Linux Gram articles from January 2005

Linux Gram archives from January 2005

Linux Leaders Plot Operation Open Gates.(planning of Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... IBM, Intel, the Open Source Development Labs, where Linux creator Linus Torvalds works, and other industry lights are planning to rob Microsoft of the ability to scare customers off of Linux by saying that the operating system is a patent...

VMware's Open Source Rival Gets Marquee Backing.(investments of Kleiner Perkins and Sevin Rosen in XenSource)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Kleiner Perkins and Sevin Rosen, two star-studded VCs, have put $6 million in Series A money in Palo Alto, California-based XenSource, the outfit started by the founders of the open source Xen hypervisor virtualization software to commercialize...

GaDuGi To Rewrite its Linux Side.(open source operating system)
January 17, 2005... GaDuGi, the new open source operating system being written for the Cherokee Nation, merges a NetWare-like network operating with Linux, according to Jeff Merkey, the ex-Novell exec behind the project. GaDuGi reportedly runs the Linux 2.4...

IBM Chucks 500 Patents into the Open Source Brew.
January 17, 2005... IBM said Monday that it's going to open up 500 of its US software patents, valued at $10 million if they were sold, royalty-free to any open source development that uses a license recognized by the Open Source Initiative. IBM said it was doing...

Pervasive To Try To Push the PostgreSQL Train on to the Mainline.(introduction of open source software by Pervasive Software Inc.)
January 17, 2005... Pervasive Software, the old-line database house, is going to chase the corporate market with a branded version of the PostgreSQL open source database, figuring that its backing will break down the barriers to enterprise adoption. The...

Red Flag Joins OSDL.(membership of RedFlag Inc. with Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs continues on its merry roll signing up members. It latest score is four-and-a-half-year-old Red Flag Software Company, the major Chinese player, which says it will participate in all three of OSDL's initiatives:...

EU Software Patent Legislation Could Be Sent Back to the Starting Line.(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... After Poland forestalled any decision by the European Council right before Christmas, 61 members of the European Parliament from 13 different countries have introduced a motion that would push the controversial legislative proposal on software...

Neoware Buys Itself More Market Share.(Neoware Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Neoware, the thin client maven, is buying TeleVideo's thin client assets for $5 million in cash plus an earn-out based on performance. TeleVideo, the old terminals giant and inventor of the smart terminal, does $7 million a year in thin...

Microsoft Seeks To Derail Novell Antitrust Suit; Accuses Novell of Double Dipping.
January 17, 2005... Microsoft is trying to get the antitrust suit that Novell filed against it a few days after Microsoft paid Novell $536 million to head off another antitrust suit thrown out of court on its ear. The suit Microsoft bought its way out of would...

Oracle Updates Data Lite with 10g Widgetry.(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Oracle has come up with a thing it's calling Oracle Database Lite 10g, a derivative of its 10g grid technology and an update of its eight-year-old Data Lite mojo, meant for the mobile and embedded crowd on the theory that mobile deployments...

Blood To Drip from Oracle's Axe.(downsizing)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... With PeopleSoft finally in its pocket, Oracle is expected to start firing people wholesale today, January 14. Some 6,000 people, mostly PeopleSoft folk, roughly 11% of the total headcount - perhaps as much as 25%-50% of PeopleSoft's staff -...

HP's Fateful Project X.(development of servers)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... What may have finally driven Intel to copy AMD's 64-bit x86 extensions was a secret little prototype Opteron-based server that HP, Intel's erstwhile Itanium partner, ran up in late 2002 under the code name Project X. Intel regarded any...

Morgan Stanley Turns Thumbs Down on HP.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Morgan Stanley has gone negative on HP. It says it expects PC unit growth will be in the single digits this year and that HP is in the worst position to cope with a tepid environment. It figures that HP is the most exposed to the new $499 Mac,...

