Linux Gram articles from August 2004

Linux Gram archives from August 2004

Quick, Darl, Duck. Rotten Tomatoes at 12 O'clock.(Darl McBride, CEO, The SCO Group Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... SCO CEO Darl McBride claims that the discovery that IBM has turned over so far - the stuff that nobody outside the two companies has seen yet - is proving out SCO's contention that IBM played fast and loose with SCO code, which makes him wonder...

Start-up Uses Open Source Project To Nudge Microsoft Off the Desktop.(Symbio Technologies Inc.'s Java-based Workplace 2 scheme )
August 2, 2004... Symbio Technologies Inc, a New Rochelle, New York start-up, wants to tear the guts out of your PC, turn it into a diskless thin client and move the compute power to a server, sort of along the lines of that ClearCube is doing with its PC...

Malcontent VC Threatens To Sue SCO for Modest Success of its IP Licensing.(venture capitalists)
August 2, 2004... We're going to take a flying leap here and guess that BayStar Capital, SCO's disgruntled former VC, is unhappy with the deal it cut with SCO after it demanded its money back, that it figures it could have done better and that that's why it's...

Mozilla To Pay for Reports of Security Holes.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... The year-old Mozilla Foundation, home to the AOL-dispossessed mozilla.org and the next-generation Firefox alternate browser, is going to start paying cash bounties to people who identify and report security issues in its software. The AOL/Mitch...

Lindows Abandons IPO Auction Scheme.(initial public offerings)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Lindows has dumped its plans to IPO by auction a la Google. It was supposed to go out using the auction process pioneered by West Coast VC WR Hambrecht and we assumed that that was still the plan when we wrote last week that Lindows had priced...

SCO Applies for USL Trademark.(The SCO Group Inc., Unix System Laboratories)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... For reasons it's not sharing at this point, on June 21 SCO applied for a trademark on the name Unix System Laboratories, which of course was the name of the AT&T unit that commercialized Unix and ultimately sold the OS to Novell. SCO mumbled...

Black Duck Gets Backing.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Black Duck, the start-up with the timely, open source-conscious, new protexIP widgetry to manage software IP, has raised $5 million in Series A financing from Flagship Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. At Flagship, Black Duck founder...

Rackable Slams Traditional Blades as Wrong-Headed; Shows 'em How To Do It.
August 2, 2004... Rackable Systems Inc, the little company getting big in large-scale data center deployments, claims that the blade merchants have been doing it all wrong all this time and that its latest development, a thing called the Scale Out Server, is the...

Intel To Launch Lindenhurst Despite Glitch.
August 2, 2004... Lindenhurst, the two-way chipset that will empower Intel to field 64-bit x86 servers up against AMD Opterons, launches Monday, August 2 despite the fact that it's got a little problem with PCI-Express, one of its most vaunted features. In...

Egenera Building Its First Itanium Blade.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Egenera, the first out with four-way Xeon blades, says it's building a two-way blade using the Itanium 2, its first spin of the high-end Intel part. The company thinks it'll be attractive to customers with critical databases and...

Sun Delivers Four-Way Opteron Server.
August 2, 2004... On cue, Sun on Monday wheeled out its expected new four-way Opteron server, the V40z, priced at $8,495 and claiming to best IBM, HP and Dell on price/performance since the industry-standard widgetry runs Solaris and the Java Enterprise System....

PeopleSoft Quarter Sucks.
August 2, 2004... It said things had turned bad and it wasn't kidding. PeopleSoft profits dropped nearly 70% in the second quarter, worse than the revised guidance it issued a few weeks ago. It says it's all Oracle's fault because of the heavy press...

CA Recruits Ex-SEC Commish for its Board.(Computer Associates International Inc., Securities and Exchage Commission)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Rarely, if ever, has the announcement that somebody has been tapped for a board seat made us laugh out loud - until this one. This one's a pip. Computer Associates, which is up to its ass in alligators with the SEC and the Justice...

Linux Infections Rare.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Evan Data polled a bunch of Linux developers and says 92% report never being infected by a virus. And 78 percent of them said they had had never been hacked. Presumably Google, with its gargantuan Linux server farm, wishes it could say...

MySQL Debuts Hosted Offering.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... MySQL AB has launched a hosted offering for users of its eponymous open source database. MySQL Hosting, which is being offered in partnership with hosting provider Rackspace, is aimed at web sites and other MySQL database applications. It...

