Linux Gram articles from November 2003

Linux Gram archives from November 2003

SCO Rebuts IBM's Latest Charges, Lights Out after GPL.
November 3, 2003... The SCO Group's lawyers answered IBM's amended counterclaims last Friday and repeatedly denied the enforceability and applicability of the General Public License (GPL) on which the Linux model, such as it is, hinges. They say the GPL is trumped...

2.6 Kernel Out for Enterprise Testing.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... The long-promised 2.6 kernel was released for enterprise testing Monday. The Open Source Develop Lab (OSDL), where Linux creator Linus Torvalds and 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton now work because OSDL wants to be the center of the Linux...

Define Mass Market.(Cray Inc.'s plans for supercomputer)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Cray Inc says it's going to productize the $90 million Opteron-based HPC supercomputer it sold to Sandia National Lab or at least sell systems based on the massively parallel processing single-image Red Storm technology. The Red Storm system,...

SuSE Mimics Red Hat, Joins ObjectWeb.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... SuSE, in an effort to keep up with Red Hat, the Linux leader, has joined ObjectWeb, the object source middleware consortium that Red Hat already belongs to. Red Hat joined as part of a SuSE-snubbing deepening of its relationship with Bull,...

IBM Bolsters Mid-Market Push.
November 3, 2003... IBM is on the verge of reinforcing its four-month-old Express mid- market thrust with 10 new solutions focused on integration and information management including what is described as the first version of DB2 really gauged to the mid-market....

FTC Poses PTO Reforms.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Following hearings, the Federal Trade Commission has disgorged a 350-page study on patent law and made 10 practical recommendations to the Patent and Trademark Office without any guarantee of adoption. The FTC says some modifications to the...

Xandros Gets Professional CEO.(Andreas Typaldos)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... There's been a change of guard at shy, reclusive Linux desktop hopeful Xandros Inc, the two-year-old Canadian outfit that acquired Corel's Debian-based Linux OS. Andreas Typaldos, one of its early investors and founder of Computron, the...

Microsoft Alms for Needy Linux Efforts.
November 3, 2003... Microsoft gadfly Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows.com and the guy who greeted the letter from Microsoft lawyers telling him to take down his MSfreePC web site with a raised middle finger, now says that 10% of each claim against Microsoft's...

Veritas Ports to SuSE.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Storage software vendor Veritas is porting some of its key applications to SuSE's Enterprise Server platform like its core File System, Volume Manager and Cluster Server software by Q1. Veritas said it is currently piloting its SuSE-based...

Panasas Debuts NAS System; CEO Schrock To Step Down.
November 3, 2003... After a lengthy delay, storage start-up Panasas Inc has rolled out its object-based NAS system to a bunch of marquee customers. Dubbed ActiveScale Storage Cluster, it's aimed at Linux clusters. Panasas executives say the NAS was designed to...

Red Hat Still Won't Run on One in Five Boxes: Pru.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Prudential Financial just started following Red Hat, launching into it with a 64-page research tome that notices that the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3) distribution, which Pru describes as a "watershed release," "will work with 80% of...

IBM Dances on HP 3000's Grave.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... As the last elegies sound and the last toasts are offered to the venerable HP 3000 server line that won't be sold anymore after Halloween, IBM is gleefully dancing on its grave. It boasts that customers such as Strauss Discount Auto and Lady...

Zander & Szulik on Proofpoint Board.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Former Sun president and COO Ed Zander, now a managing director with VC house Silver Lake Partners, and Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik have joined the executive advisory board of Proofpoint Inc, a start-up founded by Netscape refuge Eric Hahn. It's...

SGI Debuts New SATA Storage Systems.(SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500S and TP9300S)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... SGI has launched two disk systems based on lower-cost Serial ATA drives for secondary storage. Developed by LSI Logic Storage Systems, the new SATA systems are being marketed under SGI's InfiniteStorage brand. They include the TP9500S and...

Exactly What Kind of a Deal Does SCO Have with Microsoft?
November 10, 2003... The infamous SCO Group is being provocative again. It wrote the SEC to tell the agency about the $50 million investment it just got and in the short little filing it made the tantalizing statement that "In the coming months, SCO intends to...

Novell Buys SuSE in Three-sided Deal with IBM.
November 10, 2003... Novell, a down-on-its-luck has-been that hasn't made any money in three years, is buying SuSE, a Linux second stringer that hasn't ever made any money. It's paying $210 million in cash, something like seven times SuSE's run-rate, when the norm...

