Linux Gram articles from December 2003

Linux Gram archives from December 2003

Source Claims SCO Will Sue Google.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... A source claiming to be in the know says that the SCO Group is going to sue Google for not paying its Linux taxes. Last week SCO threatened to make an example of a big-time Linux user that hadn't paid SCO the license fees it's demanding and...

Linux Exec Reportedly Joins the Evil Empire.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... A source claims that the former head of Turbolinux in China, ex- Compaq exec Ashok Pandey, has joined Microsoft. What with the Thanksgiving Day holidays almost upon us, Microsoft said it couldn't confirm or deny that it had hired Pandey. It...

Windows Trademark Case Delayed.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The federal court in Seattle has delayed hearing Microsoft's case against Lindows.com until March 1 because of a scheduling conflict with a criminal matter, Lindows said. The jury trial was supposed to start on December 1. The brouhaha...

HP Loses More Execs.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Hewlett-Packard, which is having a stickiness crisis as far as its staff goes, has accepted the resignation of Jeff Clarke, the former Compaq CFO who led the Compaq side of the HP-Compaq integration team when the two companies merged. ...

Intel's Next-Generation 65nm Process Working.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Intel, which is a bit behind its own schedule for moving its chips to a 90nm process, said Monday that it had built fully functioning 4-megabit SRAMs on 65nm technology, the next step after 90nm. The development will make it possible for Intel...

SCO's Pariah Status Validates its Claims: Barron's.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... A Barron's piece on the SCO Group pushed its stock up 14% to $15.99 Monday and on Tuesday it was still climbing, setting 52-week records. The stock was a buck a share before it sued IBM for breach of contract. Barron's reasoned that the...

Oracle Still Lusts after PeopleSoft.
December 1, 2003... Oracle staged a conference call Monday to clear up "misconceptions in the market" and to say that it hadn't been dissuaded from the PeopleSoft acquisition by the length of time the process was taking but that it wasn't going to pay any...

Stoned Beaver Let Loose; Linux Folks Hope It Bites SCO.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Over last weekend the 2.6 Linux kernel took another step closer to actualization when Linus Torvalds released 2.6.0-test10, a patch "tentatively" dubbed Stoned Beaver. Its predecessor, test 9, had been circulating for about a month. ...

You Could Call It Skimmer or Bowler or, Hey, How about Cloche.(Red Hat's intentions to trademark Fedora)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Researchers at Cornell University, a Microsoft sympathizer, says they're going to protest Red Hat's intentions to trademark Fedora, the name given to the open source project that's replacing Red Hat's free and retailer distributions. The...

Lindows Claims Big Win in Canada.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Lindows.com claims deployment of 30,000 Lindows-based WebStation machines has started in Canada, Nova Scotia specifically, but then it also says that trials are underway. It says the 30k rollout will take a year. To oversee the push,...

IBM Claims GPFS Vital to Grids.(General Parallel File System )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... IBM's is going around saying the high-performance shared-disk file system it developed called GPFS or General Parallel File System is vital to grids. IBM talks about it as a new paradigm. The widgetry provides data access in a Linux or...

OSDL Circulates FSF Arguments against SCO.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... To try to hold SCO's feet to the fire, the Linux-loving Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is circulating a position paper written by the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Eben Moglen disputing SCO's Linux claims about the...

Novell-SuSE Leaves Prudential Unimpressed.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... "We think the noise created by Novell's November 4th announcement of its acquisition of Linux distributor SuSE has been concentrated in the investor market with little impact on customer behavior. While Novell may have the potential to be...

French Government Tells EC To Take a Hike.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... In exchange for a $60 million investment, France's becalmed computer flagship Group Bull SA may turn control over to the Gores Technology Group, according to Les Echoes. When last seen Gores was turning the old MicronPC, now called MPC...

Former Unify CEO Convicted of Cooking the Books.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Former Unify CEO Reza Mikailli has been convicted of cooking the books, defrauding investors and enriching himself to the tune of $4 million at their expense following a trial in federal court on charges that were brought in the summer of 2000....

HP Still Has a Lot To Prove.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Tracing HP's upside Q4 last week to consumer PCs and printers, Bear Stearns remarked that "The bigger issues for Hewlett-Packard are execution and consistency, as HP has not yet demonstrated an ability to deliver consistent revenue and earnings...