Gee, Did Munich Spit in the Wind?(LiMux project)
August 9, 2004... The city of Munich's vaunted LiMux project to move its 14,000 workers from Windows to Linux - a spit in the eye of Microsoft, whose CEO flew to Germany last year to try to save the account and couldn't, even though he came bearing handsome...

Why Should Sun Stop at Novell? Why Shouldn't It Buy SCO While It's At It?(The SCO Group Inc.)
August 9, 2004... So Sun president Jonathan Schwartz, apropos of nothing, up and tells the Wall Street Journal - in time to make the edition that hits the newsstands the morning LinuxWorld opens - that Sun has been thinking about buying Novell. He said Sun...

Top Analyst Implies IBM's an IP Cheat.(International Business Machines Corp.)
August 9, 2004... SCO CEO Darl McBride, the second most hated man in America after George Bush, says life since suing IBM has been "untenable suffering," but, comparing himself to Wesley, the pure-hearted, wrongs-righting hero in the movie "Princess Bride," said...

OSRM Claims Linux Infringes 283 Patents.(Open Source Risk Management)
August 9, 2004... Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), the wannabe insurance start-up, pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it at Linux users a few hours before LinuxWorld opened its doors Monday morning. It claimed the Linux kernel treads on 283 patents....

Longhorn Slip Can Make Microsoft Linux Fodder: CSFB.(Credit Suisse First Boston L.L.C. Evaluation)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Credit Suisse First Boston figures the most newsworthy thing about Microsoft's financial analysts meeting last week was the thing they didn't talk about: Longhorn. The broker suspects Microsoft's reticence about Longhorn suggests that...

Red Hat's Potentially Dangerous App Server Bows.(Red Hat Software Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Red Hat has expanded, as expected, beyond the Linux operating system and burrowed into the territory of IBM, BEA and Oracle when it launched its Java Application Server at LinuxWorld. The suspicion of course is that the move will do nothing...

Microsoft Loyalist Crumbles; Pushes Linux on Windows Mainframe.
August 9, 2004... Unisys, the Windows loyalist, started pushing Linux on its so-called Windows Mainframe Monday. It's been inching towards the move for a while. Early last year Unisys was fooling around with Linux in the lab, saying the thing needed...

SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 9 Debuts.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Novell made its presence known at LinuxWorld by launching SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Tuesday. Although the current Red Hat cut does use some elements of the 2.6 kernel, the new SuSe 9 is really the first commercial Linux to support the...

Microsoft Open Source Projects Evidently Succeeding.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sourceforge, which claims to host some 80,000 open source projects, many of which barely have a pulse, says that both the projects Microsoft open sourced in April are among the top 5% of active projects on the site. Of the two, the Windows...

CA Figures Even Open Source Developers Gotta Eat.(Computer Associates International Inc. )(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... At LinuxWorld the other day Computer Associates promised open source developers a million dollars to get them to built migration kits for CA's newly open sourced late-great Ingres database. Considering Ingres' current position in the...

MySQL Cozies Up to IBM.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... MySQL AB is now supporting Linux on IBM's Power processors, and Linux-on-Power is currently an IBM hot button. The Swedish open source vendor said its database would support Linux-on-Power across all IBM eServers including the p5, i5 and...

HP Debuts Linux Laptop.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has started selling SuSE Linux pre-installed on a Centrino-based notebook, making it the first major vendor to do that. HP already sells cheap Mandrake Linux desktops built on Centrino chips. HP thinks of the laptop as a...

IBM Throws Cloudscape into the Open Source Stew.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... IBM has open sourced the little Cloudscape embedded database it got when it bought Informix. IBM valued its contribution at $85 million, which was the price Informix paid when it acquired Cloudscape in September 1999. IBM is giving...

Red Hat Figures Better a Black Duck than a Dead Duck.(Black Duck Software)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Red Hat has tied up with Black Duck Software, the new IP problem spotter, and evidently not a moment too soon what with all the new patent-infringement concerns raised about Linux - not to mention Microsoft's patent chest hanging over Linux...

Veritas & Wyse Join OSDL.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Veritas and Wyse are the latest recruits signed up by the evidently thriving Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). Veritas wants in on OSDL's Data Center Workgroup in the name of making Linux enterprise- ready and Wyse, with its thin client...

Well, That's One Down.(Software Industry Contracts)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Facing resistance from the Linux community to its C++ Compiler 8.0 for Linux - the community's preference has been for the open source compiler gcc - Intel got Red Flag Software, the Chinese outfit, to use the thing and brag that - thanks to...

