Linux Gram articles from October 2003

Linux Gram archives from October 2003

Ex-BEA CEO Out for the Next Big Software Hit; Will Lightning Strike Twice?(Bill Coleman)
October 6, 2003... After dipping below the radar for a month, Bill Coleman, the "B" in BEA and once its CEO, has turned up at a start-up named Cassatt Corporation after Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt and her brother. Coleman named it that on the theory that...

Another Linux House Bites the Dust.(Trustix AS)
October 6, 2003... Six-year-old Trustix AS, the privately held Norwegian company with what it called the first truly server-oriented and secure Linux distribution to come down the pike, has hit the wall. It filed for bankruptcy on Monday after spending the...

IBM Says It Virtualizes the Whole Infrastructure.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... IBM says, thanks to technology supplied by three-year-old Inkra Networks, it's got the whole infrastructure virtualized and can now offer end-to-end cross-platform utility computing involving Linux, AIX, Windows and OS/400 at least to companies...

Lindows Flaunts Microsoft Ultimatum; Eggs Redmond To Sue It Again.
October 6, 2003... Microsoft's lawyers sent Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson a letter lambasting the www.MSfreePC.com web site that Lindows set up a couple of weeks ago as "deceptive," saying that it "seriously mischaracterizes" the settlement Microsoft signed...

SCO To Pull SGI's Unix License.
October 6, 2003... For the last six weeks SGI has been sitting on what it describes as a terse four-page notice of termination with 60 days grace that it got from the SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride saying that SCO was going to pull SGI's Unix license to Irix on...

SGI Admits Unix Code Got into Linux.
October 6, 2003... Concomitant with the revelation that SCO is about to yank its Unix license, SGI put an open letter to the Linux community up on its web site over the signature of software VP Rich Altmaier (see http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt). In it SGI...

IBM Amends its Suit against SCO; SCO Lashes Out at GPL in Response.
October 6, 2003... IBM last Friday leaked word to the Wall Street Journal that it had amended its countersuit against the SCO Group and added a charge of copyright infringement to the list of faults it has already found with the controversial company. In a...

SnapGear First To Productize 2.6 Kernel.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... SnapGear Inc, the embedded Linux security house, has released what it believes is the first production system using the new still "unreleased" 2.6 kernel. It's part of SnapGear Embedded Linux 3.0, a full embedded Linux distribution with...

SuSE Previews 2.6 Features & AMD64 Support in Retail Code.(SuSE Linux 9.0 Professional for AMD64)
October 6, 2003... SuSE has back-ported some of the more stable features that will be found in the upcoming 2.6 Linux kernel, not due to be officially released now until spring, it said, into the otherwise 2.4.21-based SuSE Linux 9.0 retail code that will appear...

Sun Sinks.(Q4 2003)
October 6, 2003... Sun says it's gonna take a monumental $1.051 billion non-cash charge for its fourth quarter ended June 30 that will translate into a revised Q4 net loss of $1.039 billion or 32 cents a share caused by a poor showing in Q1 that precipitated a...

Top Merrill Analyst Writes Pointed Open Letter to Sun.
October 6, 2003... With the news of a gargantuan charge as a backdrop, Steve Milunovich, Merrill Lynch's top tech follower, took Sun to task Thursday in an open letter that he wrote to Sun CEO Scott McNealy and the Sun board. Voicing opinions that have been...

IBM Buys Migration Business.(Sector7)
October 6, 2003... IBM has bought Sector7's applications porting services business on undisclosed terms, meaning it's picked essentially all of Sector7's assets and intellectual property. The privately held firm, which got started 18 years ago in the UK and...

Egenera Adds New Box.(Egenera BladeFrame ES)(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Egenera has added a widget called the BladeFrame ES. The thing packages up six Egenera Processing Blades in a self- contained chassis that mounts in an industry standard 19-inch rack. It's designed for branch offices, call centers, remote...

Massachusetts Goes Open; UN Backs Off.
October 6, 2003... The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the one state left trying to tighten the screws on the Microsoft antitrust settlement, has decided to move its computer systems towards open standards like Linux. It says its decision has nothing at all to do...

Macs over Windows.
October 6, 2003... Rumors passed on by well-connected friends of the family that can't be confirmed and are said to be emanating from the Office of Management and the Budget, the agency that pays the federal government's bills, suggest that they're buying Apples...

Please Sell Me a Linux License, Please, Please, Please.
October 6, 2003... We gather that if it comes to litigation the SCO Group might follow the example of that other highly unpopular organization these days, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is suing hundreds of "just-plain-folks" who have...