Sleepycat Upgrades Berkeley DB.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Sleepycat Software, which makes Berkeley DB, which claims 200 million deployments, has added a new Java API, based on the existing Java collections standard that should make building Java data storage applications easier. So it's putting...

Intel Watch.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Intel continues to promise its new 90nm Prescott and Dothan chips will ship this quarter despite reports that they were pushed into Q1 because of delays attributed to the process. Of course, no OEM adds SKUs in November and December. We gather...

Bill Joy's Meditation Wall.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... I'm figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet. I would love to get 72 dpi but will...

Microsoft Says It's Willing To License All its IP.(Column)
December 8, 2003... Microsoft's chief counsel Brad Smith got on the blower Wednesday morning and basically threw all of Microsoft's IP, "100%," he said, of its patents, trademarks, trade secrets and copyrights, on the table to be picked over and licensed by the...

Red Hat's Sales Boss To Leave.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Red Hat says its sales chief, COO Tim Buckley, is going to retire so it has expanded the brief of Alex Pinchev, the Russian the company brought in nine months ago to advance its offshore fortunes as president of international operations. ...

Wind River Joins OSDL & Eclipse.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Wind River Systems, the embedded operating system house that bought Berkeley Software Design Inc (BSDi), the 10-year attempt to commercialize Berkeley Unix, an adventure that doesn't seem to have netted the company much, has joined the Open...

Novell Adds to Board.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Novell has named two women, Claudine Malone and Kathy Brittain White, to its board of directors. Malone, 67, is the president and CEO of Financial Management and Consulting Inc and has taught business administration at Harvard, Georgetown...

'I Ain't So Tough': Linux; Debian Breached.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... A series of security breeches that occurred on November 19 and just became public information the day after Thanksgiving compromised at least four of the Debian project's Intel servers, project administrator James Troup said in an e-mail to the...

SCO CEO Pens Another Open Letter.
December 8, 2003... Editor's Note: Feeling misunderstood and misrepresented, SCO CEO Darl McBride, the man they love to hate, delivered himself of a open letter Thursday, a format that promises to become a series over the next year or year-and-a-half before his...

IBM Software To Play Scrooge, Fire Cratchits Wholesale, Source Says.
December 8, 2003... IBM is reportedly supposed to play Scrooge and fire 13,000 people from its software unit. At least that's what the scuttlebutt inside says. The first indications of whether this news is true or not could reportedly start becoming apparent...

Red Hat Won't Pander to ISVs.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik made a presentation this week to a standing room only crowd at Credit Suisse and worried out loud that Red Hat won't pander to ISVs and make the kernel-invasive changes they want, but that SuSE would. He also foresaw...

DoCoMo Preps Linux Phone.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... NTT DoCoMo, Japan's number one mobile carrier, is rumored to be readying a 3G handset based on Linux that it would release in the second half of next year. The company, which expects its 3G phones to hit 25 million units by 2006, is...

Lindows Trots Out OS for Laptops.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Lindows.com, which is fast becoming a past master at segmenting, has dreamed up a Laptop Edition of its operating system that's supposed to have improved power management, a high degree of compatibility with Wi-Fi cards and the ability to take...

EC May Force Bull into Bankruptcy.
December 8, 2003... The European Commission says it won't approve Bull's latest bailout plan before the regulators take the uppity French government to court and challenge the legality of the scheme. The EC's suit won't be heard by the European Court of...

Stinky Wireless Business Weighs Intel Down.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Intel tightened up its Q4 guidance Thursday for its mid-quarter review. It said it's sure to clear $8.5 billion in revenues, pulling up its socks from a previous low projection of $8.1 billion but it still doesn't think it can do better than...

Candles Are Lighting Up.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Dell COO Kevin Rollins told a Credit Suisse gathering the other day that corporate IT demand was "improving" rather than stagnating or merely staying "stable" like it was a quarter ago. However, the change is apparently not all that...

SCO CEO Invited to Harvard.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... This bit of news is gonna irk SCO critics no end, but Harvard Law School has invited SCO Group CEO Darl McBride to come and speak about his case. They're trying to work out a date now. It'll probably be sometime in January or February.

Eclipse To Reconsider IP Policy.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... Apparently the open source Eclipse consortium will be reconsidering the royalty-free access to API memorialized in its Common Public License (CPL). Smaller companies want to be paid for their IP.