Free Red Hats Replaced by Fedora.
November 10, 2003... In a fit of exquisitely bad timing, Red Hat pulled the plug on its free distributions just as Novell and SuSE were waxing eloquent about the wonders of open source and Novell, now suddenly Red Hat's most immediate worry since it's buying rival...

Yamhill Claims Another Convert.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Merrill Lynch semi ace Joe Osha thinks there really is a Yamhill and, like we've heard, the Opteron-aping circuitry supporting 64-bit instructions, in development for several years, is already in the Prescott Pentium 4, it's just not turned on....

Amazon To Sell El Cheapo Linare PC.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Well, now Amazon is going to try its hand at selling a cheap $200 Linux PC in competition with Walmart.com. The Amazon win is a feather in the cap of quiet little Linare Corporation, the desktop Linux start-up located in Microsoft's backyard....

HP Fields New Itanium Boxes.
November 10, 2003... HP has announced new Itanium and Xeon boxes including the first of a new dumbed-down Intel series. The Itanium Integrity machines - and HP of course is Itanium's biggest backer - include a four-way rx4640, a more compact rack- mount than...

IBM Stretches Itanium to 16.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... On Monday November 10, IBM is supposed to go against the grain of some of its own Xeon-loving server people and wheel out another Summit chipset-bearing Itanium system, this one a top-of-the-line 16-way - made out of four-way building blocks -...

Sun Tweaks its Prices.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Sun has put a cap on the price that large organizations will have to pay for its erstwhile Mad Hatter project, the restyled, newfangled, still undelivered SuSE/StarOffice-based Java Desktop System, its so- called Microsoft alternative. The...

IDC Declares a Recovery.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... IDC says the recovery - even if it's skimpy - is here. After two years of record declines and recession, the IT and telcom industries returned to positive growth this year even if Europe, Canada and Japan haven't contributed. Next year, IDC...

Sun Mulls Job Cuts: Merrill.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Merrill Lynch ace analyst Steve Milunovich thinks that Sun "is considering a headcount reduction" since he wrote that open letter a month ago telling Sun king Scott McNealy and the Sun board they need to bounce another 5,000-7,000 to boost...

SCO Goes Evangelizing.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... The SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride, who's been stigmatized with a virtual mark of Cain for threatening the open source model, is going to keynote the Computer Digital Expo (CDXPO) in Vegas on November 16 and his speech is called, predictably...

Opteron Watch.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... There's a hint in the air that Sun might bring out a line of Opteron servers at Comdex.

There She Goes Again.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Mary McDowell has finally - and apparently irrevocably - left HP. Actually she's been gone since May when she lost her job as head of Intel servers, the Compaq operation that with the merger was first denied any commerce with HP's all-important...

Government Watch.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology has thrown its weight behind open source. Its mandarins are pushing a plan to require state-owned companies and government ministries to use open source products by '05. They want all computers...

Java Leaves C# in the Dust: Evans Data.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Developers say Java is the best language for web services, according to a new Evans Data survey. The only place Microsoft's C# language is better is in tight integration with SOAP. Otherwise Java leads in flow control, syntax, object/memory...

Wind River Finds its New CEO.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Wind River has named the COO of $500 million-a-year ISV Mercury Interactive Corporation Ken Klein, a guy who joined Wind River's board in July, president, CEO and chairman effective the beginning of January. He will replace interim CEO and...

Microsoft Launches New Tech Center in Beijing.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Microsoft is setting up a new Advanced Technology Center at its five-year-old Beijing research lab to create products for Asian users that will improve human-computer interaction. It will also try to accelerate technology transfers between...

Avnet Distributes Athlon 64s.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Avnet Computing Components has started selling Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX desktop processors and configurable white boxes.

Mail Bag: Red Hat Has Made Me an Orphan.
November 10, 2003... To the Editor: In 1999, I wanted a 'standard' Linux distro for these reasons: 1. lots of driver support 2. as many pre-built app ports as possible 3. lots of users banging on software make it better (fixes the bugs) 4. I...

OSDL Picks Up Desktop Linux Charter.
November 17, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), which has so far limited itself to high-end carrier-grade and data center Linux server initiatives, is preparing for a desktop jihad the scope of which is difficult to gauge at this point. OSDL's new...