DOJ May Challenge Oracle Bid for PeopleSoft.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... USA Today quoting nameless lawyers said to be familiar with the situation thinks the Justice Department is revving up to challenge Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft. It says there are two dead giveaways to the agency's thinking. First, it's taking...

Acronis Gets Turbolinux Deal.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Turbolinux - now there's a name you don't hear much anymore - has cut a deal to bundle the Acronis PartitionExpert software with its Turbolinux 10 Desktop. Terms of the agreement weren't disclosed. The stuff, which has been localized, has both...

Wind River To Support Linux.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... RTOS leader Wind River Systems said Thursday it would add Linux support to its tools although the open source operating system competes with its proprietary VxWorks operating system not to mention the fact that back in 2001 Wind River picked up...

SCO Gets Extension in IBM Case.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The SCO Group has filed for an extension in its famous suit against IBM. It says only two of the four patents IBM is now claiming SCO infringed are registered with the US Patent And Trademark Office and that it asked IBM for documents providing...

OpenOffice 1.1 in the Can.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The disruptive forces of OpenOffice.org out to destroy the foundations of the Evil Empire's power are rejoicing because on Wednesday they reached that suite nirvana known as OpenOffice 1.1, which is now finished - a term we use loosely - and...

Lindows Courts Spanish Speakers Lindows is getting ready to support Spanish speakers. It's.
October 6, 2003... reportedly near to bringing out LindowsEspa[+ or -]ol. It's taking advanced orders. The stuff will cost 50 bucks.

SCO Snubs the Little Guy.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... If you're not a big company - like one of the 1,500 Fortune 1000 and Global 500 set that the SCO Group sent letters to warning them that Linux might cause them a legal liability - then SCO's not much interested in selling you one of its...

SuSE Chases Microsoft's SME Server.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... SuSE this week started rolling out its Standard Server 8 targeting small and mid-size companies in a move evidently meant to match Microsoft's pushing out its $600 or $1,500 anti-Linux Small Business Server 2003. SuSe claims its stuff has a low...

Lindows Targets Spanish Market.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Lindows.com is making a push into the Spanish-speaking market with LindowsEspa[+ or -]ol, hoping to make hay with the 332 million people who speak Spanish and who it figures live mainly in cost-sensitive countries such as Mexico. The software...

IBM Entices Russia & the UK To Dabble in Linux.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... IBM is tickled to death that the UK and Russia are inching closer to Linux. The company wants to see the moves as part of a wider trend among governments to adopt Linux, pointing to last week's announcement by Massachusetts that it would favor...

OSDL Advances Carrier Grade Requirements to Rev 2.(Open Source Development Lab's Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition )(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab is now up to rev 2.0 of its Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition (CGL). OSDL says new version includes 40 enhancements and "major" advances in security, high availability and clustering. Some of the...

CA Offers Up Three Living Sacrifices to Government Probe.
October 13, 2003... Computer Associates, whose books and policies are still under government investigation, has tossed three of its top financial people out on their ear after the company's Audit Committee found certain revenues were prematurely recognized in CA's...

Blade Vendors Told To Standardize.(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
October 13, 2003... The blades business ain't gonna soar the way some people think and grow at a compound annual rate of 77% through 2007 when it's supposed to be worth $4 billion unless the industry standardizes, according to the market researchers at Venture...

IBM Steals HP Disaster Recovery Chief.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... IBM has poached the head of HP's disaster recovery unit John Jackson three month after he arrived at HP from Comdisco, where he ran its disaster recovery operation according to Gary McWilliams of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story....

There'll Always Be a Microsoft.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft will continue to dominate in operating systems through 2007 despite the advances of Linux, according to IDC. As of last year, Microsoft, up 12.4% in Windows revenues, held 93.8% of the client market and 55.1% of the server market....

Dell Claims $60b is within Reach.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Dell president Kevin Rollins had a reassuring little tte--tte with Wall Street Wednesday on the company's long-term strategy and competitive position. Rollins had nothing to say about the current quarter, but claimed Dell is "on track" to...

HP Smells Blood in the Water.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... With Sun hemorrhaging, Hewlett-Packard is offering Sun customers up to $25,000 to defect to its Linux platforms. It's offering assessment, porting and migration services for moving applications from Solaris to Linux. According to HP's...

Sun Loses its Cool - Barrons.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Barrons says that "The market is losing patience with McNealy." In a story called "Is Sun in Eclipse?" that follows on the heels of Merrill Lynch's open letter to Scott and the Sun board telling them to get it together after the company said it...