Dim Sun Tries Cut-Rate Financing.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sun, which thinks its sizeable bank account could give it a real future in financing, is aping the latest deluge of junk mail and offering 3.9% financing with no payments and no interest for the rest of the year to move its hardware, software...

Kumar Begins To Know What Poor Is.(Investigations on Sanjay Kumar)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Computer Associates' ousted CEO Sanjay Kumar, expected to be indicted by the government for cooking the company's books, has been forced to return $7.56 million in restricted stock, roughly half his position in company, according to papers CA...

Microsoft Stands Up Linux.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft was a no-show at LinuxWorld. While other companies were setting up their booths, it was turning its space into rest area. The move set off lots of speculation about why, but nothing concrete. We frankly didn't get a chance to ask them...

Microsoft's Hit List.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer named his biggest current competitors at the company's meeting with financial analysts last week, an annual exercise that in days gone by included the late-great Netscape, Novell and AOL. This year it singled out...

VC as Leech.(Securities Management)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... SCO attributes the odd behavior of BayStar Capital, the VC that keeps publicly threatening to sue it for one unspoken reason or another, to a stock shorting strategy and claims the SEC is looking into BayStar's shorting practices with respect...

'We Ain't Scared of No Stinkin' Patents - Well, Not Much'.
August 16, 2004... Undaunted by the Munich scare that briefly had that city put its high-profile Linux rollout on hold for fear that its Linux desktop will run into patent claims, Vienna has decided to offer 7,500 of its 16,000 bureaucrats the choice of switching...

OK, If You Won't Pay Up, We'll Just Charge More.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... SCO has confirmed a story on ZDNet saying that it's thinking of jacking up the price of its so-called Linux licenses to make it a lot more expensive for users who wait to see if SCO wins its suit against IBM. Presumably SCO is...

Lindows Cuts IPO Pricing, Then Cuts It Again.
August 16, 2004... Without explaining whether it's because of the rocky state of the market or something more personal, Lindows has cut the price range of its anticipated IPO from $9-$11 to $7-$9. Then cut it again to $5-$7. Lindows didn't explain why it...

Solaris To Run Linux Apps.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Last week at LinuxWorld Sun was showing off a preview version of Project Janus, the widgetry due to appear in its next-generation Solaris 10 operating system that will run Linux binaries unchanged on x86 hardware. It's claiming "100%...

NASA & SGI Search for Little Green Men.
August 16, 2004... Well, if we do find little green men on Mars, it'll be thanks to SGI and Intel. NASA has decided to base Project Columbia, which will boost its computing capacity tenfold, on SGI's Linux-based Altix machines and integrate 20 512-processor Altix...

Sun Ray Thin Clients To Run Off Linux Servers.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Sun, which would really rather sell Solaris, says it's planning to let its Sun Ray thin clients run off Linux servers as well as Solaris servers. Sun said it would be available "soon," which in Sun's mouth can mean anything. Sun Rays,...

OSDL To Open Beijing Office.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is going to open an office in Beijing that it says will be staffed with locals who are supposed to liaise with OSDL on technology, business and marketing. OSDL marketing VP Nelson Pratt said the...

Wyse Goes with Latest Linux Kernel.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Wyse says it's got the first Linux thin client based on the new 2.6 kernel although the thing won't appear until Q4. It calls its OS Wyse Linux V6 and has put it in a box called the Winterm 5150SE that runs on a low-power AMD Geode GX 533...

SuSE in on Showcase IBM Account.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... IBM got the contract to overhaul Circuit City's 600 stores, update its point-of-sales systems and make it the technical envy of the retail trade. The transformation is supposed to drag the outfit out of the mid- 80s, de-proprietize it,...

3Par Promises To Make Linux Provisioning Easier.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Storage systems vendor 3Par has expanded its software portfolio with a new program called Virtual Copy DBA for Linux designed to rapidly recover Oracle-on-Linux databases and make Linux server provisioning easier. The software is supposed...

Is Carly Toast Yet?
August 16, 2004... So here we are three weeks shy of the third anniversary of that fateful day when HP said it was going to buy Compaq, and Cleo, the muse of history, who gets spiteful when people ignore her, is sitting there saying, "I told you so." HP's...

Help with Your Opterons, Lady?(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... AMD has set up a subscription-based Professional Design Support Service Program at its Boston Design Center to help people with their AMD64 designs, everything from embedded systems through clients to HPC servers. It's supposed to give...

HP Falls, Dell Shines.
August 16, 2004... Dell on Thursday came in with solid numbers for its second quarter ended July 30 casting a long dark shadow over Hewlett-Packard's pre- announcement earlier in the day and underscoring the fact that HP's problems are of its own making, not an...

