Linux Gram articles from July 2001

Linux Gram archives from July 2001

Firing Squad Misses Microsoft by a Mile.
July 2, 2001... Microsoft has escaped intact in a historic Court of Appeals victory that threw out "Hanging Judge" Thomas Penfield Jackson's order that the company be split in two. The court hung Jackson instead, excoriating him for giving embargoed press...

NEC Dabbles with Transmeta Linux Server.
July 2, 2001... NEC Japan is tinkering with a Transmeta-based Linux server, according to an NEC Japan document that we had translated by a native speaker. Information is thin but apparently the system, known as the NEC CS56, could be available with...

MandrakeSoft To IPO.
July 2, 2001... MandrakeSoft has decided to IPO. The company is looking for a very modest six million-eight million Euros ($5.1 million-$6.9 million) according to an internal memo that leaked to the French Linux site LinuxFrench.net. Like Red Hat and VA...

Failed Windows House Reborn with Linux NAS.(Tricord Systems Lunar Flare)
July 2, 2001... Tricord, the failed Windows NT house that was converted into a Linux advocate by Compaq co-founder Rod Canion, has come to market with its long-promised Linux-based clustered network attached storage (NAS) appliances. Tricord says its...

Caldera Changes Licensing Terms.(OpenLinux Server 3.1 and OpenLinux Workstation 3.1)
July 2, 2001... Caldera has introduced changes in the licensing terms for its new OpenLinux Server 3.1 and OpenLinux Workstation 3.1 products. Under the new license, users can no longer buy one copy of OpenLinux Server and deploy it on multiple servers....

VA Linux Quits Hardware Biz.
July 2, 2001... Struggling VA Linux Systems, which has been on the ropes since the dot.com bubble burst, is going to quit peddling hardware, its stock in trade, to fall back on its software and publishing interests. The company says that starting...

Red Hat Unveils Database, Goes it Alone.(Red Hat Database DBMS software)(Product Announcement)
July 2, 2001... As expected, Red Hat announced Monday that it was expanding its open source portfolio with a database. Dubbed Red Hat Database, the new software, which is based on PostgreSQL 7.1 and optimized for Red Hat Linux 7.1, is targeted at...

Red Hat Turns Consultant.
July 2, 2001... Red Hat has launched an open source consulting practice aimed at enabling companies to plan and rapidly migrate their key IT infrastructure to Linux and other open source products. The new practice initially plans to provide migration and...

Caldera Rolls Out Server, Workstation Enhancements.(OpenLinux Server 3.1, OpenLinux Workstation 3.1, Open Unix 8.0)
July 2, 2001... On Tuesday Caldera introduced two enhanced server products - Open Unix 8 and OpenLinux Server 3.1- that are supposed to address business needs ranging from low-end servers to high-end data centers. The company also upgraded its eDesktop 2.4...

Compaq Kills Alpha.
July 2, 2001... Compaq is getting out of the Alpha business. All of Compaq's high-end servers still based on the star-crossed chip will be transitioned over to Intel's 64-bit Itanium line by 2004, according to a well-guarded deal announced Monday morning...

IBM Bets on Linux & Tualatin.(x130 and x135 eServer units from IBM)
July 2, 2001... IBM has released spiffed-up versions of its x130 and x135 eServer appliance kits, choosing Linux installations as its showcase wins for the new widgetry. The kits are built out of IBM's top-of-the-line 1U server, the x330, which has been...

Lineo Clustering Debuts.(Availix Vertical Clustering)(Product Announcement)
July 2, 2001... Lineo has launched Availix Vertical Clustering 1.0, a clustering kit targeted at Internet data centers, large ISPs, telcos and access providers looking for the scalability required of non-stop access services. Vertical Clustering 1.0...

Neoware Buys Boundless Thin Client Biz.
July 2, 2001... Neoware Systems is buying Boundless Technologies' thin client business including the Windows CE-based Capio product line, SAM Remote Administration software, related intellectual property and customer base. Boundless will make and support...

