit...

Dell Makes Rackable's Ink Turn Red.
April 9, 2007... Rackable System, which tanked last quarter and started making ominous predictions of the coming year, said Wednesday that it expects to lose money this quarter because of wispy margins and lower-than-expected operating income. It still...

Microsoft Sued for Ripping Off Agere's VoIP Trade Secrets.
April 9, 2007... Another day, another lawsuit. This time Microsoft is being sued for misappropriating trade secrets by Agere Systems Inc, which used to be part of AT&T's Bell Labs, then became a subsidiary of Lucent that was spun off as an independent company...

Sun's New Chip Franchise Gets First Customer.
April 9, 2007... Sun's days-old Microelectronics units, the one cut out of servers last week and made standalone again to sell chips and such to third parties, has got a deal with Marvell to build and sell high-performance networking products based on Sun's...

OOXML Passes To Next ISO Standardization Hurdle.
April 9, 2007... Office Open XML (OOXML), Microsoft's answer to the upstart open source Open Document Format (ODF), has passed to the next hurdle on its way to fast-track ISO standardization just like ODF: a five-month-long ballot by the national members of ISO...

IBM Opens Tech Center in Bangalore.
April 9, 2007... IBM has opened an Autonomic Computing Technology Center in Bangalore to serve mostly local resellers and users. It is staffed with 35 developers and engineers responsible for creating new autonomic software, testing and supporting services. IBM...

Microsoft Sued over 'Vista Capable' Sticker.
April 9, 2007... Microsoft has managed to get sued for unfair and deceptive practices over those little "Vista capable" flags that flew on boxes in shops for months in the run-up to the Vista launch in January. A woman bought one only to discover it will...

Transmeta Gives New Meaning to the Word 'Shrink'.
April 9, 2007... Transmeta, the spoiled software-based chip novelty with the spectacular IPO that had Linus Torvalds on its payroll and tried to compete against Intel, is inches away from turning into a file in some lawyer's draw. It's now down to 65...

Apple To Boost Music Revenue with DRM-Free Tunes While EU Investigation Revvs Up.
April 9, 2007... Apple's first big music deal since Steve Jobs posted his Anti-DRM manifesto will have Apple distributing the bulk of EMI's music portfolio (sans the Beatles) DRM-free. Reportedly the deal was EMI's idea and is not exclusive. Apple will...

Interest in DoubleClick Reportedly Picks Up.
April 9, 2007... Google, which is reportedly building its own DoubleClick-like ad-serving mechanism, is now supposed to be trying to buy DoubleClick since Microsoft was reported to be in talks with the online media buyer. The competition is supposed to make any...

Dell Earnings Down 26%.(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Dell can't manage a 10-K but it told the SEC Wednesday that it expects its 2006 earnings to be around $2.6 million, or $1.16 a share, down roughly 26% from the $3.5 billion it earned in 2005. It said revenues would be around $57 billion, up...

Red Hat's Controller Resigns.
April 9, 2007... Red Hat's controller and principal accounting officer Gabriela Gonzalez resigned March 22. CFO Charlie Peters is temporarily picking up the slack.

Vista Goes to Boot Camp.
April 9, 2007... Apple's Boot Camp now supports Vista. Boot Camp is Apple's beta widgetry for running Windows on its Intel machines. Leopard, the upcoming rev of Mac OS, is where Boot Camp graduates to a final version and gets integrated in the operating...

Sun Loses China Chief.
April 9, 2007... Sun is losing the head of its China operation Daniel Yu, who is leaving the company after 22 years. Sun owns 9.3% of China's server market behind IBM with 40%, HP and Dell. Lionel Lim, president of Sun Asia South and COO of Sun Asia Pacific...

Google Carries Coal to Newcastle.
April 9, 2007... There is now a free beta Google Desktop available for the Mac that basically does what Apple's Spotlight already does and that's to index the user's drive and make it searchable. One thing it does that Spotlight doesn't is search your Gmail...

