Linux Gram articles from October 2004

Linux Gram archives from October 2004

Ex-Microsoft Boys Set Out To Create a Billion-Dollar Open Source Company.(SourceLabs Inc )
October 4, 2004... Oh my God, two ex-Microsoft chaps are doing an open source start-up. Where did Bill Gates go wrong? The name of the place is SourceLabs Inc and if two Microsoft veterans backing open source isn't radical enough, the outfit is making a...

Open Source Champions Shoot Down Microsoft FAT Patent.(Public Patent Foundation)
October 4, 2004... At the behest of the open source-loving Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has rejected all of the claims made in one of the four patents that Microsoft holds on the Windows file system. PUBPAT...

Red Hat Winds Up with Netscape IP.
October 4, 2004... Red Hat has signed a definite agreement with AOL to buy Netscape's LDAP Directory Server and Certificate Management System for $23 million. The deal is expected to close by the end of November. The price is a combination of $20.5 million in...

French To Try To Create Ultra-Secure Linux.
October 4, 2004... The French Ministry of Defense, such as it is, will be shelling out seven million euros over the next three years to underwrite the development of a multi-level-secure Linux system that meets highfalutin CC-EAL5 certification. The system...

Unisys Mainframes To Support Linux.
October 4, 2004... Unisys is going to start supporting Linux - both Red Hat and SuSE - on its mainframes - both on the Libra line that dates back to Burroughs and the Dorado line that goes back to Univac, the company's two ancestors. The giant ClearPath...

Linux PCs Boost Windows Piracy.
October 4, 2004... Gartner says the anecdotal evidence is right. Users rip Linux out of their cheap new PCs and replaced it with Windows. In emerging markets, it's generally a pirated version of Windows, meaning Linux' desktop penetration, which isn't much...

Mainsoft To Help Move .NET Apps to Linux Mainframes.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Mainsoft, the .NET-to-Java tools merchant and Microsoft partner, is pushing into the Linux mainframe world with the new 1.5 rev of Visual Mainwin for J2EE kit that's coming out. It says that the thing can be used to migrate .NET apps to the...

HP Drops Itanium Workstations.
October 4, 2004... The poor little under-achieving money-eating Itanium chip has been rejected by one of its own parents now. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, HP, the widget's co-developer, is going to drop its line of Itanium...

Microsoft Open Sources Wiki Code.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Microsoft has acted against type again and open sourced its third piece of software. This time it's .NET code for a thing called FlexWiki, an authoring environment used to create wikis, sites whose users can make additions or edit any page...

Lost Sheep Returning to the Fold.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... A story that eWeek ran the other day said that some Linux users have grown impatient enough with the upstart operating system's application incompatibilities, poor performance, escalating support costs and an immature ecosystem that they're...

CA Swings Ax, Fells 5% of its People.
October 4, 2004... Computer Associates came out swinging the ax Wednesday saying that it's going to fire about 5% of its 15,000 employees in the next month, leaving the door open for further layoffs down the road. It has been widely rumored that the company...

IBM Finally Comes Out of the Closet.(District Court for Eastern Michigan)(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... IBM has been smacked up side the head by the District Court for Eastern Michigan for "gross negligence" in the way it repeatedly swore - under oath - that source code sought as part of court- ordered discovery by Compuware, which is suing IBM...

Sanjay Loses Perks.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Computer Associates, which has been indulgent to a fault with its former CEO Sanjay Kumar, has finally taken a few perks away from him now that he's been indicted, had his passport lifted and is out on $5 million personal recognizance bond. ...

HP Headsman Reportedly Sharpens Ax.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... In August when HP CEO Carly Fiorina began lopping off heads in revenge for the company Q3 earnings miss, one head that curiously remained on its owner's shoulders was Ann Livermore's. She had ultimate oversight for the offending server and...

OSDL Hires New Engineering Director.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has hired Thomas Hanrahan out of IBM's neighboring Linux Technology Center in Beaverton, Oregon, to be its new director of Linux engineering. OSDL basically says that Hanrahan has inherited half of...

Conspiracy Theories Run Riot at CA.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Late last week Computer Associates was supposedly going to name a permanent CEO in 30 days. Now, right away it was apparent that something was wrong with that picture. Why the heck it would take the board 30 days if all they were going...

Red Hat To Buy Back Stock.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... With its stock price half of what it was back in June before it suffered a couple of company-inflicted misadventures - like the way it handled the departure of its CFO - Red Hat has decided to buy back $100 million worth of its shares either on...

Red Hat Releases Linux 4 Beta.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Red Hat has released the first beta of its next Linux cut, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, the first commercial Red Hat to use the 2.6 Linux kernel. The beta covers the company's AS, ES and WS servers and its Desktop client and will run on 32- and...

Topspin Bundles Up Utility Computing.(Brief Article)
October 4, 2004... Topspin has come up with a Grid-to-Go program to deliver an open standards-based starter kit that's supposed to - poof - create utility computing that's a tenth the cost of proprietary utility computing. The offer, good till the end of the...