DOD Unit Ditches Applixware for Free StarOffice.(StarOffice 5.2 contract for DOD's US Defense Information Systems Agency)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Sun has claimed its biggest victory so far for StarOffice 5.2, a 25,000-seat win at the DOD's US Defense Information Systems Agency (DSIA). Big wins are nice, but DSIA's not paying anything for the software. StarOffice is, after all, free....

Surge in Enterprise Linux Apps Seen.(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... The number of enterprise Linux applications has increased 30% in the last six months to over 2,300, according to IBM. Hailing the growth as a milestone in the market acceptance of Linux, IBM lists SAP, QAD, SAS and jBase among the top ISVs...

Oops, Wrong Partner.(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Compaq is working with Red Hat, SuSe and Caldera on its project to open source its single system image clustering (SSI) technology. Somehow the name Turbolinux crept in there instead of Caldera when we reported on it two weeks back.

Linux NetworX Debuts ClusterWorX Upgrade.(ClusterWorX 2.0)(Product Announcement)
July 2, 2001... Linux NetworX has upgraded its core ClusterWorX cluster management software. Release 2 of ClusterWorX, which the company touts as a major enhancement, comes with new features such as secure remote access through an SSL-encrypted connection...

Xinit Joins the Blade Generation.(Xinit Systems 3100)(Product Announcement)
July 16, 2001... UK house Xinit Systems, which claims to be the country's only purely Linux server vendor - a dubious distinction if the American experience is any guide - says it's got a blade-based dense server. It's putting 10 server blades in a 3U...

The Angel of Death Buzzes Ebiz.(Caldera will lose its largest UnixWare distributor)(Company Financial Information)
July 16, 2001... Ebiz has run out of cash, exhausted its credit and will shrivel up and die if it can't find new financing quick. What was supposed to be the largest online Linux retailing operation in the world - merging TheLinuxStore and LinuxMall - will...

LSB - You've Come a Long Way, Baby.(Linux Standard Base)(Technology Information)
July 16, 2001... The Linux Standard Base, once generally despaired of, has reached that nirvana known as version 1.0. Well, at least the written spec has. The test suite and the sample implementation aren't quite so well along and won't be finished...

Atipa Morphs.(Oculan Corp to market OpticNerve)(Company Business and Marketing)
July 16, 2001... The remains of Atipa Corporation, the other aging start-up besides VA Linux Systems to flee the Linux hardware business saying it couldn't compete against the big vendors, are being folded into still another start-up set up to peddle network...

Open Source Cozies Up to Microsoft.(Gnome founder and president of the Gnome Foundation Miguel de Icaza)(Product Information)
July 16, 2001... Microsoft and its C# technologies, the heart of Microsoft's .NET scheme, got a ringing endorsement Monday from a most unlikely source - Gnome founder and president of the Gnome Foundation Miguel de Icaza. De Icaza, also CTO of Ximian Inc,...

SGI Writhes Again, Loses its New President.(Hal Covert resigns)(Company Operations)
July 16, 2001... SGI has lost its new president. Hal Covert, who bolted Red Hat after a few months as CFO to take the same job at SGI - for more money Red Hat claimed - and only added the presidential title at the beginning of May, has resigned suddenly...

IBM Releases Journaled File System for Linux.(Journaled File System for Linux)(Product Announcement)
July 16, 2001... Just after our last issue went to press IBM released the long- promised Linux version of its Journaled File System (JFS). Blue's JFS for Linux, out under the GNU, is based on the JFS IBM originally wrote for OS/2. It's essentially the...

HP Offers Pay-per-Use Server Pricing.(Company Business and Marketing)
July 16, 2001... Hewlett-Packard has extended the "utility" pricing scheme that it uses for storage to its servers so users only pay for the compute power they use like the way they pay for electricity or water. The plan, called "Pay per Use," initially...

New Mozilla Beta Finally Dribbles Out.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 16, 2001... Just after our last issue went to press the Mozilla team finally got the 0.9.2 beta out the door. In theory the beta was only four days late. Of course that's according to a calendar that's three-years-old. The next major beta cut,...

