Linux Gram articles from June 2004

Linux Gram archives from June 2004

SCO Kisses Off Rogue VC.(The SCO Group Inc., venture capital companies)
June 7, 2004... SCO has mollified its estranged and publicly critical VC, BayStar Capital, by agreeing to buy back the 40,000 shares of SCO preferred stock that BayStar currently owns, both the 20,000 BayStar bought last year for $20 million and the 20,000...

Can Sun Really Open Source Solaris?
June 7, 2004... Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's new president and latest loose cannon, a volume kind of guy, said at a press conference in Shanghai the other day at a SunNetwork Conference, that Sun was going to open source Solaris. "I don't want to say when...

SCO's Papa Loses Appeal of Microsoft Settlement Dispute to Novell.(The Canopy Group)
June 7, 2004... The Canopy Group, the VC operation backed by the fortune made by one-time Novell CEO Ray Noorda, has lost its appeal of an internecine legal dispute with Novell over how to divvy up the reported $290 million settlement that Canopy got from...

NEC Beats HP & Hitachi to Itanium Blade Server.
June 7, 2004... NEC Solutions America is about to introduce the very first 64-bit Itanium-based blade server from a brand-name vendor. Come to think of it, it will be the very first blade server that NEC has ever sold the states. NEC figures that when the...

Red Hat Moves To Strike Out at Turbolinux & Red Flag.(appointments)(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Red Hat has named ex-IBMer Stephen McWhirter, a Lotus legacy, VP of Asia-Pacific operations, his own little fiefdom. He was previously responsible for IBM's Asia-Pacific sales and is credited with $1 billion in net new revenues. He had been...

Like Oliver, SCO Wants 'More'.(The SCO Group Inc.)
June 7, 2004... SCO told the Utah court charged with hearing its multibillion-dollar suit against IBM last Friday that from what it can piece together from the discovery IBM has produced so far the evidence that IBM ripped off SCO's Unix code and put it in...

HP To Support MySQL, JBoss.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has stepped up its commitment to open source software by inking deals with MySQL AB and JBoss to certify, support and co-market their open source software on its industry standard servers running Linux. MySQL, which offers...

ServerWorks & AMD To Whip Up Opteron Chipset.(Advanced Micro Devices)(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Broadcom's ServerWorks arm is going into the Opteron server chipset business much to the delight and encouragement of AMD. Samples are due in the fall. The two say they're aiming to achieve "optimum price/performance metrics." ...

Mono Beta 2 Debuts.(open source implementation of the .NET Framework for Linux, Unix and Windows)(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Novell has put out the second beta of Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework for Linux, Unix and Windows whose sponsorship it acquired when it bought Ximian. It's the last beta before the formal release of Mono 1.0. ...

Apache Foundation OKs Geronimo.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... The Apache Software Foundation has made the Geronimo app server an official project. The idea is to put out a certified, open source Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server under the Apache license next quarter. Of course,...

Lindows Back in Business in Benelux.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Microsoft is going to have to pay Lindows 944 euros, which works out to something like all of about 1,100 bucks, after Microsoft failed to convince a Dutch court to enjoin Lindows from any use of the name Lindows. It was Microsoft's second...

Intel Hits Major Milestone.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... In Q1, revenues generated by x86 servers came to more than the money spent on RISC boxes. The crossover started last year, but fluctuated. IDC now says the crossover is permanent. It took years, but Intel finally did it.

SCO Can't Sell "Linux Licenses" Worth a Damn.(The SCO Group Inc.)
June 14, 2004... SCO's notorious SCOsource licensing program brought in all of $11,000 in the company's second quarter ended April 30, a fact that should warm of the cockles of all the Linux hearts out there that begrudge the company its Unix IP claims. ...

PTO To Re-examine Microsoft FAT Patent.(Patent and Trademark Office)(FAT file system)(Public Patent Foundation )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... The newfangled Public Patent Foundation (PPF), a self-styled non- profit watchdog meant to protect the world from reckless patenting, whose three-man board includes anti-patent Free Software advocate Eben Moglen, has reportedly persuaded the...

Red Hat Protects Supposedly Invincible Code against Malware.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Linux, which according to modern myth is supposed to be virus-proof, is on its way to supporting the NX (No Execute) security widgetry that the x86 chipmakers are building into their processors. As its name suggests, NX is meant to block...

RLX Raises Bar on Server Management.
June 14, 2004... Blade pioneer RLX Technologies has sexed up the new 6G generation of its server management software to provide what it believes is "unparalleled" policy-based automation. The company says it has also given the stuff comprehensive remote...

CA Bosses May Have To Cough Up Any Ill-Gotten Gains.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(US$ 2.2 billion premature bookings)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Sam Wily, the Texan who tried to run off Computer Associates' compromised management a few years ago and take over the company only to settle for a cheap $10 million greenmail payoff to go away, has come back to haunt the company. Wily's...