Novell Goes Fishing.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Novell is paying $210 million for SuSE and is going to treat the operating system as a commodity once the acquisition is completed, according to what Nathan Friedman, Ximian co-founder and now VP of R&D in Novell's Ximian Services business...

Renamed PathScale Opens Kimono.
November 17, 2003... Key Research, that two-year-old under-the-radar start-up with the $14 million in financing that was originally supposed to produce Mips widgetry of all things then reportedly switched to Opteron, has changed its name to PathScale Inc and gotten...

Yamhill Speculation Punctuates Assessment of AMD's Chances.
November 17, 2003... AMD has added a swat of new x86-64 chips to its roadmap. When last seen the thing included a high-end eight-way Opteron, a 90nm chip code named Athens, a desktop 90nm chip code named San Diego and a mobile 90nm chip called Odessa, all of which...

SCO Subpoenas Linus, Others; IBM Returns the Favor.
November 17, 2003... On the SCO-IBM front, the SCO Group, in pressing its $3 million case against IBM, has subpoenaed: Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and chief developer of the Linux kernel; John Horsley, the general counsel of Transmeta, Torvalds'...

OSDL To Cover Torvalds' Legal Bills.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... The managers of the Open Source Development Lab have been dying to get into the legal scrap with the SCO Group and now that SCO has subpoenaed both OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen and OSDL Fellow and father of Linux Linus Torvalds their wish has come...

HP Casts Adaptive Enterprise Scheme as ber-OS.
November 17, 2003... Systems management has been the watchword this week. Among other things Microsoft launched Systems Management Server 2003, its buddy Dell talked up new wares for Windows servers and HP came out with a mess of 40 new management services and...

Lindows Savors Prospect of Going Up against Microsoft in Court.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... In anticipation of Microsoft's suit against it for calling itself Lindows finally getting to court in Seattle on Monday December 1, Lindows.com is circulating a Q&A suggesting it's going to be able to wash a whole lot of Microsoft's dirty linen...

Half the Vendors Will Be Annihilated by '05: Gartner.
November 17, 2003... When have you ever seen the Peter and Paul of market research, IDC and Gartner, seriously disagree? Well, then, it should come as no surprise that Gartner is chasing after IDC to ring the bell in celebration of the industry hitting bottom...

MontaVista Makes its Linux IDE Look Like Windows.(DevRocket 1.0)(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... MontaVista has got itself a new development environment (IDE) that it says is integral to its new Linux Professional Edition 3.1 based on the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. It's called DevRocket 1.0 and it, in turn, is based on the Java- grounded...

Topspin Raises Another $20m & Deal in Japan.
November 17, 2003... The funding behind Topspin, the three-and-a-half-year-old Infiniband-loyal intelligent server switch house, has been upped another $20 million, making the total to date $67 million. Meanwhile, Tokyo-based Sumisho Electronics Company Ltd...

Microsoft Seeks To Stop Lindows from Messing with its $1.1b California Settlement.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Taking aim at Lindows.com, Microsoft's lawyers have asked the courts to trash all the California antitrust settlement claims filed with digital signatures. Meanwhile, a Florida consultant by the name of FunctionIt has taken a leaf out of...

Oracle Says It May Have To Abandon Hostile PeopleSoft Tender.
November 17, 2003... Oracle has to get PeopleSoft's acquisition-activated refund program aka its Customer Assurance Program enjoined tout suite or else it may have to drop its $7.3 billion hostile bid for the company as economically unreasonable, according to what...

Ex-SCO CEO Surfaces.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Ransom Love, who's been out of sight for a while and was CEO of the SCO Group before it changed its name and turned vicious towards Linux, has joined the board of Progeny, the little outfit that tried commercializing Debian, got no joy from it...

Microsoft Virtual Server Delayed; Virtual PC 2004 RTMs.
November 17, 2003... Microsoft has acknowledged a delay in delivering the Virtual Server code that it bought and says the software won't ship by the end of the year as scheduled. Microsoft said Virtual Server would enter beta this quarter and ship sometime in...

Now, a KooBox for Kids.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... After creating a KooBox PC for grown-ups, Lindows.com, which is proving itself as segmentation-minded as Intel, has added a KooBox for Kids. It features a child-specific version of LindowsOS 4.0 called LindowsKids that's supposed to come...