Bellwether Clinks Like Crystal.(Intel Corp.)
January 17, 2005... Despite all the talk of an imminent slowdown in PCs, Intel managed to bust through its elevated mid-quarter projection and come in with record fourth-quarter revenues of $9.6 billion, up 13% sequentially and up 10% year-over-year. It had...

AMD Pre-Announces.(earnings)
January 17, 2005... Monday night, less than 24 hours before Intel posted its Q4 earnings, AMD, its little rival, said its fourth-quarter results wouldn't be as good as the market expected. A surprised Wall Street figured AMD would show an 8% improvement in...

Sun Ekes Out Small Profit; Revenues Down.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Sun managed a small profit of $19 million, or a penny a share in its second quarter ended December 26 compared to a loss of $125 million, or four cents a share, in the same period the previous year. Sun's revenues fell 1.6% year-over-year...

Opera Goes to School.(donations of Opera Software A/S)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Norwegian browser house Opera Software says it will offer free site licenses to higher education institutions. Opera claimed the move responds to schools' growing concern about the security threats students may encounter by using a less...

IBM Ordered To Disgorge Discovery in SCO Case; Court Accepts SCO's Notion of Derivative Code, Puts Linux in Defensive Position.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
January 24, 2005... The great judicial freeze that has put the SCO v IBM case in a virtual cryogenic state for months is finally starting to thaw. IBM has been ordered to turn over most of the discovery that SCO has asked for in several motions to compel over...

Forbes & CNET Join Motion To Unseal SCO-IBM Court Record.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Forbes magazine and CNET Networks have joined this paper in its motion to intervene in the SCO v IBM case. We are asking the court to open all the filings that the companies have made that are sealed. The existing motion was updated to include...

CA Kicks Off Move To Create a Common Commercial Open Source License.
January 24, 2005... Apparently it costs real money to maintain an open source license and keep it up-to-date once a company gets one since case law is a moving target these days. The GPL is way too viral to appeal to most companies so it's unlikely that the...

Operation Open Gates Closed.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs says that that Operation Open Gates we wrote about last week was the result of PR run amuck and that it's merely the OSDL's long-hatching initiative to try to incubate an open source industry in its own backyard...

SCO Wants To Depose IBM's CEO.(Santa Cruz Operations)(International Business Machines)(Chief Executive Officer)
January 24, 2005... SCO has filed a motion to compel IBM CEO Sam Palmisano to sit still for a deposition on the theory that its suit against IBM concerns all of IBM's Linux-related activities and that before he became CEO Palmisano spearheaded the company's Linux...

OSDL Names Samba Inventor its Second Fellow.(Open Source Development Labs )(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs has hired Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, naming him an OSDL Fellow like it did with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The move, reportedly in negotiation for quite some time, will give Tridgell, who's been...

It's OK To Cuddle.(Certification)(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Sun has gotten the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for its new Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL say Cuddle), the royalty-free license it is reportedly supposed to use in open sourcing Solaris 10. The Mozilla...

Oracle Fires 5,000; Lays Out Project Fusion.
January 24, 2005... Oracle said it is firing 5,000 people, roughly 9% of the newly combined Oracle-PeopleSoft workforce. It expects it will take into next week to make all the terminations, which started last Friday. European cuts are more complicated than...

Symantec-Veritas Layoffs Forecast To Be Light.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Symantec and Veritas have been telling the press that, in contrast to the thousands who lost their jobs with the Oracle-PeopleSoft takeover, only some 400 out of a combined workforce of 13,000 might be terminated when Symantec sucks up Veritas....

HP Seeks To Justify Itanium.
January 24, 2005... In a heavily promoted reminder that it is still critically committed to the Itanium chip, even if Intel has dumped it as Itanium's co-developer and hired its engineers, HP said this week that its Itanium sales exceeded a billion dollars in...

Joy Joins Kleiner Perkins.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Sun co-founder Bill Joy, the company's resident, if aging, whiz kid until he finally left the company in September of '03, has turned up as a partner at famed VC operation Kleiner Perkins, the outfit that originally backed Sun. Joy, now...

