Linux Gram articles from February 2005

Linux Gram archives from February 2005

Ray Noorda's Competence in Question; Nasty Legal Brawl Erupts over Control of his VC House.(venture capital)
February 7, 2005... Things have turned ugly in Utah. Ray Noorda, the former CEO of Novell and acknowledged father of network computing, one of the industry's golden boys, is now 80- years-old and by all reports in his dotage. His daughter Val Noorda...

Egenera Adopts the Opteron.(partnership with Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
February 7, 2005... Egenera has lined up with AMD and the Opteron chip, betraying its long-standing single-source alliance with Intel. It is the five-year-old blade start-up's second recent break with tradition, the other being its decision to sell Solaris 10...

IBM Objects to SCO Discovery Order.
February 7, 2005... IBM, as expected, wants to break the legs of Magistrate Brooke Wells' now-famous court order telling it to turn over almost all the discovery that SCO has been after. So it filed a motion with Judge Dale Kimball, who has ultimate oversight...

Centrify To Compete with Vintela in Making Microsoft Support Linux.
February 7, 2005... Vintela, the start-up with Microsoft, Canopy and SCO connections, the company that makes Microsoft widgetry do unnatural acts and support Linux, suddenly has a competitor in another ambitious start- up called Centrify Corporation that's been...

New FOSS Legal Center Seeks To Limit Microsoft's Intimidation Potential.(free & open-source software)(Eben Moglen)
February 7, 2005... Eben Moglen, the Columbia University Law professor who serves as general counsel to both the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Samba Project, has formed a Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to provide pro bono legal services to non-profit...

Euro Software Patent Legislation Suffers Another Setback.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... An overwhelming majority of the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has voted to ask the European Commission to restart the legislative process surrounding the controversial American-style software patent proposal that has...

OSI President Out; Organization Broadens its Charter.(Open Source Initiative)
February 7, 2005... OSI co-founder and president Eric Raymond is out. So is OSI general counsel Larry Rosen. Russ Nelson, who runs a high-level e-mail system design services shop called Crynwr Software, among other things, will replace Raymond. Mark...

OSDL Takes 'em Young.(ActiveGrid Inc. took the membership of Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Two-month-old open source start-up ActiveGrid Inc has joined the Open Source Development Labs and will participate in the consortium's Data Center Linux working group. ActiveGrid, which is being financed by such as Hummer Winblad partner...

OES on Tap.(Open Enterprise Server)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Novell is expected to introduce its Open Enterprise Server (OES), the combination of NetWare and SuSE, at LinuxWorld in Boston the week of February 14. It will let people use either the new NetWare 7.0 release or SuSE Linux Enterprise System...

Apple Envy.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Linspire CEO Michael Robertson, who also started MP3.com and must have Apple-envy, is starting a new digital music company called MP3tunes to churn out music hardware and software and of course an online store to champion the MP3 format over...

IBM's Deal with Lenovo under Investigation.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... The secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) capitulated to congressional pressure and has gone ahead with that extended investigation of the IBM's sale of its loss-ridden PC unit to the Chinese-backed Lenovo from the...

JOnAS Recognized.(Certification)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... JOnAS is the first non-commercial open source app server to be certified J2EE-compatible. It took months just to get a legal framework in place so ObjectWeb, the consortium responsible for the code, could get the J2EE Specification and...

Infinicon Adapts to Changing Times.(InfiniCon Systems changing its software architecture)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Infinicon, the Infiniband house, says it's adapting its architectural approach to the new network reality and modularizing its software so the stuff can accommodate either the classically positioned Host Channel Adapter (HCA) or the HCAs...

Red Hat Sets Up Government Unit.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Ahead of the next release of its distribution, which implements Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), Red Hat has started a government business unit, appointing Paul Smith to lead it as VP, government sales operation. Smith used to run Veritas'...

Voltaire Backer Hitachi Goes with Topspin.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Hitachi is going to use Topspin's Infiniband server switches, gateways and host channel adapters in its BladeSymphony blade server line, which is a little bit odd considering that Hitachi has money in Topspin rival Voltaire. Anyway,...