CIOs Skeptical of Linux.(UK Tech Summit )(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... CIOs representing such as the London Stock Exchange and British Airways told the UK Tech Summit in London that they're using Linux somewhere in their infrastructures but that the OS isn't for mission-critical applications, mostly out of concern...

Whatever Happened to the Database?(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... On the heels of Merrill Lynch telling CEO Scott McNealy how to run Sun, Goldman Sachs' ace analyst Rick Sherland says that Oracle "needs to add to its product portfolio and expand faster growing market segments. PeopleSoft," he says, "could...

Xeon DP Hits 3.2GHz.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Intel has pushed the dual-processor Xeon DP chip to 3.2GHz with 1MB of cache and a 533MHz systems bus and is charging $851 each in 1,000-unit quantities. Systems started shipping this week. It drops into either Intel's e7501 server chipset or...

PeopleSoft Promises Better-than-Expected Results.
October 13, 2003... Based on preliminary results, PeopleSoft expects its Q3 results to exceed expectations. It says that license revenues, total revenues and earnings per share would surpass its guidance. It attributed the results to its "powerful combination"...

Microsoft Upbeat about CRM App.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft is tooting its horn that its CRM application is seeing significant momentum in the marketplace. Redmond claimed that a thousand customers were using rev 1 of the application already. Launched in January for mid-market...

Sun Cluster Guru Reportedly Defects to Microsoft.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun has lost its distinguished engineer and chief technical officer for N1 products Yousef Khalidi, according to The Register, the British zine. Khalidi, who is also credited with being the key force behind Sun Cluster 3.0 and much of Solaris...

Siebel Gets Cozier with IBM & Microsoft.
October 13, 2003... Siebel and IBM have moved on to the second stage of their alliance after getting together on Siebel's newfangled software-as-a-service scheme last week. Among other things, the twosome says that in the name of the nascent on-demand...

Solaris for Opteron.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun, which has been cheering the Opteron on from the sidelines for some time, has finally decided to take the plunge with AMD's hybrid 32/64-bit processor. Sun software czar Jonathan Schwartz said Thursday that the company plans to put out...

IBM, Infrastructure Simplification & Symphonies.
October 13, 2003... IBM is currently enamored of the idea of pairing mainframes with blade servers so when it trotted out its new model 24- or 32-way T Rex 990 mainframes the other day it proposed giving customers BladeCenter technology at a reduced cost if they...

Sun Claims 300k Licenses for Solaris 9 x86.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun claims to have 300,000 registered licenses for the Intel-running Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition. It claims it's a solid foundation for its newfangled Project Orion middleware stack and web infrastructure software now officially tagged the...

A Little Something for Your Code Name Collection.(Intel's Xeon MP blade code-named McCarran)(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Apparently we should be standing by for a little number out of Intel code named McCarran, said to be a Xeon MP blade.

Lehman Reserved on Athlon64.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Lehman Brothers is betting that the AMD Athlon64 desktop chip won't reach one million units till Q3 of next year at the earliest. The broker, which doesn't think Microsoft will have Office ready for the part before Q2 or Q3, says it has...

SuSE Claims Desktop Momentum.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... SuSE, which Sun is supposed to use for its yet-to-be-delivered Mad Hatter project aka the Java Desktop System, claims to be seeing "tremendous momentum in the Linux desktop space" and it thinks that with the Microsoft-rabid Sun getting in the...

Every Boy's Dream.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... We imagine - though we don't know for sure because they wouldn't let us on Little League - that if every boy doesn't want to play professional sports then he wants to own a professional team. Ex-Red Hat CEO Bob Young has realized that dream. He...

SCO Gets $50m Investment.
October 20, 2003... In a surprise move IBM should be interested in, BayStar Capital and some other still-unidentified institutions have put 50 million buck in the SCO Group for a 17.5% position. Together with what SCO already had in the bank, the investment...

The 'Divine Right' Security Attributed to Linux Misleading: Study.(by mi2g)
October 20, 2003... UK market researcher mi2g, which has specialized in such statistics for years, says that in the last 12 months 56.2% of all successful overt digital attacks were made against Linux servers whereas only 31.9% of all breaches were successful...

Jabber Model Spreads to Federated ID.(Ping Indentity)
October 20, 2003... Year-old federated identity management start-up Ping Identity, a Denver ISV whose CEO is Andre Durand, the guy who started Jabber Inc, has picked up $5 million in VC funding from General Catalyst Partners, an early stage investor, and some...