PolyServe Lands OEM Deal with XIOtech.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... XIOtech Corporation, the storage network software house, will resell PolyServe's Matrix Server clustering software for Linux systems along with its Magnitude RAC Pack offering. RAC Pack is an integrated, pre-configured bundle for deploying...

Itanium Watch.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Intel is on a momentum kick in support of the Itanium 2 and in the process identified the 90nm Montecito version of the widget, due in, oh, 2005, the one with the 24 megs of L3 cache, as being destined to be the first of its breed to have a...

OK, How About Plan B.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Evidently Novell had to warm up to the idea of buying SuSE. Its first notion was reportedly to persuade the so-called Chicago 7, so called after a meeting they had there, to kick in $5 million apiece to develop a new Linux distribution....

HP Kisses Another Exec Good-bye.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Webb McKinney, 58, who's been hanging around HP for as long as anyone can remember and who led the HP-Compaq integration team along with Compaq's representative CFO Jeff Clarke, is hanging up his spurs. He retires next month. HP has been...

StarOffice Gets Retail-Happy.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Sun is making a holiday push on behalf of StarOffice 7. It says the $80 program is available at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Fry's, Micro Center, Office Max, Office Depot and Staples.

Dell Profits Up 26%, Revenues Rise 17%.
November 17, 2003... Dell earned $677 million, or 26 cents a share, on revenues of $10.62 billion in October quarter driven by strong growth in servers and storage. The results were in line with expectations. On a conference call, Dell president Kevin Rollin...

Red Flag To Peddle RTLinux in China.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Red Flag, China's Linux darling, will resell and support RTLinuxPro, FSMLabs' hard real-time software, and other products domestically. FSMLabs and Red Flag plan to work together to jointly develop board support packages for standard...

CyberGuard To Buy SnapGear.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... CyberGuard is acquiring SnapGear, the Australian Linux security house, for $16 million in stock and cash. In 2001 SnapGear, which offers Linux-based edge firewall and VPN security appliances for small and mid-sized businesses, was spun off...

Galileo Never Had It Like This.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Sharp is using the Professional Edition of MontaVista Software's embedded Linux operating system in an $850 all-in-one home digital information server called Galileo, or more stodgily the HG-01S, that's just gone on sales in Japan. Galileo...

SuSE Pursues Education.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... SuSE Linux, which is anticipating its acquisition by Novell, has put together an Education Program to chase students, schools and non- profits offering them its wares at discounts of up to 40% off through its US resellers CCV Software and Ricis...

Neoware Profits Up 29%.(fiscal 1st qtr ended Sep 30, 2003)(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Thin client hardware and software vendor Neoware earned $1.86 million, or 12 cents a share, on revenues of $15 million in its fiscal first quarter ended September 30. In the same quarter a year ago, it earned $1.45 million, or 10 cents a...

How's This for Ironic.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... A piece of software called BitKeeper that raised a great snit and had petitions circulating among the religiously inclined when Linus started using it last year for version control reportedly managed to thwart a Trojan Horse attack on the Linux...

Hamachi's on the Menu, But It's Slim Pickings.(Novell's Nterprise Linux Services 1.0 (aka Hamachi))(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Novell is planning to release Nterprise Linux Services 1.0, aka Hamachi, aka Yellowtail, the integrated package of file, print, messaging, directory and management services it salvaged from NetWare and put on Red Hat and SuSE Linux, in...

SCO Threatens To Derail Novell-SuSE Deal & Sue a Fortune 1000 Linux User.
November 24, 2003... Talk about amusement value. Man, this thoroughly entertaining SCO thing gets better and better. For its latest move, SCO CEO Darl McBride has suggested that SCO is going to upset Novell's $210 million acquisition of SuSE. He claims the...

Mad Hatter To Sip China Tea out of China Cup.(Sun Microsystem's Java Desktop System (aka Project Mad Hatter)deal with China)
November 24, 2003... That hole Alice nipped down after the White Rabbit before tying up with the Mad Hatter has come out in China - just like our parents used to tell us it would if we kept on digging in the garden when we were kids. Just imagine Sun...

Penguin Hires Big-Time CEO.(Enrico Pesatori)(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Penguin Computing Inc has imported another CEO although the last one it brought in from the outside didn't work out. Founder, you know. Anyway, this one is more glamorous than the last and speaks with a darling Italian accent. After living...