Black Duck & CollabNet Ally.(Black Duck Software Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Black Duck, which peddles a software license compliance system, and CollabNet, which sells a collaborative software development environment, have teamed in a technology and marketing alliance to help reduce the intellectual property risks...

Unisys Extends its Commitment to JBoss.(Brief Article)
February 7, 2005... Unisys is going to offer its enterprise customers production support for the JBoss open source application server under a multi-year agreement cut by the two companies. Unisys, one of the original members of the JBoss Founder's Consortium,...

As I Live & Breathe, Microsoft, the Interoperator!(management)
February 7, 2005... Microsoft is circulating an e-mail over Bill Gates' signature embracing interoperability and pulling the nose of middleware (read IBM) as a solution around heterogeneity. Microsoft's goal, it says, is "to harness all the power inherent in...

SCO Case Might See the Inside of a Courtroom Yet; But Judge 'Astonished' at SCO's Lack of Evidence.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
February 14, 2005... Well, it looks like there's chance the $5 billion SCO v IBM case might get heard after all despite IBM's attempts to get it squelched. The federal court judge responsible for the case has thrown out all three of IBM's motions for partial...

HP's Commitment to Opteron Deepens, Adds Blades, Workstation, New Two-Way.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
February 14, 2005... HP is about to expand its commitment to the Opteron, adding its very first Opteron workstation - to go up against Sun and IBM - an Opteron version of its two-year-old Xeon-based DL380 two-way - that's gonna irk the dickens out of Intel - and...

Intel Tries To Redeems Itself.
February 14, 2005... Intel evidently benefited from canceling Tejas and the 4GHz Pentium 4 chips last year. On Monday it said it had move up its schedule for dual-core PC chips and that the little dickens would arrive in systems in the second quarter, robbing...

VMware Should Watch its Back.(use of new technology, Virtual Iron Software Inc.)
February 14, 2005... Chris Stone, late vice-chairman of Novell responsible for its acquisition of SuSE and Ximian, has surfaced on the shiny new advisory board of Virtual Iron Software Inc, a start-up virtual computing platform outfit in Acton, Massachusetts that...

Voltaire Gives iSER to the Linux Community.(Institute of Social Economic and Research)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Voltaire has contributed its iSER protocol sources to the Linux community. iSER is a new IETF standard extension to iSCSI that supports multiple RDMA-based transports like Infiniband and Ethernet RDMA. Besides boosting iSCSI performance,...

OSDL Delivers DCL 1.1 & CGL 3.0.(Open Source Development Labs, Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition 3.0, Data Center Capabilities 1.1)
February 14, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs has delivered its Data Center Capabilities 1.1 (DCL 1.1) specification, an expansion on its initial cut last February, and has also put out its Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition 3.0 (CGL 3.0) for...

New MontaVista Program To Push Linux in Mobile Phones.(MontaVista Software Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... MontaVista Software has rolled out a program called Mobilinux to boost the adoption of Linux in the mobile phone business. Mobilinux brings together semiconductor vendors, ISVs and integrators to create reference architectures and provide...

The Cell Chip Shows a Bit of Eye-catching Leg.(new chip from International Business Machines Corp., Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp.)
February 14, 2005... IBM, Sony and Toshiba engineers used the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco to hike the skirt on the vaunted and mysterious multi-core Power-derived ~4GHz chip code named Cell that they've been...

Sun Pushing Solaris-on-Opteron.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Sun has started what it calls the Solar Edge Elite program to drive reseller Solaris-on-Opteron sales to its largest customers. Only a year into selling Opteron boxes and Sun is now reportedly the largest consumer of Opterons even though...

Dell's Shooting To Be an IBM-like $80b-a-year Company.
February 14, 2005... Dell earnings dropped 11% to $667 million, or 26 cents a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter ended January 28 because of a $280 million tax charge that worked out to 11 cents a share. Dell is taking the charge in anticipation of...

Carly Saw the Writing on the Wall.(Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive's performance)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... At Christmas, Carly was sidling up to fellow-CEOs like Intel's Paul Otellini and Cisco's John Chambers asking their advice on how to make a graceful, face-saving exit from HP in case the pressure she was under from the HP board boiled over,...