Somebody Clean Out This Closet.
August 16, 2004... The Open Source Initiative currently recognizes some 53 open source licenses, which has already got to be about 50 open source licenses too many but reports suggests OSI is going to add a couple more to the list. See...

Sun Hiring.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Sun is looking for people with security clearance who are willing to submit to a lie-detector test for its revivified government practice. It wants to hire professional services architects, system engineers, IT network technologists, principal...

IBM Hiring.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... On the heels of HP's bad news, IBM up and said Thursday that it would hire 18,800 people worldwide this year, 8,800 more than it originally planned. A third of the jobs will be in North America and two-thirds of them will be for IBM Global...

HP Exec To Chair Grid Forum.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... The Global Grid Forum (GGF) has tapped Mark Linesch, VP of HP's Adaptive Enterprise Program as its next chair succeeding Charlie Cattlet who's had the position for the last five years. GGF regards itself as the pre-eminent grid standards body...

Conspiracy Theorists, Take Note.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Vintela Inc, a sister of SCO's by virtue of being funded out of the same Canopy Group pocket and a partner of Microsoft's by virtue of their mutual interest in Unix and Linux, says it's extended SMS to seamlessly manage Unix, Linux and Mac OS X...

Whoops!(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Somebody here must have dozed off during Intel's lectures on what it takes to be a Centrino and also missed the fact that Intel doesn't extend the Centrino brand to any but a Windows box so HP could hardly be using a Centrino, as we said last...

Itanium-Armed Start-up To Menace IBM's Precious Mainframe Monopoly.
August 23, 2004... There's been no one to challenge IBM's unprecedented mainframe monopoly since Big Blue ran off the last of the PCMs years ago when it got light years ahead of them on the silicon front, forcing them to close up shop and slink away. At the...

PathScale Aims To Push Mellanox Off its Perch.
August 23, 2004... Ah-ha, so the "highly disruptive technology" that persuaded PathScale investors to oversubscribe its $15 million third round back in May is aimed at unsettling Mellanox' effective Infiniband monopoly and giving PathScale a chance to carve off a...

Market Spits Out Lindows IPO.(Initial public offerings)
August 23, 2004... Google ain't the only outfit around with IPO headaches. After cutting the price of its IPO twice, Lindows, the unprofitable desktop Linux start-up, pulled the offering Wednesday claiming it "won't be forced into a cut-rate IPO by a fickle...

Google Gets Its Comeuppance.
August 23, 2004... If Google is as smart as it's cracked up to be, it's figured out by now that it's best not to piss on the shoes of the guy whose money or influence you want. And if Google's young heroes get really reflective as they study the bottoms of...

RealNetworks Puts Gun to Apple's Head.
August 23, 2004... RealNetworks, the company Apple won't talk to, put a gun to Apple's head Tuesday to force it to deal. Since Apple won't negotiate, RealNetworks has set out to rustle its customers. Real has already picked the lock on Apple's precious...

AMD Starts Transition to 90nm.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
August 23, 2004... AMD is now the proud vendor of the very first 64-bit mobile chip to be made on 90 nanometers and sold for revenue, the so-called Oakville realized as the Athlon 64 3700+. The part is turning up when AMD said it would (after getting...

Novell Misses.
August 23, 2004... Novell earned $23 million, or six cents a share, on revenues of $305 million in its fiscal third quarter ended July 31. It derived $12 million in revenues from its presumably unprofitable SuSE Linux business: $4 million from enterprise...

PolyServe Gets $20m Fourth Round.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... PolyServe, the clustering outfit, has picked up $20 million in D Series funding from Fidelity Ventures, Greylock, New Enterprise Associates and the RODA Group intending to use the money, which it called an "operating cushion," to accelerate...

SCO, Meet Compuware. You Guys Can Commiserate Together.(The SCO Group Inc)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Now here's a story SCO ought to pay attention to. Compuware Corporation, which sued IBM for software piracy two-and- half years ago in a case that's due to go to trial in three months, rushed into court the other day with an "emergency...

Like a Wet T-Shirt, Niagara's Form Vaguely Seen.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Sun was at Hot Chips this week talking about its upcoming Niagara "throughput" processor, a little four-thread/eight-core number that's reportedly hit silicon and should turn up in boxes in 2006. As glamorous as all this threads and cores...

