Linux Gram articles from January 2004

Linux Gram archives from January 2004

Microsoft Said To Offer EU Governments Free Software.
January 12, 2004... Microsoft has or is about to offer to supply the governments of EU countries with an unlimited number of free software licenses to settle the European antitrust case against it, according to a source who was reportedly briefed by Microsoft. ...

IBM CEO Pushes Linux Desktop Internally.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... The press has gotten its hands on an internal memo written by IBM CIO Bob Greenberg in November that says that IBM CEO Sam Palmisano "has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux-based desktop before the end of...

SCO To Detail its Case against Linux to IBM by Monday.
January 12, 2004... At press time, the SCO Group expected that by Monday January 12 it would turn over to IBM all the evidence it had of Linux' alleged infringement on SCO-owned Unix IP that IBM asked for in its motion to compel discovery last month, thereby...

Charlie's Back & He's Got a Plan.
January 12, 2004... Charlie Northrup, the guy who may one day be recognized as owning the patent on web services, has wrestled two more patents out of the Patent and Trademark Office. He says it wasn't easy because the PTO understands the potential...

IBM Allies with Topspin.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Poor little orphan Infiniband may get a shot in the arm Tuesday when IBM is supposed to say that it'll be integrating Topspin Infiniband switch technology in its servers and TotalStorage products as well as reselling the switch to other people...

Red Flag & Miracle Linux Buddy Up.(Red Flag Software, Miracle Linux)(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... China's Red Flag Software and Tokyo-based Oracle-majority-owned Miracle Linux have formed a joint venture to create a unified Linux platform for Asia that would harry Microsoft at least on the server side. At least that's what they hope....

They're Mine. No, They're Mine. No, They're Mine.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... SCO Group spokesman Blake Stowell says the company is having a word with the Copyright Office about those Unix copyrights that Novell registered on September 22 and October 14 of last year, the ones whose existence was only revealed at...

Oracle Lacks Direction: Butler.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Oracle lacks direction, according to the Butler Group. The market for managing the nice neat structured data that fits in nice neat relational rows and columns is pretty well saturated, while 80% of the data people handle, all the unstructured...

Red Hat Raises Half-a-Billion Dollars.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Red Hat, which has always been so proud of its debt-free status but, at the same time, hates like hell to spend the money it's salted away in the bank, has borrowed $500 million that it said it might use to make acquisitions. It's sold off a...

Well, That $2b Didn't Go Very Far.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Sun is kill off what's left of the Linux-based Cobalt appliance line that it spent $2.2 billion in stock buying three years ago. Ah, well, we said at the time that it was paying a lot for a little. Guess Sun kinda evened things up when it...

SAP Rewriting All its Software.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... SAP is rewriting all its software to cut costs, both its own and its customers' airy maintenance costs, figuring on getting an edge on Oracle and PeopleSoft in the marketplace in the process, according to a scoop the Financial Times got. The...

Novell Makes SuSE & Ximian Play Together.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Novell, which is in the process of buying SuSE, said Tuesday that the Ximian Desktop 2, which it already owns, now support the latest SuSE client editions, SuSE Linux Desktop and Linux 9.0. The upgraded Ximian 2 also includes the Ximian...

IBM Slims Down its Blades.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Having wrestled with thermal issues, IBM says it's got the slimmest Intel-based blade server on the market, a four-way Xeon MP box designated the HS40. It says it provides three times the power in three-quarters of the space as HP blades...

Crusoe's Footprint Shrinks by Half.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Transmeta, which decided in the fall of '01, after the bottom fell out of the Japanese ultra-light notebook market, that it really needed to go after the embedded market, is bringing out two tiny x86 Crusoe chips this month that are supposed to...

Veritas Shores Up Utility Computing with Ejasent.
January 12, 2004... Three months after Forrester analyst William Martorelli questioned the viability of four-year-old Ejasent Inc as a standalone company, he got his answer. Veritas said Wednesday that it was buying the privately held Ejasent for $59 million...

Happy Anniversary, Richard.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... This past Monday was Richard Stallman's 20th anniversary. Twenty years ago he quit his job at MIT and started developing the free GNU operating system. Twenty years and a complete GNU system suitable for production use has never been...

SEC May Sue IBM.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... It looks like the SEC may take IBM to court. IBM got a Wells Notice saying SEC staff is considering recommending that the SEC bring a civil action against IBM for violating the securities laws. It seems that IBM allegedly aided and abetted...

Gateway Flubs Q4.
January 12, 2004... Gateway warned investors Monday that fourth-quarter revenues fall short of projections. It now anticipates doing about $880 million instead of $925 million-$975 million. Gateway expects to post an operating loss, excluding restructuring...