The Legacy of Carly Fiorina.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Prudential thinks it could be at least six months before HP finds a replacement for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina and at least nine months before "a new CEO takes the reins and a concrete strategy is articulated." It warns that business could drift...

It's Official. Swainson Named CA CEO.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... On Wednesday, an inauspicious day for CEOs everywhere considering that was the day HP CEO Carly Fiorina met the headsman's axe, CA officially made John Swainson its CEO. His two-and-half-month apprenticeship as CEO-elect under interim CEO...

Conspiracy Theorists Take Note.(Novell Inc., International Business Machines Corp., contract)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Novell and IBM are jointly pitching SuSE on IBM's Power platforms to ISV courting them with free software evaluations. SuSE-on-Power is supposedly IBM's instrument for doing Microsoft and Red Hat dirt.

Now FUDcon.(Fedora Users and Developers Conference)
February 14, 2005... The Fedora Project is going to host its first annual Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDcon) on February 18 at Boston University.

IBM Trapped by SCO Discovery Order; But Resists Searching the Files of 3,000 Developers.
February 21, 2005... So, after a year and a half of evading discovery, IBM's lawyers evidently couldn't figure out how to wriggle out from under the new discovery order the company is under in the $5 billion SCO case - especially since their main escape route was...

SCO Flirts with Delisting.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Complicating SCO's currently unenviable position, it's gotten a notice from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market telling it that it's in danger of being delisted on February 25 because it hasn't filed its 10-K with the SEC yet for the fiscal year ending...

Novell Finds Backdoor into Red Hat's Mansion.(alliance between Novell Inc. and Aurema Inc.)
February 21, 2005... Novell may have figured out a way to elbow into some prestige Red Hat accounts simply by giving them what they want. It has tied up with Aurema Inc, which does mainframe-style cross- platform workload management, to create ARMTech for SuSE...

OSI in Life-Threatening Squeeze.(Open Source Initiative)
February 21, 2005... The days of the seminal Open Source Initiative (OSI) may be numbered unless it can think of something else to do with itself besides recognizing open source licenses. OSI has officially sanctioned close to 60 open source licenses - some...

OSDL Warms Up for the Desktop Push.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) released the first cut of a Desktop Linux (DTL) Capabilities paper this week, roughly a year after it set up a DTL working group to wrestle with how it should go about trying to pry Microsoft's fingers loose....

FSF Moves the Furniture Around.(replacement of Bradley Kuhn with Peter Brown at Free Software Foundation)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has replaced its executive director. The incumbent, Bradley Kuhn, has shifted over to the newly created $4 million Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) set up by FSF general counsel Eben Moglen and some OSDL...

New Study Finds Windows More Secure than Linux.(comparative analysis of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Ah, the religious issue of which is more secure Windows or Linux has reared its divisive head again. Seems two researchers, one of them a professor from the Florida Institute of Technology and a Linux convert, the other the director of...

Novell Open Sources NetMail Code.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell has set up an Exchange- and Domino-competitive open source project called Hula meant to create a collaboration server based on code from Novell's NetMail collaboration server, which claims four million users. It says Hula will provide...

AMD To Port Xen to AMD64.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... AMD says it's going to port Xen, the open source virtualization pack, to AMD64 in collaboration with XenSource Inc, the start-up founded to support the technology. The port of Xen, which lets a single machine run multiple operating...

Red Hat 4 is Here, Well, Almost.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Red Hat has finally trotted out the long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4), its commercial version of the Linux 2.6 kernel, calling it "a defining milestone in the evolution of Linux as the backbone of the enterprise." It's supposed...

Unisys Gets RHEL 4-Certified.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Unisys' ES7000 system has become one of the rare boxes to be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-certified for both 32- and 64-bit servers with up to 32 processors. RHEL 4 is the first commercial Red Hat distribution to be based on the 2.6 Linux kernel....

StarOffice 8 Betas.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sun has been showing off a StarOffice 8 beta, claiming greater interoperability with Office and a better look-and-feel. Sun said it added productivity by increasing wizards and tools and supporting some Lotus and WordPerfect versions....