HP Unites Printers & PCs in its Tale of Beauty & the Beast.(Hewlett-Packard Co. Imaging and Personal Systems Group)
January 24, 2005... Hewlett-Packard has merged its Imaging and Printing Group, source of most of its profits, and its marginally profitable PC unit to form a new operation called the Imaging and Personal Systems Group (IPSG). HP's Imaging and Printing chief,...

Red Hat Names New North American Sales Chief.(People)(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Red Hat has hired VP Lynne Corddry, the general manager of Unisys' Federal Systems and Technology Business Unit, to run its North American sales operation. She was only with Unisys for seven month and was previously director of federal sales...

BusinessWeek Composes Ode to Linux.
January 24, 2005... Linux, Linus Torvalds in white tie and what looks to be an Emperor Penguin have made the front cover of the latest issue of Businessweek under the tag line "Linux Inc" because, the magazine says, Linux' once rag-tag development has "turned...

Kernel.org Accepts OpenIB Code.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... The OpenIB Alliance, the industry association founded to develop an open software stack for Infiniband architecture on Linux, says that the Linux kernel people have accepted its software stack in the kernel.org repository. It says the move...

LynuxWorks Launches Linux POS.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... LynuxWorks has rolled out new embedded Linux point-of-sale software targeted at the worldwide retail market. Dubbed BlueCat Linux POS, the new product is LynuxWorks' first offering for the retail segment. LynuxWorks executives claim...

Gupta Rolls out Linux RAD Tool.(Rapid Application Development)(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Gupta Technologies has introduced a rapid application development (RAD) tool for building Linux business applications. Team Developer 2005 comes with a full-feature graphical code editor. The old version of the Team Developer...

AMD Loses Money; Could Exit Flash.
January 24, 2005... AMD, which braced the market for the bad news last week, lost $30 million, eight cents a share, in the fourth quarter on record sales of $1.26 billion. It said it managed an operating income of $20 million, way way off sequentially, but...

SuSE Pro 9.2 Downloadable.(Brief Article)
January 24, 2005... Novell has made its consumer release SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 available for download. Unlike the LiveDVD version, the code is fully installable and is not time-limited. See ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/.

The Itanium Chip Finds a Champion & Possible Savior.(Secure64 Software Corporation)
January 31, 2005... The guy who was principal architect of HP's PA-RISC chip as well as the PA-Wide Word widgetry that underlies the Itanium chip has gotten together with the guy who co-developed the original data compression technology for the Internet to start a...

IBM Sets Another One of Those 'Proprietary Traps'.(new server)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... IBM announced a low-end 64-bit Linux-on-Power5 server the other day. IBM calls it the OpenPower 710 and an alternative to entry-level HP and Sun Unix and Linux boxes. Sun calls it a "proprietary trap." See, Sun is frustrated that...

Key SCO Hearing Rescheduled.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Novell's motion to dismiss SCO's two-year-old slander-of-title suit for disparaging SCO's ownership of Unix, which was supposed to be heard by Judge Dale Kimball on February 1, has been rescheduled for 3 in the afternoon of March 8. When a...

Intel & SAP Put Money in Zend.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Zend Technologies Inc, the creator and commercializer of PHP, the "P" in LAMP, the multi-headed god of open source, and a rival of J2EE and .NET, has picked up an undisclosed amount of investment money from Intel and SAP, a couple of pretty...

Neoware Buys Mangrove Systems.(Neoware Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Thin client purveyor Neoware Systems has acquired French-based Mangrove Systems to bolster its Linux software and expand its European support and service. Neoware is paying two million euros cash plus 153,682 Neoware shares currently worth...

Black Duck Joins OSDL.(Black Duck Software, Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Black Duck Software, the start-up begun by an ex-Microsoft guy to create IP risk management and mitigation solutions, has joined Open Source Development Labs. OSDL said Black Duck, whose software manages license compliance, would become part of...

Linspire Experiments with Community Translation.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Linspire, the old Lindows, has got a web-based application that is supposed to let volunteers translate Linspire's Linux distribution into 80 different languages although currently the thing appears to only support 21. It's called IRMA,...

