Linux Gram articles from November 2007

Linux Gram archives from November 2007

Sun Sues NetApp - Twice - in What Promises To Be a Bitter Open Source Brawl.
November 5, 2007... Sun countersued NetApp last Thursday in an action that NetApp founder Dave Hitz describes on his blog as seeking a permanent injunction "to remove almost all of our products from the marketplace" and "make NetApp employees wonder 'Do I still...

Mandriva Bitches to Ballmer about Microsoft Playing Hardball.
November 5, 2007... It seems that Microsoft has persuaded the Nigerian government to switch out the 17,000 copies of Mandriva Linux it ordered under a pilot project of Intel Classmate PCs for its schools and substitute Windows instead. Mandriva's still going...

GPL Escapes Legal Scrutiny.
November 5, 2007... The first-ever US copyright infringement suit based on an alleged violation of the GPLv2 has been settled out of court. Meaning we're not going to find out whether the GPL would have stood up in court. Pity. Something definite would have...

What's Next After VMware?
November 5, 2007... If VMware, with its amazing $46 billion market cap, represents "Virtualization 1.0" then who's to be the avatar of "Virtualization 2.0"? Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is. ...

Oz Okays GoogleClick Deal.
November 5, 2007... In a big uh-oh for Microsoft, Yahoo and the other GoogleClick critics, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission approved Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Tuesday. The regulator decided the two companies weren't close...

At its Peril BEA Snubs Oracle's Ultimatum.
November 5, 2007... BEA said it wanted $21 a share and ignored the Sunday night deadline that Oracle put on its $17-a-share offer. Oracle took the offer off the table. BEA's biggest stockholder, activist Carl Icahn, has threatened a proxy fight and claims the BEA...

Microsoft Consent Decree Extended for the Moment.
November 5, 2007... Most of the restrictions imposed on Microsoft by its 2002 consent decree with the US government - which were supposed to expire on November 12 - have been temporarily extended to no later than January 31, 2008 to accommodate the legal...

Gphone Close, Journal Says, Spurs Run-Up in Stock.
November 5, 2007... Google is supposed to be inching closer to unveiling its fabled "Gphone," according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The paper says that in the next couple of weeks Google should trot out "advanced software and services that would allow...

Dell No Longer Delinquent.(Brief article)
November 5, 2007... Dell finally filed its long-overdue financial statements with the SEC on Tuesday, restating fiscal 2003. 2004, 2005, 2006 and the first quarter of 2007 and reducing its cumulative earnings by $92 million or three cents a share - less than 1% of...

Ruby-on-Rails Start-up Gets $6.2m in Funding.
November 5, 2007... FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and...

The Marines Enlist VMware.
November 5, 2007... VMware said Monday that the United States Marine Corps is deploying its widgetry across its data centers and mobile combat units worldwide. VMware couldn't resist pointing out that lives depend on the Corps' continuous on-demand access to...

Sixth-Generation Montvale Itanium Arrives.
November 5, 2007... Intel has pushed out its wimpy dual-core Montecito upgrade, code named Montvale, a 90nm 1.42GHz-1.66GHz Itanium chip that was - alas - due last year and was originally supposed to be 65nm. It only adds a little to the existing 1.4GHz-1.6GHz...

Apple Declares Leopard Fleet-of-Foot Out of the Blocks.(Brief article)
November 5, 2007... Early Tuesday morning Apple said that over two million copies of its new Leopard operating system, a k a Mac OS X 10.5, were sold or delivered since the thing went on sale Friday night. That, it said, is a much better showing than the first...

Virtual Iron Hires Sales Hot-Shots To Run the Company.(Virtual Iron Software)(Brief article)
November 5, 2007... Virtual Iron Software, VMware's often forgotten rival, has hired a couple of ex-EMC guys of all people to run the company. Ed Walsh, who ran EMC's Information Management Software Group after EMC acquired him along with Avamar Technology Inc...

HP Fields 'First Ever' Multi-Level Security Services for RHEL5.
November 5, 2007... HP has put together what it calls the "first ever" mission-critical multi-level security (MLS) services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) - or any other Linux operating system for that matter. Multi-level refers to stepped levels of...