MySQL Buys Alzato.(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... MySQL AB has acquired Swedish cluster specialist Alzato. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded by Ericsson three years ago, Alzato has a high-availability data management system called NDB Cluster for the telecom/IP environment. ...

Cisco Falls Afoul of GPL.
October 20, 2003... Forbes Magazine repeated an interesting little tale this week that was leaked to an Internet chat room about how the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is trying to get Cisco to open source the Linux- based software that runs the popular $129...

Transmeta Claims Moore's Law Will Get its Comeuppance.
October 20, 2003... Transmeta, the exotic x86 house, is back for a second try at the brass ring having flubbed it big-time the first time through. This time it's taking on both Intel and Moore's (industry-held-sacred) Law. It claims Moore's Law will ultimately be...

Brazil Sticks its Toe in Open Waters.(Linux OS)
October 20, 2003... Having made some process peddling Linux to Munich, the UK and Russia, IBM has now enticed Brazil to give the operating system a flyer. For whatever it's worth IBM says it's got a letter of intent claiming the country and the company both share...

2.6 Watch.(Linus Torvalds )(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... Linus Torvalds wants to focus on the stability of the next- generation 2.6 Linux kernel rather than patches "that don't fix a real and clear bug," he said. The widgetry, which is supposed to be able to scale to 16 processors, is intended for...

Is Oracle Signaling its Run at PeopleSoft is Over?(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... Oracle has extended its $19.50-a-share hostile tender offer for PeopleSoft for the fifth time, moving it from Friday October 17 until midnight of New Year's Eve. It's still waiting for the Justice Department to say something one way or...

Big Country, Big Grid.(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... IBM is bragging about the so-called China Grid, by its account one of the biggest and most ambitious grids anywhere, certainly the biggest one China has undertaken. It'll eventually be capable of 15 trillion calculations a second, a number...

OSDL Sets Up CGL Certification.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) says the Linux distributions can self-certify that they meet the requirements of the new Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 (CGL 2.0) specification that pushes on security, high availability and clustering. The...

Na, Na, Ya Can't Scare Us.(Credit Suisse's report on Linux usage)(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... It was Credit Suisse's turn to do one of those quarterly Fortune 1000 CIO surveys that brokerages are fond of doing and it said it was "surprised by the percentage of participants that indicated Linux usage for both mission-critical...

Betcha Intel Dubs It a Dog.
October 20, 2003... The papers that AMD, which turned up at Microprocessor Forum this week, is working on the, ahem, K9, successor to Opteron, with expectations of having samples at least by the second half of '05. In keeping with current fashions, it's supposed...

Lindows Sells StarOffice for Windows.(packaged with its OS)
October 20, 2003... Lindow.com, the little company trying hard to be a thorn in Microsoft's side, has packaged up its OS together with StarOffice 7 for Linux and StarOffice 7 for Windows and is selling the online bundle for $59.95. StarOffice is supposed to retail...

Another Linux Win Rumored.(China Mobile)(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... Travelers claim that China Mobile is moving a lotta servers, maybe as many as 25,000, to Linux.

IBM: Good, Not Great.
October 20, 2003... **************************************** IBM Reports September EPS of $1.02, with Revenue Up 9% to $21.5 billion Prior to Currency Translations, Revenue Increased 4% Prior To Services/Software Acquisitions, Revenue in Constant Currency...

Intel Thrills Market.(Q3 earnings)(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... Intel came in with earnings of $1.7 billion, or 25 cents a share, on $7.8 billion for the third quarter surpassing its improved guidance. Earnings were up 85% sequentially, 142% year-over-year, and revenues were up 15% sequentially, and 20%...

Sun Sinking, Sinking, Sinking.(revenue losses)(Brief Article)
October 20, 2003... Sun reported lower year-over-year revenues for the tenth consecutive quarter Thursday. In line with its September 29 warning, the one sick puppy lost $286 million, nine cents a share, on revenues of $2.54 billion in its first fiscal...

HP CIO Dead.(Bob Napier)(Obituary)
October 20, 2003... Bob Napier, who got to keep his job as Compaq's CIO when the company merged into HP and is credited with having the internal HP and Compaq computer systems merged their first day of business as a combined concern so they could hit the ground...

Novell Tried To Buy SuSE, Sources Say.(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Well, well, well, well, well. We have it on very good authority that Novell just tried and failed to buy SuSE to add to its Ximian acquisition. Apparently $120 million for such a thing is a little rich for its taste. The German government,...