Innominate Gets $5m.(Innominate Security Technologies AG)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Security appliance vendor Innominate Security Technologies has raised $5.23 million in second-round funding. Deutsche Venture Capital led the investment, which included participation from existing investor TecVenture Partners. The...

The Linux Citrix Updated.(Symbio Technologies)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Symbio Technologies, the start-up that wants to tear the guts out of your PC, turn it into a diskless thin client and move the compute power to a server, has released its Symbiont Management Suite 4, software that is supposed to make it easier...

From Swat to Prevent.(Products)(Coverity Inc.)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Coverity, the start-up begun by ex-Stanford technies dedicated to stamping out source code bugs, is about to trade up from its old product Swat to an upgrade called Prevent and a new product called Extend that adds customization. Veritas...

SCO Mulls Options in DaimlerChrysler Case.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... One of the dumbest things SCO's lawyers ever did was to sue DaimlerChrysler, one of SCO's Unix licensees, for not certifying - like it was contractually bound - that it wasn't running Linux binaries anywhere in its establishment or, if it was,...

IBM Patent Database Created.
January 31, 2005... A California outfit by the name of PatentCafe has set up a database of the 500 patents that IBM has pledged to open up to open source developers claiming its natural language-based search engine will accelerate developers' use of the patents....

Carly May Not Be Toast, But HP's Board Reportedly Wants To Trim Her Crust.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... The HP board may have awoken to the fact that HP's stock is down 55% since CEO Carly Fiorina took over in 1999 and maybe even to the idea that the HP-Compaq merger hasn't been gloriously successful. According to the Wall Street Journal's...

CA To Be Remade in IBM's Image.
January 31, 2005... Under its new CEO-elect, John Swainson, the import from IBM, Computer Associates is going to move from a brand unit to a business unit structure just like at IBM. According to Swainson, who circulated an e-mail internally last Friday...

Transmeta Sets Drop Dead Deadline.
January 31, 2005... Transmeta's processor business continues to hang by the threads of a badly frayed rope. The company, which hasn't turned a profit in the five years it's been in existence, has given itself until March 31 to drum up enough business to...

BEA Recruits Key Personnel from the Outside.(Appointments)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... In its search for the right chemistry, BEA, which has been rearranging its office furniture for a while now, has hired an executive out of Borland and two out of Sun to man key posts. BEA has named Tony de la Lama, who was general manager...

Spy Hunters Poke around IBM-Lenovo Deal.(Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Members of the Treasury Department's oversight Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, have reportedly raised an eyebrow over IBM's $1.75 billion...

OpenSolaris Roadmap.(Forecasts)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... According to a roadmap Sun posted on its shiny new opensolaris.org web site, in Q2 Sun intends to open source the Solaris kernel, networking, libraries, commands, compilers and read-only CVS repositories. Community members will have access to a...

Linux Cops.(Growth)(Gendarmerie Nationale)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... The Gendarmerie Nationale, France's national police force, is reportedly going to move its 80,000 desktops from Office to OpenOffice to save an estimated $2.6 million. Government accounts worldwide reportedly contribute 10%-15% of Microsoft's...

HP Agitprop.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Going into Sun's next big quarterly launch announcement Tuesday, HP would like us to remember that Sun's x86 server volumes suck (160% year-over-year grow off a base of 5,500 is nothing to brag about compared to HP's 441,855 units); that 70% of...

Ready-To-Install Clusters.(Products)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... SGI is going into the ready-to-install cluster business with a mid- range HPC-oriented cluster design that's supposed to make use of fewer and faster CPUs, packing more processors into each node. It's also supposed to have a hybrid cluster that...

Ah, the Browser Wars.(Ben Godger view about the web browser)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Since the lead engineer behind the Firefox browser Ben Godger went to work for Google a few days ago, the claims of Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker that Mozilla wasn't working on a browser for Google are ringing a bit hollow. Godger...