Sun & AMD Forge the Great Underdog Alliance.
November 24, 2003... In what might be construed as a backhanded compliment to Intel, its arch-nemesis, Sun Monday raised the white flag and in a deepening embrace of the x86 architecture that was, let's face it, positively inevitable acknowledged that it has cut a...

Mono Will Take a While Longer.(from Novell)
November 24, 2003... Novell has pushed back the delivery of Mono 1.0 by, oh, say, six months. Mono is the open source project to put .NET on Linux that was started by Ximian, now a Novell satellite, two years ago. It's now due in the second quarter of next year. It...

Psst, Mister, Move You Off Office?(SCAI GmbH's SCAI MAS )(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... SCAI GmbH, a German consultant specializing in migrating to StarOffice or the free OpenOffice version of the stuff, is peddling a suite of tools it's cooked up for moving off of Microsoft Office called SCAI MAS. It says the widgetry...

SAP Invests in Sistina.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Storage infrastructure software vendor Sistina has gotten a $1.5 million investment from SAP Ventures, SAP's VC arm. Sistina plans to use the money for sales and marketing and developing partnerships with ISVs and OEMs. Targeted at...

AMD Adds More Opterons.(AMD 148, 248 and 848 Opterons)(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... AMD has added three more models to its Opteron chip line: the 148, 248 and 848, priced at $733, $913 and $3,199 in 1,000-unit quantities and presumed to be worth 2.2GHz. The 248 for two-way servers is available now, the 148 for one-way...

NTT Comware Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), which is on a member recruitment drive to enhance its position in the Linux pecking order, has enticed NTT Comware, the NTT subsidiary and reportedly one of the largest system integrators in Japan, into...

HP Enterprise & PC Businesses Out of the Red.(Q4 2003)
November 24, 2003... Hewlett-Packard turned in a solid performance in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 31 that returned its enterprise and PC businesses to profitability. HP netted $1.1 billion, or 28 cents a share, on revenues of $19.9 billion. ...

Opterons Make Top500.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... AMD says that four of these newfangled Opteron-based systems have made it on to the Top500 Supercomputer list, that testament to floating point. The lucky four include the top-ranking Opteron unit that Linux Networx built for Los Alamos...

Novell Posts Wider Loss, License Revenues Down 25%.(fiscal year ended October 31, 2003)(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Novell turned up with a wider loss and lower revenues in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 31. The company lost $109 million, or 29 cents a share, including $130 million in non-recurring charges, on revenues of $287 million. ...

SCO Gets Death Threats.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... SCO says its top executives have been getting death threats since last spring after the company filed suit against IBM so they're now apparently traveling with a bodyguard. SCO won't say how many threats it's allegedly received, what - other...

AMD Picks Dresden for 300mm Fab.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... AMD has decided to put its 300mm wafer fab in Dresden next to its current state-of-the-art facility. The company said it picked Dresden to leverage the skills of the 2,000 people that already work for it there, not to mention the...

Itanium Watch.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Intel says it will ship upwards of 100,000, yes, that's right, 100,000 Itania this year, which would put it in the same league as those RISC chips it was born to overtake. However, Intel president Paul Otellini got downright silly the other day...

EC To Ponder Oracle-PeopleSoft Merger.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... The European Commission says it could take four months for it to turn over the notion of Oracle acquiring PeopleSoft in a hostile bid. Its investigation, which should delight the unwooable PeopleSoft, began Monday. The Justice Department isn't...

SCO Claims GPL Won't Survive.(general public license)(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... SCO CEO Darl McBride gave a speech this week at the enterprise- minded Computer Digital Expo being held next door to Comdex and prophesied that the GPL won't survive the way it is; that it has to be reworked to make it more pro-business. He...

PathScale Claims Compiler Lead.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... Having demo'd its AMD64 compilers at SuperComputing this week, PathScale claims their performance bests the any other 64-bit compiler for Opteron-based Linux servers by a margin of up to 40%.

Barrett Sees Light at the End of the Tunnel Tho It's Only a Match.(Brief Article)
November 24, 2003... a Match "Hopefully, we'll start to see some enterprise growth in 2004. We've seen some sprinkling of that, but I don't expect a major, major upgrade cycle. I do think we'll see increased investment in the US going forward." - Intel CEO...

Gnome Summit Set.
November 24, 2003... There's gonna be a Gnome Summit at Brooklyn College November 22-24. The director of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman is giving the keynote.