LinuxWorld Dates.(Calendar)
December 8, 2003... LinuxWorld is set for January 20-23 (the expo runs the 21st to the 23rd) at the Javits Center in New York.

SCO Numbers Stalled.(Brief Article)
December 8, 2003... The SCO Group was supposed to post its latest quarter on Monday but the tom-toms claim the auditors need more time and that the great unveiling will be pushed back a week or so. The move suggests SCO's lawyers will also have more time to file...

Red Flag Chief Reportedly Out.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Last week the Chinese government ousted Red Flag Software Company president and CEO Liu Bo, who used to be a vice-president of Microsoft China, for being "too Western," an American ISV in communication with the firm said. A pointed e-mail...

Microsoft Stops Lindows Sales in Sweden.
December 15, 2003... The dangerous trademark fight between Microsoft and Lindow.com that could ironically wind up stripping Microsoft of its rights to the Windows trademark has suddenly leapt outside the US to Sweden, where Microsoft succeeded Wednesday in getting...

Court Orders SCO To Spell Out its Case against Linux.
December 15, 2003... A Utah judge last Friday ordered the SCO Group to turn over to IBM evidence that IBM copied Unix code into Linux. The discovery ruling, which SCO enemies celebrated as a victory over the company currently more loathed than Microsoft,...

IBM Software Reportedly To Lose its Sales Force.
December 15, 2003... In a flip-flop uncharacteristic of it, IBM Monday reversed itself and abruptly cancelled what was described last week by an IBM source as a layoff aimed at 13,000 souls in its Software Group, an admittedly big number. The news hit Monday...

Investors Put Brake on SCO's Liberal Contingency Deal with its awyers.
December 15, 2003... with its Lawyers The SCO Group apparently knuckled under to a couple of huffy investors Monday and gave the Royal Bank of Canada and BayStar Capital Partners, the guys who put $50 million into SCO in a private placement cut in October,...

CA Problems Multiply.
December 15, 2003... Computer Associates continues to be mired down in the government's investigation of alleged financial improprieties and things ain't getting any better. Last Friday senior VP of finance David Kaplan resigned for "personal reasons" and CA...

Novell Joins OSDL, Ditto NetApp.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Novell must be satisfied with the hazy scope of the Open Software Development Lab's new desktop charter because it up and joined the outfit and the company, the new owner of Ximian and soon SuSE, was known to have made a desktop initiative a...

Sarvega Says It's Got an XML Blade.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... A three-year-old start-up called Sarvega Inc out a Chicago suburb that's been in the XPE appliances business says it's got the industry's first blade, a widget dubbed the XRE 200, to handle the complexities of an XML web services...

Red Hat Aces LSB Certification.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Red Hat says that the Free Standards Group has certified its Enterprise Linux 3 on all Linux Standard Base run-time environment architectures like x-86 compatibles, Itanium, IBM's iSeries, S/390s and zSeries. It says it's the first enterprise...

CA Makes Web Services Management Push.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Computer Associates launched a Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management product for monitoring and managing web services Monday. Besides discovering and managing web services, Unicenter WSDM is designed so businesses can rapidly...

HP Reorgs.
December 15, 2003... Having pretty much run out of things it can cut without the promised magic of its merger with Compaq kicking in, despite what its top managers say, Hewlett-Packard, has decided to move the furniture around so the place looks like it did in...

Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est la Meme Chose.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Expanding on the notion that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Merrill Lynch pointed out that - what with one thing and another - the exact same people are running the post-merger HP that were responsible for the P&L before...

Amphus Says It Can Manage & Deploy All x86 Servers.
December 15, 2003... Amphus, the blade server designer-turned-ISV, says it's ready to deliver its promised third-generation management software that's capable of provisioning, monitoring and managing any x86-compatible server or blade server. Amphus started...

Michels Quits as Tarantella CEO.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Doug Michels has stepped down as president and CEO of Tarantella Inc, the Citrix wannabe successor company to the Santa Cruz Operation, replaced by the former CEO of Ravisent Technologies Inc Frank Wilde. Wilde is bringing money in with him....

Oracle Application Server 10g Debuts.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Oracle has released Application Server 10g, which it touts as the first grid-ready app server. Besides featuring built-in grid computing and integration technologies, Oracle Application Server 10g is supposed to provide a comprehensive...

BSDi Offshoot Builds Tiny Server.(OffMyServer Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... OffMyServer Inc, the San Jose, California operation that was briefly BSDi's experiment with hardware after BSDi bought Telenet Systems and before Wind River bought the BSD part of BSDi, claims it's got the world's smallest fully functional...