Sun Peeks Out from Behind the Cloud.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Merrill Lynch thinks that after a three-year hiatus Sun's installed base is starting to upgrade and that it looked strong closing the quarter. Merrill figures Sun is still losing market share to Dell and IBM so it attributes any strength to...

SCO Board Shrinks.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... Steve Cakebread, who's been on the board of the SCO Group since July of 2000, stepped down on December 22, citing time constraints. Apparently he won't be replaced, leaving the company with a board of eight, five of them independent. Meanwhile,...

Tim Berners-Lee Knighted.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... London-born, Oxford-schooled Tim Berners-Lee has been dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire for creating the World Wide Web.

More Than Just the Fortune 1000 Subject To SCO's Linux Tax.
January 19, 2004... Despite the PR nirvana that LinuxWorld would seem to represent, the scuttlebutt suggests that the SCO Group won't drop an attention- riveting end-user suit in the middle of it. Instead it's broadening the target of its claims and has...

HP Claims Linux Leadership.
January 19, 2004... HP is going into LinuxWorld as the market leader despite IBM's pioneering and investment. HP says its Linux business in 2003 was worth a bit over $2.5 billion, up from $2 billion. HP's recently christened worldwide Linux marketing director...

Egenera Courted To Go Public.
January 19, 2004... Egenera has taken in a fourth, reportedly oversubscribed, round worth $30 million so it can capitalize on the roll that it's on, it said. The company is supposed to be in the grip of "explosive growth." Anyway, the company's valuation was...

Etagon Cans Hardware To Focus on Software.(Etagon Inc)
January 19, 2004... A year ago Israeli start-up Etagon Inc, which happens to be headquartered in New York, was in the hardware business putting together an ambitious machine it described as a platform hosting appliance, a hardware-software cross between an...

Judge Slaps Down Cheeky Lindows Scheme.(Microsoft)
January 19, 2004... The judge supervising Microsoft's $1.1 billion California settlement of those class-action allegations that it overcharged for Windows has pulled the plug on Lindows' scheme to route claims through the MSfreePC.com web site it set up for the...

Free Bug Bites Microsoft.(Microsoft is going to give away its $99 Services for Unix interoperability-cum-migration add-on)
January 19, 2004... Fighting fire with fire, Microsoft is going to give away its $99 Services for Unix interoperability-cum-migration add-on. It lets Unix and perforce Linux apps run on Windows and lets Windows hook to a Unix network and co-exist in a...

Sun Claims Big StarOffice Deal.(Sun Japan has signed up computer distributor SourceNext Corporation to handle StarOffice)
January 19, 2004... Sun Japan has signed up computer distributor SourceNext Corporation to handle StarOffice, which is evidently called StarSuite 7 when it's in Japanese, saying the "multimillion" arrangement is the biggest distribution deal that StarOffice has...

Novell Dares SCO To Sue SuSE Customers, Offers Indemnities.
January 19, 2004... Novell completed its $210 million cash purchase of SuSE Linux on Monday, and immediately announced that it would indemnify "qualified" customers of SuSE Enterprise Server if the SCO Group sues them for copyright infringement as it's threatening...

OSDL, IBM, Intel Create SCO Defense Fund.(Open Source Development Lab)
January 19, 2004... The Open Source Development Lab, which has been looking for a way to get into the SCO fight in the name of good public relations and the height of its own profile, said Monday that it had started a legal defense fund to aid any users that the...

MySQL Doubles Revenues Again; MySQL 5.0 Alpha Debuts.
January 19, 2004... MySQL AB doubled its revenues to $12.6 million (10 million euros) in 2003 for the second year in a row but it still wound up in the red for the year as a whole though things changed in the last few months, according to CEO Marten Mickos, when...

HP To License its IP.(intellectual property)
January 19, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has set up a new IP licensing organization to leverage its large patent portfolio. It said all its patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are up for grabs. The move is a tad inconsistent since HP supported W3C's...

Sun Losses Narrow.
January 19, 2004... Well, Sun did better in the December quarter than it was supposed to. It only lost $125 million, or four cents a share, on revenues of $2.89 billion or $99 million, three cents a share, on operations. Revenues were up 13.9% sequentially...

Ex-United Linux GM Moves to OSDL.(Open Systems Development Lab has reportedly hired Paula Hunter)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... The Open Systems Development Lab (OSDL) has reportedly hired Paula Hunter, who was the general manager of the United Linux effort, to be its new director of business development on the East Coast. Brian Grega, who OSDL named its biz dev...