OK, Suppose CA's Interim CEO Gets Itchy Feet.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Well, given the latest development, one can only wonder how much longer Computer Associates can impose on its reluctant interim CEO Ken Cron. Kenny was seconded from the CA board to take some of the heat off his predecessor Sanjay Kumar...

OK, This is Hard To Imagine But Try To Think Really Cheap Windows.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... It seems we should be on the lookout for a Linux-engaging - not to say Linux-befuddling - HPC entry from Microsoft, based on the good ole Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. How it's implemented is still a matter of speculation.

IBM Takes Advice from Rival.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... IBM sidling up to blade rival RLX Technologies, whose widgets it once offered to sell then moved nary a one, to ask its advice on Infiniband merchants, according to RLX CEO Doug Erwin. Erwin told it to go with TopSpin, his choice for RLX,...

It's the Blades, Stupid, Not the Razor.(blade servers)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... HP has confirmed that it'll have an Opteron blade server next half. (We said it'd have a four-way Opteron Blade months ago, probably the low-heat parts that won't fry an egg.) It's also confirmed Itanium (Deerfield?) blades and it's suspected...

Dell Tops its Line with Four-way Itanium Box.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Dell, which got kinda Itanium-shy after a bad experience with the original Merced chip, has brought out a high-end four-way Itanium2 server dubbed the PowerEdge 7250, expecting the thing to be used in database, engineering and ERP environments...

Canadian Kids To Use StarOffice.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Sun says it's cut a StarOffice 7 deal with the Ontario Ministry of Education covering 2.5 million students. Terms were not disclosed, but even the school system called the cost "minimal." Presumably that means it's getting the software for the...

AMD Scores Chinese Coup.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has persuaded Legend, which is supposed to be the biggest of the Chinese OEMs, to give up its steady diet of Intel chips and design AMD's 64-bit Athlon 64 and 32-bit Athlon XP chips into a home PC line called the Feng Xing V. Legend started...

OSDL Picks Up Ex-Red Hat Guy To Run Asia.(Open Source Development Lab)(appointments)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Fresh from some minor recruiting/dues-paying victories in China, the Open Source Development Lab has hired Masanobu Hirano, the guy who tried to put Red Hat on the map in Japan as president of Red Hat Japan and general manager of Red Hat North...

Open Terra Offers SuSE a Mobile Connection.(new jersey based software vendor offers mSolve Enterprise Mobility platform for SuSE Linux and Netware customers)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Open Terra and Novell have a deal that will make Open Terra's Java- based mSolve Enterprise Mobility platform available to SuSE and NetWare customers to create mission-critical mobile programs. The mSolve widgetry provides for rapid...

Gentlemen, Cock Your Pistols.(Lindows offers Desktop Linux Comparison Kit)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Apparently figuring it can trounce the immediate competition, Lindows has burned Red Hat's free Fedora Core 2 developer-level code, Mandrake 10 Community Edition and its own Linspire 4.5 operating system on to eight CDs, christened them the...

Xandros Returns to Linux Roots, Offers Free Desktop OS.(operating system)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... In a bid to expand its user base against an expanding retinue of rivals, little Xandros, Coral's heir and current Linux desktop hopeful, is offering a cut-down version of its desktop OS for free to personal users. The Canadian company is...

Mercury Launches New Linux Servers.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Mercury Computer is introducing a new line of rack-mountable Linux servers based on IBM's PowerPC970FX chips. IBM, you will recall, is all hot these day to carve out a Linux fiefdom for its proprietary 64-bit chips. Mercury is offering the...

SCO Tale Takes Another Odd Turn.(The SCO Group Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... SCO stock has been found to be trading without SCO's knowledge or consent on three unregulated German bourses, another weird turn for a company already majoring in weird. The discovery was made in the last few days by a SCO stockholder....

DLT Snags DOD Deal.(DLT Solutions, Department of Defense)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... DLT Solutions has gotten a five-year Blanket Purchase Agreement worth as much as $29 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide Red Hat software to the Defense Department. That means it's gotten a hunting license...

AMD Launches Geode Design Kit.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(client reference design kit to enable the rapid development of thin clients like blade PCs, information appliances, kiosks and point-of- sale devices)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has put out a thin client reference design kit based on its low- end Geode GX processors. The design kit is meant to enable the rapid development of thin clients like blade PCs, information appliances, kiosks and point-of- sale...

EC Testing Intel's Teflon Coating.(European Commission)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has been whining again to the European Commission about what a bully boy Intel is - it's got new examples of Intel's Brown Shirt tactics -and that bestirred the EC to dust off a semi-dormant four- year-old investigative of Intel that AMD...

Exception Noted.(Microsoft/Digital Research Inc. settlement)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
June 14, 2004... One of our esteemed readers, who keeps us painfully accurate, has taken exception to our characterizing Digital Research Inc (DRI) as "Microsoft's very earliest competitor" last week in that story we wrote about how the Canopy Group had lost...