Openbravo Acquires Librepos.(Brief article)
November 5, 2007... Openbravo, the open source SMB ERP house, has acquired Librepos (nee Tina POS), the open source point-of-sale application vendor on the theory that the retail market is very vulnerable to open source disruption. Terms were not disclosed....

HPC ISV Raises $11m.
November 5, 2007... Interactive Supercomputing Corporation (ISC), a three-year-old Waltham, Massachusetts start-up developing software for automatic parallelization and interactive execution of technical desktop applications on HPC servers, has raised $11 million,...

Wal-Mart To Peddle New Cheap Linux PC.
November 5, 2007... Wal-Mart sold cheap Linux PCs going back years. This season it'll have a Linux-based Everex Green gPC on offer for $199, its usual price point for such things. With Windows the 1.5GHz Via chip-based box with 512MB of memory and 80GB...

Preliminary Injunction Stops PTO from Changing the Rules.(Patent and Trademark Office)(Brief article)
November 5, 2007... A preliminary injunction has stopped the US Patent and Trademark Office from changing its rules on November 1 and limiting the number of claims that can be made on a patent to 25 and restricting the number of patent amendments to just three....

Dell Hints at Becoming a Consolidation Player.
November 5, 2007... "In the last two years Dell has acquired five companies, two related to the consumer business, one related to software and two related to services. These have all been relatively small companies but I would not be surprised if the nature and...

BEA Watch.
November 5, 2007... One night imagine that Oracle has the date November 15 circled on its calendar. That's the day BEA is supposed to report its Q3 financial results - at least as much as it can considering it's still delinquent in its SEC filings.

EMC, VMware Get China Bug.
November 5, 2007... EMC says it's going to double its investment in China to $1 billion over the next five years to expand R&D as well as sales and service. EMC subsidiary VMware also expects to increase its presence in China and build up its 35-man R&D staff...

Happy Anniversary, ARPANET.
November 5, 2007... Monday was the 38th anniversary of the very first host-to-host ARPANET message that was sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute.

Microsoft Sends VS Cross-Platform.
November 12, 2007... In what amounts to a monumental reversal of policy, Microsoft said Monday in a press release - so it's in writing - and publicly at TechEd in Barcelona that it's changing its licensing terms and will no longer restrict developers "to building...

Novell Drops $100m Claim against SCO.
November 12, 2007... At a court hearing Tuesday Novell surprised a lot of people and withdrew its claim that SCO damaged it to the tune of $100 million by reneging on a deal supposedly assigning its Unix IP to UnitedLinux, the failed Linux consortium, in 2002. ...

Red Hat & Sun Cut Java Deal.
November 12, 2007... Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has...

Microsoft & Novell Extend Hated Pact.
November 12, 2007... The infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability/patent protection deal that FOSSers love to hate just passed its first birthday and, bragging that it's exceeded their original business targets, the pair has extended the arrangement. They're...

Cisco Spooks Market like a Leftover Halloween Ghoul.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Financial report)(Brief article)
November 12, 2007... Cisco CEO John Chambers Wednesday sounded the first alarm bell that the subprime mortgage mess is bleeding into IT spending. He said orders to Cisco particularly from US banks and carmakers have fallen dramatically. And he expects demand...

Watch Out, AMD, Here Comes Penryn.
November 12, 2007... HP and Lenovo rushed out with the news that they're gonna be selling Intel's new 45nm Penryn chips in workstations a few days before Intel formally launches the chip this weekend. The press releases must have been burning a first-to-market...

Windows Live Programs Clear Beta.
November 12, 2007... Microsoft's immediate answer to rival web-based applications, its free Windows Live online programs, the stuff it calls "software plus services," emerged from their beta gauntlet Tuesday. The suite includes e-mail, instant messaging, photo...

AMD Posts Banns for Wedding of CPU & GPU.
November 12, 2007... AMD Thursday announced the FireStream 9170, its first so-called stream processor, its first step at integrating the GPU and CPU in the name of HPC, one of the main reasons it spent billions buying ATI. It's not expecting to deliver the...

Dell To Spend $1.4 Billion Buying EqualLogic.
November 12, 2007... Last Monday at a Tokyo press conference Michael Dell as much as said Dell was going to make a large acquisition and, as good as his word, this Monday morning the company announced that it's going to buy New Hampshire-based high-performance...