OSDL Moves on Desktop.(Open Source Development Labs)
January 19, 2004... For the benefit of LinuxWorld, OSDL on Tuesday is supposed to wheel out its new Desktop Linux working group initiative and say it's targeted at developing requirements and specifications for a range of Linux desktop environments for the...

Red Hat Turns eCos Over to Free Software Foundation.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... Red Hat has turned the copyrights it held on the eCos embedded operating system over to the Free Software Foundation, which gave the world the General Public License. The FSF is supposed to work with the eCos community and its maintainers of...

SCO Names CTO.(SCO Group has tapped Scott Lemon to be its chief technologist)
January 19, 2004... The SCO Group, the company people love to loathe, has tapped Scott Lemon, a legacy from its Vultus acquisition and a Novell graduate, to be its chief technologist. He's supposed to be the company's mouthpiece for communicating its technical...

SCO Details its Case against Linux to IBM.(SCO Group )
January 19, 2004... The SCO Group said Tuesday that it had given IBM all the discovery material that IBM wanted and went to court to get. It amounts to SCO's previously unspoken case against Linux and is being kept under lock and key. IBM will riffle through...

SGI Debuts Mid-range Linux Server.(.... called the Altix 350 )
January 19, 2004... SGI has introduced a mid-range Itanium 2 Linux server called the Altix 350 for technical computing as a database server, departmental server or throughput cluster. Pricing starts at $12,199. A four-processor configuration starts at...

Oracle Moves the Furniture in its Executive Suite.
January 19, 2004... Oracle, which has been a worry since its last president, Ray Lane, got booted out in 2000 and all power was obviously invested in CEO and sometime-loose-cannon Larry Ellison, has given its CFO Jeff Henley Larry's title of chairman and named...

Microsoft Changes its Position on Old Windows Support.
January 19, 2004... Remember that paid support that Microsoft was supposed to withdraw from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium Edition? Well, it's not going to. Nope. It's going to extend it until June 30, 2006 instead to pacify...

EU Suspends Oracle-PeopleSoft Probe.
January 19, 2004... The EU has stopped weighing the proposed $7.3 billion Oracle- PeopleSoft takeover while it waits on Oracle to produce some unidentified additional information. The EU's antitrust people were supposed to say yes or no by the end of March....

SEC May Sue CA.(Computer Associates)
January 19, 2004... Computer Associates said Monday morning that it had gotten one of those Wells Notices from the SEC basically saying that unless CA can somehow talk its way out of it in the next two weeks the SEC is going to take it to court for flouting the...

Zend To Move to the US, Add Support Services.
January 19, 2004... Zend, the Israeli PHP specialist, is moving its headquarters to the US to be closer to its partners and customers. The 30-man outfit is also planning to expand its business by adding support services later this year. Zend CEO Doron...

RealNetworks, IBM Strike Digital Media Deal.
January 19, 2004... RealNetworks and IBM have teamed up to provide a cross-platform digital media management system that will let businesses create, secure and deliver digital audio and video services to consumers. The partnership brings together RealNetwork's...

Tadpole Joins Linux Push.(Tadpole Computer)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... Tadpole Computer, which has subsisted for years building Sparc notebooks for the Sun crowd, is going to join the Linux push at LinuxWorld and introduce a new family of widgets called the Talin. The Intel-based Talin, the only Intel machine in...

Visions of Itaniums in the Millions.(Intel Corp)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... Intel whistled up the press the other day in the name of Itanium mind share and said that by 2007 Itanium systems should cost no more than Xeon boxes thanks to the components like chipsets that it's working on, as well as Itaniums that are...

Intel Scores on IT Spending.
January 19, 2004... The great Intel chip machine rolls on. The company's record fourth-quarter revenues came in slightly above its month-old guidance hitting $8.74 billion, up 12% sequentially and up 22% year-over-year thanks to better-than-anticipated...

IBM Sees IT Spend Improving.
January 19, 2004... IBM came in with strong results for the fourth quarter earning $2.7 billion, or $1.55 a share, on revenues of $25.91 billion, better than expected. By comparison the year before, it did $1.02 billion, or 59 cents a share, on revenues of...

SAP Sales Disappoint.
January 19, 2004... German software house SAP said Tuesday that preliminary results indicated that fourth-quarter sales were down 3% year-over-year. By the same yardstick total revenues fell from $2.9 billion to $2.8 billion. Software revenues also fell 3% to...