Sun Quarter Believed Weak.
April 9, 2007... Sun's recent flirtation with profitability may be short-lived. Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi downgraded the company Monday saying, "Our channel checks suggest that Sun's third quarter - especially in the US - was weaker than prior...

AMD Chip in iPhone Rival.
April 9, 2007... AMD says its ATI-derived Imageon media processor is inside the Apple iPhone-like LG touch screen Prada phone that will be sold everywhere, it seems, but the US starting this quarter.

Best Buy To Expand Apple Sales.
April 9, 2007... Best Buy will be selling Apple computers in 200 stores this fall after piloting the gear at 57 shops, a pretty little increase in Apple distribution points. They'll be shops-within-shops.

Pshew, Google Finally Finds Kaiser.(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... For a while there it looked like there was something Google couldn't find, namely its own three-foot pet python Kaiser, which it managed lose somewhere in its 300,000-square-foot New York City offices. The maintenance staff finally found the...

LSB Updated.
April 16, 2007... The new Linux Foundation, the combination of OSDL and the Free Standards Group, has updated the Linux Standard Base (LSB) that is supposed to stand between Linux and fragmentation by letting ISVs run the same software package on multiple...

Sun Open Sources Storage Widgetry.
April 16, 2007... Sun is donating storage technologies to the OpenSolaris community so it can create cheap storage solutions that, it says, will run on anybody's commodity hardware - IBM's, Dell's, HP's or its own. It's trying to position OpenSolaris as...

Iona Acquires Open Source SOA Start-up.
April 16, 2007... Iona Technologies has acquired LogicBlaze, a privately held, probably straining open source SOA and business integration venture, on undisclosed terms. It called it a "smallish transaction." LogicBlaze was started by Winston Damarillo, the...

Sourcefire's Stock Price Crumbles on Warning.
April 16, 2007... Sourcefire, which just went public a month ago, had its teeth kicked in Monday after it pre-announced its Q1 results and said it was going to lose $2.2 million-$2.6 million on revenues $10.1 million-$10.5 million, up around 20% year-over-year....

SGI Gets New CEO.(Silicon Graphics Inc., Bo Ewald)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... SGI has changed its CEO again. Dennis McKenna was there for the last 14 months and slashed and burned. Now he's out and retread Bo Ewald, who used to be COO of SGI once upon a time, is in. He's supposed to return SGI to growth and...

SAIC To Resell Red Hat.
April 16, 2007... Red Hat has cut a master marketing agreement that will see the $8 billion-a-year Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) peddle its wares to defense-related and federal accounts as well as the commercial market.

BakBone Supports RHEL 5.
April 16, 2007... Bakbone Software, which claims to support more Linux distributions and applications than any other backup software vendor, says its NetVault Backup and NetVault Replicator now support Red Hat's latest Enterprise Linux 5.0 and that it's the only...

Novell Joins Green Grid.
April 16, 2007... Novell has joined the Green Grid as a contributing member. It's the consortium of IT companies pursuing energy efficiency in the data center. The idea is to invent widgetry that uses less power. Novell is proposing to do it through the Xen...

Palm To Use Linux OS as Platform.
April 16, 2007... Palm, which has apparently put thoughts of getting acquired out of its head - at least for the moment - says it's going to use Linux underneath at least some of its smartphones starting this year. It's been developing the mojo in-house for...

Apple OS Sacrificed to iPhone.
April 16, 2007... So the rumors were right. Apple has delayed the launch of Leopard, its next-generation Mac OS X, a competitor of Microsoft Windows, until October, four months past its June 11 due date. In a statement issued late Thursday after the market...

AMD Bleeding Badly from War with Intel.
April 16, 2007... AMD pre-announced its March quarter Monday morning, complaining that revenues had suffered a sharp quarter-over-quarter decline to roughly $1.225 billion, down 8% year-over-year. It blamed lower overall ASPs and "significantly" lower unit...

Quad Extreme.
April 16, 2007... Intel started its enthusiast quad line Monday by pushing out the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800, its twelfth quad-core processor and the fastest yet. The new chip is reportedly 65% faster than a Core 2 Extreme dual-core X6800 on video encoding....