VMware Remembers the Poor Benighted Software Developer.
November 12, 2007... Electric Cloud, the enterprise-class software production management house, has pushed into virtualization on the back of a co-marketing and sales arrangement with VMware. It's integrating its ElectricCommander widgetry with VMware Lab...

Sun's Revenues Stagnate.
November 12, 2007... Sun earned $89 million, three cents a share, on revenues of $3.22 billion in the September quarter, a better showing than this time last year when it lost $56 million, or two cents a share. It attributed the results to high-end servers and...

Microsoft Creates Free Search Server.
November 12, 2007... Microsoft has pulled the search widgetry out of SharePoint Server 2007 and turned it into a standalone Search Server 2008 Express that it will make available as a free download. It says information workers waste as much as 9.5 hours a week...

Egenera Signs First Virtualization 2.0 Partner.(Fujitsu Siemens Computers)(Brief article)
November 12, 2007... Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's...

BEA Gives Icahn a Hall Pass to the Holy of Holies.
November 12, 2007... In an unusual move, BEA says it's giving activist stockholder Carl Icahn confidential information that it can't give other people 'cause it's, well, confidential and is supposed to prove to him that the company is worth more than the $17 a...

Dojo Hits 1.0.
November 12, 2007... The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry...

GroundWork Adds Debian to its Portfolio.
November 12, 2007... GroundWork Open Source, the folks with the network management software, says monitoring widgetry now works on Ubuntu and other Debian strains of Linux. Its Monitor Open Source kit is freely available as a ".deb" install package and shares the...

His Lawyer Prays Reiser Won't Testify at His Murder Trial.(Hans Reiser)
November 12, 2007... Hans Reiser, the Linux file system creator on trial in California for the alleged murder of his missing wife, is proving to be a handful for his own lawyer William DuBois. Having reportedly memorized the 9,000 pages of discovery, Reiser...

Collaborative Licenses BITS Code.
November 12, 2007... Collaborative Software, the company start-up by ex-Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen, has licensed the Shared Assessment Programs created by BITS, the consortium of US financial houses intending to use it to create an open source...

Novell Closes Five EMEA Offices.
November 12, 2007... Novell is closing down its direct sales offices in Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway and Turkey to focus on 10 larger European countries as part of a yearlong shift to a more indirect approach globally that it signaled last December. Novell...

Sun's Voice of Reason Silenced.(Brief article)
November 12, 2007... Former Sun VP of global information systems strategy-turned-consultant Larry Singer told a CIO conference in California the other day that he left Sun in March because it's overemphasizing open source when it should be concentrating of...

Congress Wants Another Crack at GoogleClick.
November 12, 2007... A bunch of influential Republicans in Congress want to take another crack at the proposed Google-DoubleClick merger and are calling for another hearing - this one focused on the "enormous" privacy issues the prospect of a GoogleClick raises....

Where Are They Now?
November 12, 2007... David Patrick, CEO of Ximian before it was sold to Novell in 2003 and then general manager of Novell's Linux, NetWare and open source operation, has turned up as CEO of Xkoto, a clustered grid-scale database load balancing start-up....

Meyer Goes to AMD Board.
November 12, 2007... AMD has named president and COO Dirk Meyer to its board.

IPhone Does Europe.
November 12, 2007... Apple's iPhone are supposed to go on sale in Germany and the UK today. They'll start in France on November 29.

Sun Embraces Android.
November 12, 2007... In the wake of the Google's announcement of Android, its Linux-based cell phone platform, on Monday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on his blog said he would "like Sun to be the first platform software company to commit to a complete developer...

Sun Adds to Virtualization Cacophony.
November 19, 2007... This being the week that virtualization graduated to being an everybody's-gotta-have-one checkbox item, Sun rolled up to Oracle OpenWorld festivities, where Oracle had just unveiled the Xen-based Oracle VM, with its own free young open source...

IBM Claims Symphony is Music to its Ears.
November 19, 2007... Two months after IBM decided to try to revive Lotus Symphony as a rival to Office, it says the free Symphony beta 2 has been downloaded by 250,000 registered users, 88% of whom are Microsoft customers. Twelve percent are using the Linux...

Google Puts $10m Bounty on Android Development.
November 19, 2007... Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about...