Another Canadian Pitches Another Desktop Linux.(Alta Terra Ventures releases BearOps Linux Desktop OS)(Product Announcement)
July 16, 2001... Alta Terra Ventures, a publicly traded company in Edmonton, Canada, has launched the BearOps Linux Desktop OS, a successor to its MaxOS product. Either they're very brave or very foolhardy or maybe it's Canadian contrariness - Corel's...

Compaq To Fire 8,500 All Told.(Company Operations)
July 16, 2001... After the market closed Tuesday afternoon Compaq sought to quell rising fears on Wall Street that it wouldn't make its numbers for the June quarter by saying that preliminary figures indicate it should return four cents a share on sales of...

Intel Flubs 900MHz Xeon.(flaw in 32-bit Intel Xeon 900MHz)(Product Information)
July 16, 2001... Intel has tripped over its shoelaces again. It has confirmed reports that its high-end 32-bit server chip, the 900MHz Xeon, is hung up. It's been on ship hold since mid-April after some kind of undisclosed erratum was discovered that causes...

SteelCloud Prefers Linux over NT.(SteelCloud's Linux appliances are primarily focused on the security side)(Company Business and Marketing)
July 16, 2001... Network appliance vendor SteelCloud plans to shift its focus from NT and Windows 2000 to Linux. According to SteelCloud executive VP Brian Hajost, the move was dictated by customer demand. "A lot of our prospects are moving to Linux,"...

Linux as Sun Stalker.(Merrill Lynch reports that Linux poses threat to Solaris OS)(Industry Trend or Event)
July 16, 2001... Merrill Lynch has suddenly awoken to the fact that Linux feeds more on Unix than Windows and moved itself to say that Sun ought to be more worried about the Linux phenomenon than Redmond. "Because Linux is a better server...than a desktop...

IBM Develops Linux Auditing Tool for Wireless Nets.(Wireless Security Auditor)(Product Announcement)
July 16, 2001... IBM Research has built a Linux-based auditing tool to protect wireless data networks from hackers. IBM says the Wireless Security Auditor allows network administrators to find vulnerable access points in 802.11 networks by monitoring and...

MandrakeSoft in IPO Throes.(Company Financial Information)(Statistical Data Included)
July 23, 2001... MandrakeSoft on Thursday started taking orders for shares in the run-up to its going public in a few days. The stock is going for less than the company was expected to seek. The French Linux house said it's looking for 4.27 million Euros...

Lineo Fires 13%.(Company Operations)
July 23, 2001... Lineo, the embedded house, has punched the layoffs ticket that seems to go with being a Linux house. Last Friday it laid off 13% of its staff, about 40 employees. The reductions in force went across-the-board, half the cuts were in the...

Are We Missing Something Here?(Ximian's Mono Project)(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 23, 2001... There are times you can just smell trouble brewing so we tried drawing Microsoft out on the subject of Ximian and the so-called Mono Project to put Microsoft's C# technologies on Linux and distribute the stuff under the Microsoft-loathed, open...

NuSphere Sued for Breaking GPL.(Company Business and Marketing)
July 23, 2001... ********************************************** Editor's Note: Since this story broke NuSphere has been back to us claiming that we misquoted its lawyers when we said in paragraph seven that they said "they will deny the charge" - that is, the...

Microsoft Tries To Salt the Tails of Linux Developers.(new Web site training on Internet Information Server on Windows 2000)(Company Business and Marketing)
July 23, 2001... Microsoft has put together a "virtual conference" to teach developers how to migrate Linux-based e-biz web sites to Windows. It's evidently hoping to persuade Apache-on-Linux developers of the error of their ways. With more than 60% of...

Trouble in Camelot: Apache Show Dies.(Camelot Communications falters, ApacheCon Europe cancelled)(Company Business and Marketing)
July 23, 2001... The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has cancelled the ApacheCon Europe 2001 conference following the death of the trade show promoter that was putting on the show. ApacheCon Europe was to have been held in Dublin from October 15-17. ...