CA's Temp CEO Finds He Can Resist Anything Except Temptation.(Computer Associates International)(chief executive officer)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Gossip out of Computer Associates says the company's reluctant interim CEO Ken Cron, seduced by the company jet, the company helicopter and all the attention, has decided he likes it and has joined Bush and Kerry in running for office. Insiders...

Get Off the Friggin' Phone & SELL Something.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... One observer claims HP is frozen internally in conference call hell and that's why it can't execute. He says the place has practically cornered the market in conference phones that its staff use to talk to one another, that it's got way too...

Carly's Problems Just Got Bigger.(Carly Fiorina)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... HP CEO Carly Fiorina's apparently got herself a big Itanium problem. According to a survey of 7,000 of the company's global customers, released by the HP user group Interex this week, only 50% of its HP- UX users plan to move to Itanium ever....

Netscape Rev Out.(Netscape Communications Corp)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Despite being disowned by AOL, the delayed Netscape 7.2, the work of the Mozilla open source project and based on Mozilla 1.7, has finally been released. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

OSDL Posts Test Rev.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs, which says it's got a mandate from its members and the Linux development community to make OSDL a leader in Linux testing, has upgraded its Scalable Test Platform (STP), which it uses to validate changes to the...

Red Hat Hires Service Chief.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Red Hat has hired Kate Johnson, the ex-managing director of UBS Investment Bank's Investment Banking Division technology and logistics, to head services. She's described as having 13 years of experience in client services ranging from sales...

PVP Market To Grow 700% This Year Handheld media players - those pricey gizmos that look like big MP3.(personal video players)
August 23, 2004... players but with bigger screens - arrived last year and are expected to become popular enough (among the techno-geek crowd at least) to result in segment growth of 700% this year, according to In- Stat/MDR. As more consumers become aware...

Temporary Ceasefire Called Between SCO & BayStar.(The SCO Group Inc.)
August 30, 2004... Evidently there's a temporary ceasefire in effect between SCO and its habitually malcontent investor BayStar Capital, the VC that's publicly threatened to sue SCO more than once. At last blush, a month or so ago, BayStar was gonna sue SCO...

OSDL Lawyers Up.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs has hired itself a general counsel to help it wade through the legal quagmire presented by Linux and open source. It has brought in Diane Peters from Ater Wynne LLP, who has been the consortium's outside...

Newisys Thinks Big is Beautiful.
August 30, 2004... At Hot Chips this week Newisys, the struggling Opteron systems developer bought by Sanmina-SCI, went public with an Opteron companion chip it calls Horus that can build seriously big 32- Opteron SMP machines, way bigger than the current...

Prior Art Undoes Eolas.(patent claim rejected)
August 30, 2004... Okay, so why did the Patent and Trademark Office reject Eolas' 10 so-called plug-in patent claims for a second time? Well, according to PTO re-examiner Andrew Caldwell, who has to decide whether Eolas will be allowed to throw a money wrench...

Server Revenues Up 8%; Linux Momentum Strong.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... A new Gartner tally says that Q2 server revenues grew 7.7% year- over-year to $11.5 billion and that Linux growth was unabated. IBM increased its premier revenue position having captured 30.7% of the money, up from 29.8% last year. HP and...

Cron Believed a Shoe-in.(Ken Cron, CEO, Computer Associates)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Now that he's been seduced by the job and its perks, and actually wants it - well, he does have $3.6 million in annual bird-in-the- hand compensation riding on it - Computer Associates' unlikely interim CEO Ken Cron could be installed as its...

Linus Discounts Microsoft's Patent Peril.(Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... "I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end....

May They Have Better Luck Than the Wright Brothers.(Sun plans to recast development tools with Service Oriented Architecture )(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Sun says it's got a project going called Kitty Hawk to recast the Java Enterprise Suite and Java Studio tools and bring them into alignment with this newfangled modular Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) stuff that's basically another try at...

HP Snags Motorola Deal.(Hewlett-Packard)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has inked a multi-year contract with Motorola to provide an integrated platform for mobile operators. The package includes HP's 64-bit cx2600 rack-mounted server, a carrier-grade version of its rx2600 server, hardened to...

Linspire Debuts AOL Dialer.(America Online)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... The folks at Linspire, yeah, the Lindows guys, who have a part-time interest in Internet telephony, have put out a beta of some AOL Dialer software that will let Linux desktop users log onto the Internet via AOL's dial-up service. However,...

VxWorks 6.0 in Beta.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Wind River's General Purpose Platform VxWorks 6.0 Edition has moved into beta. The upgrade includes new features such as MMU-based memory protection so customers can safeguard their applications during development. Wind River said...