Sun Reportedly Casts Fujitsu as its Backdoor in the Alamo.
October 27, 2003... See, there, what did we tell you? We said as long ago as last December that there were rumors Sun would try to use Fujitsu as the backdoor in its Alamo (CSN No 479). Well now the Japanese press has gotten wind of top-level discussions...

Red Hat Enters Phase 2 of How To Get Paid.(Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0)
October 27, 2003... Without much fanfare leading up to it - though everyone knew it was coming - Red Hat Wednesday said Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 had arrived and that it meant its position in the data center was solidified. It is the company's second-generation...

SuSE Takes on Exchange 2003.(with SuSE Openexchange Server 4.1)
October 27, 2003... SuSE is upping the ante in competing with you-know-who and says that on November 17, a Monday, it will upgrade its all-in-one groupware- collaboration-and-messaging widgetry to Openexchange Server 4.1. SuSE held back its announcement until...

ClearSpeed Technology Aims To Commoditize HPC.(Clear Speed Technology CS301)
October 27, 2003... An outfit called ClearSpeed Technology says it's got a piece of silicon that can do 25 GigaFLOPs at peak, in other words 25 billion floating point operations a second, and it can be stuck in an x86 box. The widget, the first in a family of...

Grids Don't Have To Be a Purgatory.(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Inferno, the disowned Bell Labs network operating system, is now supporting grid computing. Its handlers, Vita Nuova, the British firm with the Italian name pronounced like it's Latin, claim that "Grids need not be as difficult to design,...

HP May Spend $5b To Buy Cap Gemini, Report Says.
October 27, 2003... According to the UK's Sunday Times, which fancies it does investigative journalism and, in keeping with that fancy, quotes unnamed industry sources, HP, which lost out on PricewaterhouseCoopers, is still interested in Cap Gemini Ernst & Young...

Lindows Makes Apps Push.(LindowsDeveloper Edition)(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Lindows.com has now concocted a LindowsDeveloper Edition that it says is designed specifically for software developers and includes a hundred-odd development tools built in. It's meant to jumpstart a larger desktop Lindows software library...

Did You Look under the Bed?(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Conspiracy theorists are convinced that Microsoft is somehow behind that miraculous $50 million investment that the SCO Group just pulled in from BayStar Capital and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Linux RTOS House Gets Investment.(TimeSys Corp.)
October 27, 2003... TimeSys Corporation, the seven-year-old Linux RTOS house, has gotten an $8 million investment, at least the second time it's been to the well. It pulled in $15.5 million a year ago March. The new money comes from Adams Capital Management as...

Lindows Aims To Make Money Off of Free Phone Calls.(with SIPphone's SIPadapter)(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Lindows.com founder Michael Robertson's other company SIPphone Inc says it's got a $80 SIPadapter the size of a pack of cards that makes it possible to call for free from any standard phone. Two of them will cost $150. Of course the...

EC Formulates Open Source Guidelines.(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... The European Commission has come up with some migration guidelines to help public administrators decided if and how they should make the jump to open source software. The guidelines, which were run up by Netproject Ltd, a British consultancy,...

Lehman Thinks Yamhill is Real.(Intell microprocessor)(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... Dan Niles, Lehman Brothers' ace analyst, believes that Intel is going to release a rival to AMD's 64-bit hybrid x86 chip, the Athlon64, in the first half of next year and that it could trash AMD's processor sales. Niles is figuring on the...

Permabit Takes on EMC with New CAS System; Names New CEO.
October 27, 2003... A small Cambridge, Massachusetts-based storage start-up called Permabit is challenging storage behemoth EMC with a new application aimed at tapping into the emerging market for content addressed storage. EMC was the first to target the...

Grids Need a Killer App: Summit.(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... "Grid computing is poised to cross over from the world of high- performance, but esoteric, research computing to being a viable option for commercial enterprise IT architectures. Enterprise customers are curious about grid and interested in...

Microsoft Questions Linux Momentum.(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... According to Microsoft, Linux momentum has been tapering off. Windows Server 2003 has been deployed on 185,000-odd web sites, 16,000 of them switching over from Linux and 2,000 from Solaris.

PeopleSoft Reports Loss but Wows Street.(Q3 2003)(Brief Article)
October 27, 2003... PeopleSoft lost $7.3 million, or two cents a share, on revenues of $624 million in Q3 but still beat expectations. Excluding certain accounting adjustments related to its acquisition of JD Edwards, PeopleSoft said it would have earned 17...