TurboLinux Changes its CEO Again.(T Paul Thomas exits, Ly-Huong Pham enters)(Company Operations)
July 23, 2001... T Paul Thomas, brought in to straighten up the place and take TurboLinux public, has stepped down as its president and CEO in favor of the company's COO Ly-Huong Pham, who has been running day- to-day operations since February. The move...

Transmeta Stifles Rebel Yell.(Rebel.com goes under)(Company Financial Information)
July 23, 2001... KPMG auditors have taken over 14-year-old Canadian Linux server appliance house Rebel.com, the would-be Transmeta play. The outfit, 25% owned by fellow Canadian Corel, a position Corel got when Rebel took over Corel's failed appliance...

Now Novell Imagines It's a Server Appliance House.(Novell's NetDevice kit)(Product Announcement)
July 23, 2001... This we gotta see. Now Novell is going to become a server appliance vendor. It's going to sell software for building appliances. Customers will build the hardware. The first kit in the NetDevice family will be one to build a NAS out of...

Woody Equals Debian 3.0.(Product Information)
July 23, 2001... Breaking with their typical naming conventions, Debian folks will designate the next major release of the distribution, currently codenamed Woody, rev 3.0. They'll be jumping from the current Debian 2.2 straight to 3.0. Three years...

One Citrix Wannabe Collapses into Another.(GraphOn acquires Menta Software technology)(Company Business and Marketing)
July 23, 2001... GraphOn has acquired exclusive rights to the technology of what it considers its closest competitor, failing Israeli developer Menta Software. Sources say the deal has gone down for 2.5 million shares of GraphOn stock currently valued at...

Mitel Acquires e-smith.(Company Business and Marketing)
July 23, 2001... Mitel Networks has acquired e-smith, the Linux network server software start-up that focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises. The terms of the cash deal were not disclosed. Headquartered in Boston, e-smith has its development...

HP's Little Differentiator.(HP-UX offers both API and ABI support)(Product Information)(Brief Article)
July 23, 2001... HP figures it's got a leg up on IBM in this Linux business. Its species of Unix, HP-UX, offers Linux two kinds of compatibility. There's API support and then there's ABI support, something, it sniffs, IBM's vaunted AIX 5L can't do. HP-UX...

Milberg Weiss Sues Caldera.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 23, 2001... The great SEC IPO investigation into how underwriters apportioned shares during the great IPO boom - the one that used VA Linux Systems and its underwriter Credit Suisse as templates - and recently resulted in Credit Suisse guys getting fired -...

The Great Debate: Mundie Foils Tiemann in Open Source-Shared Source Face-off.(Industry Trend or Event)
July 30, 2001... Microsoft, by most estimates, won the Great Debate between open source and shared source on Thursday. But it won on debating points, not the issues. The long-anticipated event pitted Microsoft senior VP of advanced strategies Craig...

What IP?(Microsoft patent issue with ECMA)(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... ECMA secretary-general Jan van den Beld insists that Microsoft has assured him any number of times that there is no Microsoft IP in or near the C#-CLI specification that ECMA is standardizing that would require a license from Microsoft so you...

Dear, Dear, How Un-Chic.(Marche libre)(Company Financial Information)
July 30, 2001... We called around to all the Parisian brokerages we could find, the bluebloods like BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, SG Securities, Julius Baer and they all seemed to sneer as soon as we mentioned the words Marche Libre. With a Gallic shrug, they...

OpenAvenue Comes to the End of the Road.(Company Financial Information)
July 30, 2001... Open source has taken it on the chin again. Two-year-old OpenAvenue Inc, one of the outfits trying to peddle a platform for doing commercial open source development to enterprises, has turned up its toes. It has apparently taken the...