SCO Delays its Earnings.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... As rumor had it, the SCO Group has moved out its Q4 posting from December 8 to December 22 saying its accountants need the time to complete the accounting treatment of that $50 million private placement of Series A convertible preferred stock...

SuSE & IBM Cozy Up.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... SuSE and IBM have set up a joint Software Integration Center at IBM's software lab in Toronto meant to optimize SuSE server OS with IBM applications software beginning with DB2. The Linux version of the database's Enterprise Server Edition has...

Intel Offers New Windows/Linux Compilers.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Intel has got some new Version 8.0 C++ and Fortran compilers for Windows and Linux and a C++ compiler for CE.NET all meant to improve performance, it says, across multiple Intel architectures - from Itanium servers to desktops to PCA-based...

Red Hat & IBM Expand their Relationship.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Red Hat and IBM Thursday expanded their relationship, which is supposed to make everybody feel better about the fact that IBM has promised to put $50 million into Novell when it completes its acquisition of Red Hat rival, SuSE, but then of...

Intel seems To Show a Hint of Desperation.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Intel is challenging the Global 500 to compare Itanium servers to proprietary RISC systems during a free trial test period it's attached to a new "try and buy" program that it calls the Intel Itanium 2 Solution Challenge that it says will run...

SCO Hit with Another DDoS Attack.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Around four o'clock Wednesday morning Utah time, the SCO Group was hit with another large-scale Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that disabled its web site and corporate traffic like e-mail, its intranet and customer support, it said. That...

AMD Pushes on its China Ambitions.
December 15, 2003... AMD and the Beijing Peking University Founder Group Corporation, a sizeable 18-year-old university spin-out with 5,000 employees, plan to establish a new joint Platform Development Lab in Beijing to integrate and develop non-PC appliances...

eMachines Launches Athlon 64 Desktop.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Budget PC vendor eMachines has quietly released a desktop based on AMD's hybrid Athlon 64 processor. Available at Best Buy stores and their online counterpart, the $1,300 Windows XP Home Edition-based eMachines T6000 uses the Athlon 64...

Now Where Do You Suppose Sun Got That Opteron Box?(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Compare shots of the Newisys 4300 and the four-way Opteron that Sun showed off last month at Comdex and see if you get a tingly dj vu feeling all over. The dead giveaway would seem to be the small LCD display that both have in the upper...

1% Linux.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Unisys, which is dedicated to Windows but is willing to sell SuSE on its so-called Windows mainframes, says 1% of its installed base, roughly 10 ES7000s, are running Linux.

Sybase ASE Goes Itanium.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Sybase has put its Adaptive Server Enterprise database server on HP- UX and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Itanium 2s.

HP Might Be Interested in a Little Something in Management Software.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... HP claims it's not interested in buying any large service operation, but that it might be persuaded to open its check book, which it claims it'll keep a lock on next year, for smaller regional players in the fragmented managed services arena...

HP Gets Itself a New Linux Marketeer.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... HP has tapped Efrain Rovira as worldwide director of Linux marketing for HP Enterprise Servers and Storage. He had been director of business strategy and planning in HP's Industry Standard Server unit. Rovira has also worked for NCR, Acer and...

SCO May Be Pulling in its Horns.(Brief Article)
December 15, 2003... Uh-oh. We're getting the distinct impression from the rumblings we're hearing that the SCO Group is going to make us out to be liars and not sue Google after all. It appears it may have changed its mind and decided that the Linux darling is too...

SCO's Last Open Letter Draws Response from Red Hat Co-.(Letter to the Editor)
December 15, 2003... founder Bob Young To the Editor: I've kept out of this debate as I no longer work at Red Hat and wanted to give Matthew Szulik and the Red Hat team complete control over Red Hat's communications with the press. But three years have...

Linux doyen and head of Linux International maddog Hall wasn't any too thrilled with Darl either.(Letter to the Editor)
December 15, 2003... To the Editor: I would like to respond to Darl McBride's open letter about copyrights. First of all, Mr McBride seems to think that the GPL (a license which gives certain rights and has certain restrictions on how to distribute...