MySQL Jumps on Subscription Train.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... MySQL AB has rolled out a new subscription-based pricing model for its open source database that combines software, support and alerts. It is called MySQL Network and was announced at LinuxWorld this week. The company said the subscription...

Wind River Betas Platform NE for Linux.(Network Equipment)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Embedded software house Wind River Systems put out a reference design release of its Platform for Network Equipment Linux Edition the other day. It is said to be the first Wind River platform to include a complete Linux reference file...

Sybase Ports ASE for Linux to OpenPower.(Adaptive Server Enterprise )(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sybase has launched its Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for Linux on IBM's OpenPower-based servers. Sybase executives are pitching ASE for Linux on OpenPower as suited for transaction-heavy environments such as financial services.

IBM To Pour $100m into Managed Linux Clients.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... IBM says it's going to invest $100 million over three year to up the Linux support and technology in its Workplace software portfolio. It says it was inspired by the high double-digit growth last year in the number of people deploying IBM...

Palamida Offers Advil for Software IP Headache.(Palamida Inc)
February 21, 2005... The latest start-up, Palamida Inc, has managed to combine the commercial launch of its software IP asset manager for large corporations with a $5 million round of funding from marquee investors. It will compete against Black Duck, Serena...

HP Hires Headhunter To Find Miracle Worker.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP's board has hired Russell Reynolds Associates to search for a new CEO to replace Carly Fiorina. HP said the search would be managed by Andrea Redmond and Charles Tribbett, who co-lead the firm's CEO/Board Services Practice. Needless to...

CA Hires Biz Dev Guy; Firm Focuses on eTrust, Unicenter.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Computer Associates has hired retired investment banker Michael Christenson as executive VP, strategy and business development reporting to COO Jeff Clarke. He will be in charge of strategic alliances and M&A. Christenson wound down a...

AMD's Opterons Officially Move to 90nm.
February 21, 2005... AMD unwrapped its two latest Opterons this week, as expected, positioning them as a major update. The new 2.6GHz chips, which are supposed to be available in 30 days, are designated the 252 and 852 and claim to be the highest- performing...

AMD Demos Dual-Core Opterons.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... AMD demoed dual-core Opterons at LinuxWorld this week in a Cray XD1 supercomputer, an HP xw9300 workstation, an HP ProLiant DL585 and a Sun Fire V40z. The servers ran four dual-core chips and the supercomputer and workstation two each. ...

HP Numbers Show Earnings Strain.
February 21, 2005... Showing you how anxious Hewlett-Packard's board was to get rid of Carly, its first-quarter numbers, posted after the market closed on Wednesday, were better than people expected. Earnings were flat, but revenues were up 10%. In case you're...

Evidently HP Got a Woman To Clean House.(Patricia Dunn new chaimanof board)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... HP's board was reportedly able to squeeze its list of complaints with Carly's administration on four pieces of paper that were assembled and read to her in early January by Patricia Dunn, now her replacement as chairman of the board. From all...

Carly Reportedly Fired the Wrong People.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... The rumor mill says one of the problems the HP board had with Carly was the preemptory way she fired three key executives for lack of something better to do when HP's fiscal Q3 numbers came a cropper last year. Supposedly they were the wrong...

Lab Building on Upswing.
February 21, 2005... HP has set up a $3 million open source utility performance center (HPC1) in France for prototyping and deploying complex IT solutions involving its products and services. HP apparently got the University of Oslo to can its Sun-based e-mail...

Novell Hires Chief Marketer.(William Hewitt appointed)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell has hired William Hewitt, the group VP who used to be responsible for PeopleSoft's demand generation and field marketing, as its chief marketing officer. He gets to wear senior VP chevrons.

The Legal Mind at Work.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... In a footnote in its motion for reconsideration of the latest discovery order that the court imposed on IBM in the SCO case, IBM says that in the last year and a half it has produced documents from the files of 174 people and SCO has produced...

OES Exceeds Historical Interest.(Open Enterprise Servers)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Novell says the NetWare+SuSE Open Enterprise Server it sent to open beta in December has been downloaded 7,000 times, the largest number in Novell's history. It's supposed to be available in early March and will be priced the same as NetWare...