SuSe CEO Quits, 10% of its Staff Axed.(Roland Dryoff quits, Johannes Nussbickel steps up)(Company Operations)
July 30, 2001... In the latest contraction to hit the Linux business, SuSe co-founder and CEO Roland Dyroff has stepped down and the company is laying off 10% of its worldwide staff, about 50 employees. German operations, the company's home base, are taking the...

HP Slips Deeper in the Mire.(Company Operations)
July 30, 2001... Hewlett-Packard is finding it impossible to pull out of its economy- induced tailspin and so it's going to fire 6,000 people in its next quarter, which starts August 1. HP has been moving staffers around the game board, seconding 5,000 of...

HP Open Sources Coolbase.(Product Development)
July 30, 2001... Hewlett-Packard has open sourced a bunch of software components for creating applications and mobile e-services for embedded and personal systems. Dubbed Coolbase, the stuff comes out of HP Labs' Cooltown project, which is working toward...

Compaq Q2 Ugly, Q3 Looks Uglier Still.(Company Financial Information)
July 30, 2001... After slashing its projections for the second quarter and firing more people, Compaq came in on the money. It did $67 million - the promised four cents a share - on revenues worth $8.5 billion, down 17% year-over-year but a tad better than the...

Sun Open Sources DRM Software.(Product Development)
July 30, 2001... Sun, as expected, has released the source code for its Grid Engine distributed resource management (DRM) software to open source. To manage the new initiative, Sun has set up a Grid Engine project to work with the developer community and...

SGI Coming Unglued.(Company Business and Marketing)
July 30, 2001... After losing $493 million on $1.9 billion in revenues in the year ending June 30, the once mighty SGI needs money. It's got liquidity problems and needs to generate $150 million-$175 million this quarter - and that's apparently only the tip of...

NuSphere, MySQL Talk; Differences Remain.(Company Business and Marketing)
July 30, 2001... Following its tete-a-tete with its partner-turned-foe NuSphere last Friday, Swedish software house MySQL AB says it's pessimistic that things will change much. MySQL says NuSphere denied MySQL's allegations and was unwilling to discuss...

Caldera Gets New Marketing Chief.(Timothy Ashby)(Company Operations)
July 30, 2001... Caldera has found a new marketing head in Timothy Ashby. As Caldera's executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Ashby's job is to strengthen the company's global brand and oversee strategic relations, marketing and corporate...

Code Red.(Government Activity)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... So there was a thwarted attack on the White House web site a week ago. The attack, one of those denial-of-service things, came from an estimated 300,000 Windows servers infected by the so-called Code Red virus - yes, Microsoft had issued a...

GraphOn Rebrands.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... GraphOn has rebranded its product line, abandoning names like Bridges and Go-Jo and bringing all its technology in under the Go- Global umbrella. Under Go-Global, there's Go-Global UX for Solaris, rebuilt from the ground up and shipping as of...

Borland Offers Developers a Taste Test.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... Borland has released free versions of its JBuilder Java kit, Kylix Linux development environment and Delphi 6 Windows development environment. In each case the hope is to get developers to play with the stuff, then buy full versions....

Total Impact Debuts Linux Render Engine.(Centricity)(Product Announcement)
July 30, 2001... Total Impact has launched a new line of cluster systems based on its recently introduced briQ network appliance. Dubbed Centricity, the initial gismos come with rendering software and are targeted at the animation market. Centricity starts...

MGI, Tuxia in Linux Entertainment Set-top Deal.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... Toronto-based visual media software house MGI and German embedded Linux concern Tuxia have teamed up to develop a multimedia-TV software infrastructure for Linux-based entertainment devices. The two companies have signed a memorandum of...

Jabber Messenger Goes Wireless.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... The commercial side of Jabber, the open source instant messaging system that's number three in the market behind AOL's dominant Instant Messenger (AIM) and Microsoft's Messenger, has combined forces with Parisian wireless gateway start-up...

Free Software Foundation of India Starts Up.(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
July 30, 2001... The Free Software Foundation launched its first Asian affiliate in India on July 20. The Free Software Foundation of India initially plans to promote the use of existing free software among schools, communities, governments and...