Can CA Save Linux from the Great Satan SCO?
December 22, 2003... It's dawned on Computer Associates that IBM pays it royalties for the SMP technology in AIX, IBM's version of Unix, because of the work done long ago by Unix icon Locus Computing Corporation. CA says it owns the Locus IP by virtue of its...

RealNetworks Gives Microsoft a Billion-Dollar Antitrust Suit for Xmas.
December 22, 2003... RealNetworks Inc, the Seattle digital media/streaming media company started by ex-Microsoft exec Ron Glaser, sued Microsoft for antitrust violations late Thursday in a California federal court charging it with monopoly maintenance and demanding...

Red Hat Buys Sistina for $31m in Stock.
December 22, 2003... Red Hat is buying storage infrastructure software house Sistina Software for $31 million in stock to provide Red Hat customers with a path to virtualization and vendor-independent storage solutions, it said Thursday when it posted its fiscal Q3...

Linux Kernel Released.
December 22, 2003... The 2.6 production version of the new state-of-the-art Linux kernel was released Thursday in time to turn it into a stocking stuffer - coal in the case of Microsoft. The source code is on the web at www.kernel.org and at ftp.kernel.org. ...

The Consolidation Fairy Strikes Early; EMC Jumps the Gun & Buys VMware for $635m.
December 22, 2003... EMC is buying privately held VMware Inc for $635 million in cash, 10% of its bank balance, moving now to prevent the virtualization house from either going public or getting bought by somebody else. It is, lest anyone need reminding, EMC's...

SCO Attacked for Being Attacked.
December 22, 2003... At the end of last week the SCO Group, the industry's leading pariah, found itself in the ludicrous position of having to defend its contention that it was the subject of a crippling and expanding two-day Denial of Service attack for the third...

Hamachi To Run $59-a-Head.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Novell has put a $59-a-user price tag on Hamachi, the integrated package of file, print, messaging, directory and management services that it salvaged from NetWare and put on Linux under the name Nterprise Linux Service 1.0. Novell...

Lindows Upgrades to 4.5.(LindowsOS 4.5)(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Lindows.com, which Microsoft is now suing in Europe as well as America over its choice of name, has upgraded its desktop LindowsOS 4.0 kit to 4.5 adding integrated search, free SIPphone support and ability to translate web content back and...

Home of Open Source Capitalism.
December 22, 2003... Now there's a string of words that don't exactly fit comfortably next to one another. A clever little head-turning juxtaposition that this newfangled Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) being put together for March 16-17 in San Francisco is...

Zander To Run Motorola.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Ed Zander, Sun's former number two whose 18-month absence hasn't improved Sun's fortunes a wit, is going to run Motorola, replacing chairman and CEO Chris Galvin, grandson of Moto's founder, who said in September, after a vote of no...

Sun Drops Fee To Try Solaris x86.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Sun has canned the 20 bucks a pop it's been charging for evaluation copies of Solaris x86 and is giving downloads of the stuff away for nothing just like it does with evals of its Sparc-based operating system. It claims news of its alliance...

Fujitsu Siemens Says Its Opteron Box Is Ready.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Back in April when AMD finally got to launch its hybrid x86-64 Opteron in New York, Fujitsu Siemens sent along a video clip saying it was going to do an Opteron workstation. On Tuesday AMD got to say the Celsius V810 box, which uses the...

Oracle Shines.(Q2 ended November 30, 2003)(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... After a disappointing first quarter, Oracle turned in better-than- expected earnings for its second quarter ended November 30. It earned $617 million, or 12 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion. Earnings per share were a penny higher...

Red Hat Escapes Penny Ghetto.(net income up Q3 2003)(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Red Hat's net income rose sharply to $4.1 million, or two cents a share, on revenues of $33.1 million in its third fiscal quarter ended November 30. It's the second time in a row its EPS has been more than a penny. It thinks it'll hit three...

Bye-bye, Tanglewood. Hello, Tukwila.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... Evidently Intel's lawyers nodded off there for a moment and let the boys down in the lab - or whoever's responsible for code names - baptize the post-Montecito multi-core multiprocessor chip the company's got on its Itanium roadmap Tanglewood....

Hope You Can Still Find Your Bubble Pipe.(Salesforce.com Inc. to go public)(Brief Article)
December 22, 2003... God's gift to the CRM market, sexy on-demand Salesforce.com filed to go public Thursday. It's looking to raise $115 million and chi-chi Morgan Stanley will be bringing it out in a blow-out IPO that's supposed to be second in glory only to...