Sun to its Critics: Go Suck an Egg.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2005... Sun president Jonathan Schwartz apparently feels vindicated. According to his blog posting last Friday, 420,895 Solaris 10 licenses were downloaded in the first 10 days or so since the operating system started to ship commercially on January...

Infiniband Gets a Second Shot at the Mainstream.
February 28, 2005... After watching its ships sink a few years ago, Infiniband is poised to stick its toe back in the mainstream. Mellanox Technologies Ltd is dragging it to the shoreline. Mellanox is about to show off an Infiniband adapter, helped along...

IBM Unleashes Hurricane Hoping To Hit HP, Itanium.
February 28, 2005... IBM has revved its proprietary four-way Intel server chipset, which used to be called Summit, but now, in its third iteration, it's called Hurricane, doubtless because IBM hopes to blow any vestige of Intel's Itanium chip off the map and if it...

Open Source Advocates Call for Oasis Boycott. What Ever Would the ACLU Say?
February 28, 2005... Open source leaders want Oasis, the standards organization, to abandon its brand new IP rights policy, supposedly two years in the making, because it tolerates RAND as well as royalty-free. The open source community, in a move akin to the...

Mandrakesoft & Conectiva Merge.(Acquisitions)
February 28, 2005... Mandrakesoft, the last surviving European commercial Linux distributions, is going to acquire Conectiva, the Brazilian Linux distro, for $2.3 million in stock to increase its size and R&D capabilities. Mandrake, which has had no position...

See, You Do Have To Be Careful What You Ask For.(Legal)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... At last blush, IBM had filed a motion with the SCO court in Utah seeking to limit the scope of its own claims. It seems IBM doesn't want the court to look too deeply into Project Monterey and whether Dynix and AIX might infringe SCO...

Win4Lin Out From Under Windows 98n Bondage.
February 28, 2005... NeTraverse, which has had more avatars in its long and windy career than your average Hindu deity and currently peddles a WINE-free way to run Windows programs on Linux called Win4Lin, has, by the grace of an asset acquisition, become Win4Lin...

Novell Numbers Limp.
February 28, 2005... Thanks to that fortuitous antitrust settlement it got from Microsoft, Novell technically earned $392 million, or 90 cents a share, on revenues of $290 million, up 9% year-over-year, in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31. Closer to...

IBM To Sell Turbolinux in Japan.(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... In a move that'll make Red Hat none too pleased, Turbolinux says that IBM Japan has added its recently released Turbolinux 10 Server to its list of officially supported operating system for the xSeries models 206, 306 and 346. Turbo, whose...

Firefox Gets Security Fix.(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... The Mozilla Foundation updated the Firefox 1.0 browser. Release 1.0.1 is primarily a security fix to protect against spoofing and arbitrary code execution. It is supposed to be available on all platforms. And you thought only...

NEC Extends Fault Tolerance to Software.(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... NEC Solutions (America) Inc has introduced a new mid-range fault- tolerant machine that promises the self-recovery of software as well as hardware, a significant differentiator from NEC's otherwise look- alike competitor and OEM Stratus...

Always a Bridesmaid.(Industry News)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... Novell's attempt to dominate the news coming out of LinuxWorld last week left Linux watcher Prudential Equity unmoved. It still thinks Red Hat is king of the hill and that "Novell will likely be a distant #2 provider." It says, "Novell is...

Sleepycat Turns Watchdog.(Technology Application)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... The UK's immigration folk are starting to use Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB Transactional Data Store 4.3 at 70 ports of entry to improve border security. The software was reportedly picked because it's embedded and so supposedly more secure...

Novell Hires China Hand.(Appointments )(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... Novell has hired ex-IBMer Sen Ming Chang to be its managing director for Asia and get it into China. He will be based in Beijing.

Nelson a Problem for OSI.(Open Source Initiative)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2005... The Open Source Initiative has yet to address those allegations of racism hanging over the head of its newly ensconced president Russell Nelson since that posting he put on his personal blog. The Open Source Development Labs has refused to get...