CDW To Sell Unbreakable Linux Support.
November 19, 2007... Under a multi-year agreement it signed, CDW, the big reseller, is going to peddle Oracle Unbreakable Linux support, the first real move out of Oracle to put some English behind its Linux ball, the one that was supposed to bean Red Hat and make...

Google's Android Threatens To Fork Java.
November 19, 2007... Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a "massive endorsement" out of it. Oh, Java gets a "massive...

Dell Buys SaaS House.
November 19, 2007... Dell is going to buy privately held Everdream Corporation, a nine-year-old ISV that does agent-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for remote-service management or at least it will "when all the closing conditions are met," it said....

Ellison Threatens To Leave BEA Hanging.
November 19, 2007... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the financial analyst meeting adjacent to Oracle OpenWorld late Wednesday not to count on Oracle renewing its snubbed bid for BEA. He said that Oracle's more likely to spend its money on other "second...

BEA Defends its $21-a-Share Valuation.
November 19, 2007... Judging by the narrowly seesawing after-hours trading in BEA stock Thursday evening, the company didn't exactly convince Wall Street that it's worth the $21 a share it's demanding of an acquirer, having apparently run off Oracle and its $17...

Dell To Handle Solaris.
November 19, 2007... Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said that a third of the Solaris out there is running on Dell servers, giving the two challenged companies reason to prop each other up presumably for the incremental revenue. So, as a result, Dell is going to OEM...

IBM's Got its Head in the Clouds.
November 19, 2007... Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet...

Another Warning Flare Seen in Skies over US Spending.
November 19, 2007... Despite posting better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter numbers the other day, Network Appliance sent up a warning flare, like Cisco did last week and IBM before that, saying that business was off in North America because of the subprime...

EMC to Wall Street: 'That's All of VMware You're Getting'.
November 19, 2007... EMC has repeated again for the benefit of those who didn't hear it the first time that it's not going to be selling anymore of its position in VMware, which is 86% owned by the storage maven. EMC CEO Joe Tucci said so in a speech to...

Oracle Fakes Out VMware.
November 19, 2007... On Monday Oracle briefly routed VMware's already traumatized stock - last week was a lousy time for tech stocks - when it announced from Oracle OpenWorld that it was entering the virtualization market with free code for industry standard...

VMware Returns Oracle's Fire.
November 19, 2007... Swearing that it wasn't just reacting to Oracle breathing fire in its direction and claiming that it had a notion that Oracle would roll into the virtualization market Monday, however tepidly, and so scheduled this announcement for Tuesday,...

EC To Take Long Look at GoogleClick.
November 19, 2007... The European Commission has decided not to stint on its investigation of the proposed Google-DoubleClick merger and, beginning Tuesday, is treating it to a rare in-depth review that will take until April 2. The move raises the hopes of...

Microsoft Virtualization To Cost 28 Bucks.
November 19, 2007... Microsoft has officially christened its Viridian virtualization software Hyper-V and has ended its internal political debate about how to package the widgetry. It's going to be available standalone as Hyper-V Server as well as inside...

IBM Buys Cognos, Its Largest Acquisition Ever.
November 19, 2007... Cognos has been begging to be harvested for ever so long and Monday morning IBM Software plucked it from the tree and put it in its basket. IBM is paying $58 dollars-a-share cash, a total of $5 billion American greenbacks for the Canadian...

Google Search Engine Sued for Patent Infringement.
November 19, 2007... Google's precious search engine has been sued for patent infringement by Northeastern University and Northeastern spinout Jarg - in Texas, home of the notoriously pro-plaintiff federal courts when it comes to patent cases. Reuters...

Sun Stiffens its Security.
November 19, 2007... Sun is buying a little California company called Vaau (say vow) for its enterprise role management (ERM) and identity compliance software. Terms were not disclosed because whatever Sun's spending is immaterial, it said. ERM is supposed...

HP Builds on Virtual Connect.
November 19, 2007... HP says it's shipped upwards of 10,000 Virtual Connect modules on its c-Class BladeSystems in the last year and now it's going to use those doohickeys to extend its Virtual Connect technology beyond a single blade enclosure to all the blade...