The Show that Ate Las Vegas Dies of Anorexia.(Comdex)
June 28, 2004... There won't be a Comdex this year. (Long pause for general chortling and rejoicing as shoemakers everywhere weep.) Industry ennui killed it. The current owners of the biggest money-spinner besides Microsoft ever spawned by the...

Microsoft Readies HPC Server To Overrun Linux Preserve.(high performance computing)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Microsoft, in its own good time, when the market is more mainstream, will try being a drag on Linux' heady inroads into high-performance computing, still an esoteric venture. It's going to create an HPC edition of Windows Server 2003 for...

HP Claims Big Cluster Breakthrough.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
June 28, 2004... HP Germany claims to have gee-whiz file-sharing widgetry that uses new Linux clustering technology and delivers maybe as much as 100 times more bandwidth than your garden-variety NFS cluster. HP calls the mojo StorageWorks Scalable File...

Egenera Files To Go Public.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Egenera was gonna go public. It filed with the SEC Thursday, making it the first blade start-up to go to the public coffers. In its 882-page opus, Egenera said it planned to raise $125 million. It did...

VMware Takes First Pass at 64-Bit Support.(development of a product)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... VMware says it's run up prototype support for the Windows, Red Hat and SuSE host operating systems that are designed or being designed to exploit the 64-bit extensions in Opteron and Intel's so-called Yamhill chip. It says it's put the...

Evermore Doesn't Cut the Mustard.(Evermore Integrated Office, office software from China)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's great, independent- minded, techno arbiter, has declared the Evermore Integrated Office, the Chinese import and would-be Office rival, "not yet ready for prime time," putting it in the same league as...

France Threatens To Cut Back on Microsoft.(Renaud Dutreil)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... French civil service minister Renaud Dutreil has been telling Reuters that the French government wants to use open source software to resupply parts of its computer population of close to a million machines citing the country's runaway deficit....

Oracle, Red Hat Out To Woo Asian ISVs.(independent software vendors)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Oracle and Red Hat have kicked in $13 million in software, training and resources to start a new Oracle-Red Hat Linux Enterprise Applications Porting (LEAP) Center in Singapore. LEAP is the first significant Linux initiative in Singapore...

CA Replaces Tainted General Counsel.(Steve Woghin, Kenneth Handal, Mark Barrenechea)(appointments and resignations in Computer Associates International Inc.)
June 28, 2004... Computer Associates, the company the government calls "corrupt," has found a brave soul to replace its ousted general counsel Steve Woghin, who was left to the tender mercies of the federal prosecutors in mid-April, one of a bunch of senior...

Oracle & the Candy Store Window.
June 28, 2004... Oracle thought about taking a run at Lawson Software, JD Edwards, BEA, Siebel Systems, Business Objects, Documentum, and Sybase, according to videotaped testimony taken from Oracle CFO Jeff Henley and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and shown at the...

Sun Tries Globalizing Government Push.(a new Global Government Office, Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Sun is going to build a new Global Government Office around Clark Masters, the guy who was relieved of running its mid- and high-end server unit and sent to mind its relationship with federal accounts, the corporate equivalent of Siberia, even...

Supremes Throw Possible Monkey Wrench into Intel's Defenses.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... The US Supreme Court has ruled seven to one against Intel and told it that federal courts can to require it to turn over documents to European antitrust investigators because of the EC's quasi-judicial functions. The Supremes, however,...

Speculation Imagines HP Buying CA.(Computer Associates, Hewlett Packard)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Here's the latest scenario floating around Computer Associates: The feds start eying the board for possible indictments, lighting possibly on lead outside director, now chairman Lew Ranieri. The company eventually pleads guilty to securities...

IBM Ordered Tried for Nazi Complicity.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... It's almost 60 years since the end of World War II and half the people now alive are only dimly aware that it was even fought, let alone who won, but IBM may finally have to answer for its actions under the Nazis in court. It has been...

Open Google.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Google is reportedly picking over its code base weighing how it might benefit if some of it were open sourced or at least some approximation of open source.

Fujitsu Sets Up Opteron Lab.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Fujitsu Systems Europe (FSE) has put together the world's first Opteron lab for application testing and benchmarking in Toulouse, France and had fitted it out with Opteron clusters.

IP Expert Joins Black Duck.(Black Duck Software, intellectual property management solutions)(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Black Duck Software, the new IP management house, has named Karen Faulds Copenhaver, an authority on intellectual property and technology licensing and an ex-IBMer - and we all know how much IP IBM has - as its general counsel.

Network Associates Denies Report It's on the Block.(Brief Article)
June 28, 2004... Anti-virus house Network Associates said it's not for sale and that it's not in acquisition talks with Microsoft after CRN wrote a story that got a lot of attention saying it was. Rivals think it unlikely, but everyone convinced. Microsoft...