IBM Tops Patent List Again.
January 19, 2004... IBM topped the corporate patent list for the eleventh year in a row with the 3,415 US patents it got last year. The US Patent and Trademark Office said IBM was ahead of Canon, the next biggest patent holder, by 70%. IBM said it was the...

Dell Japan Feeling Feisty.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... Dell Japan is going to challenge NEC for the top spot in Intel servers, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and is beefing up its staff. It plans to increase the number of bodies it's got by 20% by the end of March, a move that would give it...

Fujitsu Picks InfiniCom.(InfiniCon Systems)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... On the heels of IBM tying up with Topspin, the Infiniband switch house, InfiniCon Systems, another one of the surviving Infiniband start-ups, said that Fujitsu is using its InfinIQ switches in high- availability clusters. The IBM-Topspin...

PathScale Linux Compilers To Beta.(Compiler Suite)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... PathScale will launch a beta of its 64-bit Linux compilers for the AMD Opteron processor at LinuxWorld. The production version of the Compiler Suite is scheduled to ship in late March after a second broader beta in February. The...

IBM To Launch Linux POS Systems.(a turnkey point-of-sale offering for retailers based on SuSE Linux)
January 19, 2004... IBM plans to launch a turnkey point-of-sale offering for retailers based on SuSE Linux. Blue's new Retail Environment for SuSE Linux combines its own SurePOS systems, xSeries servers and middleware with SuSE Linux optimized for retailers....

FreeBSD 5.2 Debuts.(operating system from FreeBSD Project )(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... The FreeBSD Project has put out FreeBSD 5.2, the latest rev of the OS. The upgrade features full tier-1 support for single- and multiprocessor AMD Athlon64 and Opteron systems, better integration with the Name Service Switch Subsystem,...

Ellison Weds.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2004... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, 59, billionaire playboy and bachelor, has been taken off the marriage market for the fourth time. He married his long-time girlfriend in time for Christmas. The bride, Melanie Craft, a 35-year-old blond looker, writes...

LinuxWorld.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... LinuxWorld was held in New York this week and the weather was downright Artic, which may explain why attendance was thin. Other than that, there really weren't any red-meat announcements.

Ah, To Be a Duck Among the Penguins.
January 26, 2004... Ex-Microsoft senior executive Douglas Levin has started a company named Black Duck Software in memory of a childhood pet. He says the company is as different as, well, a black duck in a colony of penguins. He says that he has no competition and...

Xandros To Test the Corporate Appetite for Linux on the Desktop.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Xandros, the little Canadian start-up that bought Corel's Debian- based Linux distribution and also gave Lindows its start, is going to try to peddle a $129 business desktop that it claims is a full- featured Windows alternative. It's also got...

IBM Cooks Up NT-to-Linux Migration Scheme.
January 26, 2004... IBM is going to try to exploit Microsoft's intention to discontinue NT support and security patches by the end of the year and has set up an NT-to-Linux migration program targeting an ambitious 2 million NT customers. Even if the move...

SGI To Gussy Up Linux Graphics.
January 26, 2004... SGI, which in its heyday owned the graphics market, has launched an initiative to see advanced graphics on a par with high-end Unix capabilities make it to Linux machines. Currently Linux graphics are only PC-class. Its efforts include...

SuSE Abandons United Linux.
January 26, 2004... The United Linux scheme that IBM is believed to have put in train to keep Red Hat contained and give SuSE some legs is nothing more than an empty shell. With the SCO Group, the great Anti-Linux, refusing to drop out, SuSE, the new Novell...

Red Hat Offers Anti-SCO Warranty.
January 26, 2004... It's not exactly what you would call indemnification but, falling short of that, Red Hat is offering its customers a warranty that if Red Hat is found to infringe on the SCO Group's IP that Red Hat will replace the infringing code. The...

Red Hat Debuts Provisioning Module.
January 26, 2004... Red Hat has come up with a provisioning module that's supposed to dynamically deploy, configure and manage multiple new or existing Linux servers. The module has been added to the Red Hat Network, its update and management scheme, and...

Qualcomm Deal a Bad Omen for Sun.
January 26, 2004... IBM and Red Hat have knocked Sun and Solaris out of a Qualcomm extranet, a relatively high-profile deal that's deemed financially insignificant, but is regarded as a bad omen for Sun since telcos have always been a key market for Sun. ...

InfiniCon Claims Infiniband Leadership.(InfiniCon Systems)
January 26, 2004... Although it probably won't reach profitability before the end of next year, InfiniCon Systems claims to be the most revenue-rich of the Infiniband switch start-ups thanks to its OEM relationship with Fujitsu, the only vendor in revenue with...