Speculation Mounts about Ruiz' Future.(Hector Ruiz )(Brief article)
November 19, 2007... AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has been a resident of Jim Cramer's "Wall of Shame" for a while now and what with president Dirk Meyer's elevation to AMD's board last week - not to mention sales chief Henri Richard's strange lateral move outta there in...

Al Gore Joins Kleiner, Perkins.(Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)(Brief article)
November 19, 2007... Former Vice-President Al Gore, Nobel laureate, Oscar winner and of course inventor of the Internet, has finally succumbed to the blandishments of Kleiner Perkins senior partner John Doerr and joined the firm. Kleiner is currently putting...

Sun Pumps Up Stock Price.
November 19, 2007... Sun shareholders went ahead and rubberstamped that 1-for-4 reverse stock split proposal put in front of them to make Sun's perpetually $5 stock look better. So now it's 20 bucks. Oh, yeah, and Sun told the SEC it fired another 600 people last...

Red Hat Counts Fedoras.
November 19, 2007... At the end of its first week out Red Hat counted 54,000 Fedora 8 downloads. The community software offers three new custom spins or appliances for games, development and electronic applications. There's also increased security, a new desktop...

Unix' Daddy Open Sourced.
November 19, 2007... The final release of the source code for Multics, the basically failed if highly seminal 1969 MIT-Bell Labs-GE-developed modular, scalable, highly available, utility-style general-purpose mainframe timesharing operating system that implemented...

'Real Men Have Fabs.' - AMD Founder Jerry Sanders.
November 19, 2007... Wall Street thinks the cash-strapped AMD is back to talking to Taiwan Semiconductor about buying AMD's new Feb 38 facility in Germany. Meanwhile, as Intel glories in its 3.2GHz 45nm Penryns versus 2GHz 90nm Barcelonas and plans to add two more...

Zmanda Embraces Ubuntu.
November 19, 2007... Zmanda has extended its open source Amanda Enterprise backup and recovery to Ubuntu, a bow to Ubuntu's growing popularity.

Dell's Latest China Policy.
November 19, 2007... Dell is supposed to start selling SUSE Linux Desktop 10 pre-installed on some enterprise-oriented desktops like the Optiplex 775 and 330 in China on November 20. Dell's kicked in 60 days worth of free telephone support after that it's up to...

Red Hat Summit.
November 19, 2007... Red Hat is planning its fourth annual summit for June 18-20 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. That's after the JBoss user conference in Orlando February 13-15. See www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2008 and www.jbossworld.com.

Milestones.
November 19, 2007... Microsoft chairman Bill Gates this week presided over his last Microsoft stockholders meeting as a Microsoft employee ahead of his scheduled retirement from the company next June 31. Next year he said he'd be at the meeting as a "part-time...

Imagine the Prenup.(Brief article)
November 19, 2007... Google co-founder Larry Page is following his partner Sergey Brin down the aisle. West Coast society pages report that Silicon Valley's most eligible bachelor, worth about $20 billion, will be marrying girlfriend Lucy Southworth, who he's been...

GPL Meets the Web.
November 26, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just memorialized the Affero GPLv3, a version of the GPL that was created to cover software that runs over a network such as the Internet, which these days would mean, oh, SaaS stuff and Google Apps, Web...

Firefox 3 Beta 1 Out.(Brief article)
November 26, 2007... The Mozilla Foundation has belatedly delivered Firefox 3 Beta 1 up for public download and testing warts and all. It includes malware protection, web forgery protection and anti-virus integration and is supposed to make it easier to find...

SFLC Files Two New GPL-Violating Copyright Suits.
November 26, 2007... The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed two more lawsuits in defense of the GPL, charging router maker Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas LLC with denying downstream recipients of GPL-protected code with access to the source...

SAP's TomorrowNow Looking Like Yesterday's Toast.
November 26, 2007... Gee, evidently Oracle curses work. The CEO and other unidentified, unnumbered senior managers of TomorrowNow - the third-party SAP support subsidiary that Oracle has accused of hacking into its systems and lifting its proprietary software...

Industry Sued for Using PCI Express.
November 26, 2007... Armed with the results of a re-examination of the validity of its patent by the Patent and Trademark Office, Microlinc LLC has refiled its suit in the famed Eastern District in Texas against Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Acer, Apple, Dell, Sony, Toshiba,...