IBM Substitutes Flash for Hard Drives on Blades.
April 16, 2007... Armed with the latest low-voltage chips from Intel and AMD, Flash-based storage and an acoustic door for racks, IBM is telling customers that its latest blade and System x servers will reduce energy use, associated carbon dioxide emissions and...

Dell Makes Contribution to Energy Efficiency.
April 16, 2007... Dell has introduced two low-end Opteron-based servers that it says will draw less power and perform better than the Intel Xeon boxes it's been selling. Dell, which has never been a comer in the blade market, is also touting its rack...

VoIP Pioneer in Big Trouble.
April 16, 2007... The US Court of Appeals granted Vonage an emergency temporary stay after a district court told it last Friday that it couldn't sign up any new customers because it's treading on three basic Verizon VoIP patents. The stay is good until the...

PSI Seizes Opportunity IBM Dealt It.
April 16, 2007... Now that IBM has terminated its support for 31-bit mainframe operating systems and hardware, Platform Solutions is dangling its so-called Open Mainframe Server, the Itanium gear that will run OS/390, z/VSE and z/VM as well as Linux and Windows...

Sun To Pick Up SavaJe's IP.(Sun Microsystems Inc., SavaJe Technologies Inc.)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... Sun is acquiring SavaJe's IP in a distress sale. Something of a Java darling, SavaJe made a Java operating systems for mobile phone and a Swing-based development platform for creating rich user interfaces. It started to fall apart financially...

Sanmina Pares Forecast.
April 16, 2007... Contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI pared in revenue forecast for the March quarter Monday from $2.65 billion-$2.75 billion to $2.6 billion citing excess inventory in its supply channel and soft demand in high-end computers and communications.

FCC Orders Pretexting Stumbling Block.
April 16, 2007... The Federal Communications Commission - shocked by all the pretexting that's been going on under its very nose - says it will now take a password to get your account information from your telephone company, a legacy of the HP boardroom spying...

Voltaire Gets Money from 3Com Chair.
April 16, 2007... Eric Benhamou, the chairman of 3Com and Palm, has put an undisclosed amount of money in Voltaire through Benhamou Global Venture. It was enough to rate a seat on the board.

Whistling Up the Alpha Dog.
April 16, 2007... IBM, Novell and their cheering section may have supreme confidence that SCO's litigation against them is going to fail in summary judgment, but at least somebody thinks the cases are going to trial. David Boies, reputedly the best litigator of...

QA Problems Suspected at Dell.
April 16, 2007... MGI Research thinks Dell may have quality control problems on top of all its other woes. It thinks the problems are with low-end servers, laptops and desktops. It says the channel is reporting a spike in machines that need to be serviced by...

Microsoft Demoted.
April 16, 2007... Goldman Sachs has removed Microsoft from its elite "Conviction Buy" list of top-rated stocks. It reckons that Vista and the new Office kit - under pressure from software-as-a-service, virtualization and open source - may mark the end of the era...

Dell To Abandon Four-Ways.(sales of x86 compatible computers)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... Dell is expected to abandon the four-way market. It currently sells two four-ways and both are reportedly on their way out. It quotes IDC saying two-socket x86 system has seen overall growth of 14% over the last five years while four-socket...

No Longhorn Beta 3 Yet.(Microsoft Longhorn Server)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... Longhorn Server testers have been waiting for a third beta, the last major test build, which is supposed to be out this month. Last week they got another Community Technology Preview apparently so they can count and see that all the Beta 3...

Vista License Expanded.(Microsoft Windows Vista)(Brief article)
April 16, 2007... Vista Enterprise licensing now covers those PC blade affairs that ClearCube sells where the real guts of the system are off in a cage somewhere and the user just has the display and keyboard on his desk. There's also a license provision now for...

HP China Chief To Be Replaced by Ex-Dell Guy.
April 16, 2007... The head of HP China Sun Zhenyao is retiring at the end of May and will be replaced by the former president of Dell China Fu Biaobang, according to Reuters. Fu resigned from Dell last June to be president of a local Chinese computer house...