SGI Pairs Up with Voltaire.
January 26, 2004... SGI has teamed up with Voltaire and will use its widgetry for Infiniband clustering of its new mid-range Itanium-based Altix 350 Linux system built specifically for technical computing where Infiniband is landing some wins. SGI said its...

IBM & SuSE Get a Hunting License.
January 26, 2004... IBM and SuSE have come through with the Common Operating Environment (COE) certification brownie points needed to wangle SuSE Enterprise Server 8 into the defense establishment. Red Hat has already been down this road and got its COE hunting...

Trolltech Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Labs )(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Trolltech, whose Qt product is the basis of the open source KDE desktop environment, is the latest concern to join the Open Source Development Labs and will participated in the consortium's new Desktop Linux Working Group. Trolltech's other...

Free Software Foundation Tries To Make Hash of SCO's Claims.
January 26, 2004... In defense of the General Public License it created and with SCO on the edge of suing a big Linux end user, the Free Software Foundation took to the pulpit again to decry SCO and its IP claims. At a press conference at Columbia University...

IBM Pushes Its Own 64-bit Solution.
January 26, 2004... IBM, which has little use for Itanium and has taken the Opteron under its wing, is making a push in the name of Linux on its own 64- bit PowerPC chip, the part Apple uses in its G5s and Nintendo in its game consoles and that IBM has in its...

CodeWeavers Chases Windows Apps for Linux.
January 26, 2004... Hoping to exploit the desktop Linux buzz, CodeWeavers Inc, the WINE- based Windows-to-Linux house, is trying to pushing the migration of Windows apps to Linux and create what it calls a truly Windows- agnostic Linux desktop environment. As...

Novell To Join Eclipse.
January 26, 2004... Novell says it's going to join the Java-based open source Eclipse IDE-for-tools initiative, which is about to be spun off from IBM, and standardize on the development environment in the name of uniformity and efficiency. Basically it's...

Sun To Dunk Linux in Java.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Sun is setting up a new java.net community for Linux developers and promising expanded support for Java-based development tools and project infrastructure on Solaris, Linux and Windows. According to its own roadmap, Sun is supposed to have...

SuSE To Bundle JRockit.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... SuSE is going to bundle BEA's JRockit Java virtual machine in the next spin of its operating system Enterprise Server 9. The two companies are also supposed to "co-develop solutions" under their new relationship. JRocket, which Red Hat also...

Intel Upgrades Linux Tool.(Intel released an update to its VTune Performance Analyzer tool for Linux)
January 26, 2004... Intel released an update to its VTune Performance Analyzer tool for Linux, which identifies lines of code in an application that consume excessive processor resources so that developers can remove potential performance bottlenecks. Release...

MySQL To Offer Management Tool.
January 26, 2004... MySQL AB has a GUI-based tool up its sleeve called MySQL Administrator to help developers manage and monitor MySQL database servers. It's supposed to simplify server configuration, user administration, database health monitoring, backup...

GroupWise for Linux Goes to Open Beta.(Novell's GroupWise 6.5 for Linux)
January 26, 2004... Novell's GroupWise 6.5 for Linux, a product Novell's top management swears will never go open source because it's too valuable, goes into open beta on February 4. The collaboration platform now supports Novell's Ximian Evolution e- mail...

Penguin To Offer Itanium 2 Servers.(Penguin Computer )
January 26, 2004... Linux hardware vendor Penguin Computer plans to roll out servers based on the 64-bit Itanium 2 processors in Q2. Details of the rack-mount Itanium servers will be announced after they go through Linux compatibility testing and are ready to...

SuSE Picks Up Dell, Egenera & Veritas.
January 26, 2004... Dell, which for all intents and purposes has been a Red Hat company, threw its mantle across SuSE's shoulders this week, evidently the result of Novell buying the joint. Dell's support endorsement gives SuSE the top three OEMs selling for...

OSDL Moves on Desktop.
January 26, 2004... For the benefit of LinuxWorld, OSDL wheeled out its new Desktop Linux working group initiative and said it's targeted at developing requirements and specifications for a range of Linux desktop environments for the enterprise. Typically...

Sun Makes Linux Promises.
January 26, 2004... As part of its Java Desktop System thrust, Sun is promising Linux on its ultra-thin Sun Ray clients. It was also showing around its upcoming 3D windowing environment code named Project Looking Glass at LinuxWorld. Looking Glass won't come out...

SCO Writes Another Letter.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... SCO Group CEO Darl McBride has been writing letters again. This time he's taken his case to Washington and written to all the senators and congressmen warning them about the threat of open source and the GPL, which he calls "a much more serious...