Sun Settles Kodak Suit;Licenses Patents.
October 11, 2004... Right before what promised to be a seven-day trial to decide whether it would have to pay Eastman Kodak a possible $3 billion for trespassing on three of its patents, Sun decided to settle out-of- court and pay Kodak $92 million in cash to get...

In a Move Out of the 'Godfather,' Ellison Bumps Off P'soft Chief.
October 11, 2004... Last Friday the industry witnessed one of its great occasional psychodramas, the kind of stuff people dine out on for years. The PeopleSoft board up and fired CEO Craig Conway, the architect, as some would say, of its defenses against...

Goldman Sachs Says Desktop Linux Could Exploit Microsoft's Weaknesses.(Goldman Sachs and Co.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, Microsoft's biggest Wall Street booster, conceded the other day that Linux' advance on the desktop needs to be monitored. Not that he's particularly worried about Linux slowing Microsoft's growth any...

SuSE Revs its Desktop Kit.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Novell said at the LinuxWorld Expo in London the other day that it would rev its desktop system early next month and wheel out SuSE Linux Professional 9.2, good for 32-bit as well as the 64-bit Athlon and Intel Extended Memory 64 platforms. ...

First Turbolinux Update in Two Years.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Turbolinux has revved its server for the first time in two years and will start selling the thing in Japan at the end of the month at three price points that differ in how much support goes with each of them. It'll start selling what it calls...

Fox News Meets Dan Rather, Computer-Style.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... SCO is getting ready to unveil its counter-Groklaw site, sort of the computer industry's version of Fox News meets Dan Rather. The curtain is supposed to lift on November 1 and SCO's putting a kind of self-imposed filter on the thing. To get...

CA's Watch Stops.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Two weeks ago Computer Associates said it would name a permanent CEO in 30 days. Last week it said it would name a permanent CEO in 30-45 days. This past Tuesday interim CEO Ken Cron, who wants the job permanently and is fighting off...

AT&T Scares Microsoft.(AT&T Corp.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Thanks to the spike in viruses, AT&T is evaluating both Linux and the Mac OS X as to reliability, security, productivity and TCO. The company said it had no immediate plans to swap out its 70,000 Windows desktops. The testing, being done by...

More Intel Servers Selling But For Less.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Prudential is modeling a 19.5% year-over-year global increase in server shipments this year, a 24.2% increase next year and a 13.8% increase in 2006. Its numbers are based on continued strength in SMB demand and large corporate spending...

AMD64 Picks Up Steam; Gives Company Intel-like Aura.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... AMD, which is being measure by the press for the "next Intel" thanks to its first flush of success with the AMD64, said its Q3 sales came in a bit short of guidance, though net income improved somewhat sequentially It pre-announced its...

Red Hat Adds to Board.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Red Hat has tapped Edward Kozel, who used to be Cisco's CTO back in the early says and as head of business development made 22 of its many acquisitions, for its board. Kozel, also a Boeing vet, is currently a managing director with...

NC Redux.(Network Computer)
October 11, 2004... PMC-Sierra Inc, which makes Mips chips, has picked up the network computer banner that Oracle let slip in the mud years ago after it failed to rouse the industry into making $500 NCs - a price point that Larry Ellison reported got wrong when he...

SteelEye Releases LifeKeeper for LAMP.(SteelEye Technology Inc.)(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... SteelEye Technology has put out a release of its LifeKeeper high- availability software for the LAMP platform, the acronym for the Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP/Perl/Python script engines combo used for building web sites....

Intel Supports AMD64.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Intel wishes it weren't doing this, but the other day it came out with a suite of tools that support its AMD64-like Intel EM64T widgetry. In fact the tools will work on AMD's chips. The toolkit, which currently includes compilers,...

Gluecode Donates BPM Engine to Apache.(Gluecode Software)(business process management)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Gluecode Software, an open source application infrastructure house, has pitched Project Agila over the wall to the Apache Software Foundation expecting the embeddable open source business process management (BPM) engine to become part of...

Mountain View Adds New Support to PowerCockpit.(Mountain View Data Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... Mountain View Data Inc has revved its PowerCockpit provisioning software to support the major Linux distributions, AMD's 64-bit systems and Linux 2.6 kernel deployment. It says the stuff has been tested on HP, IBM and Rackable server and...

Audience for RealPlayer 10 for Linux Enlarged.(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... RealNetworks has broadened the potential audience for its RealPlayer 10 media jukebox software by offering the Linux version in nine additional languages and the Mac version in four. RealPlayer 10 for Linux was developed in cooperation with...

SCO Watch.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 11, 2004... SCO has been back filing more motions in the IBM case. It says it was trying to hurry the court schedule along afraid that Judge Dale Kimball might go ahead and rule on IBM's partial summary judgment motion before the magistrate, Brooke...

China's Xenophobia Puts Sun at Risk.
October 18, 2004... The Chinese government has reportedly decided to clean up its act and has ordered the country's cities and provinces to stop using pirated software. They are reportedly supposed to buy and deploy legal software by the end of next year. The...

Novell Warns Microsoft Off with Threat of Mutually Destructive Deterrence.
October 18, 2004... Novell, in a less than subtle warning to Microsoft, did a little saber rattling on Tuesday when it issued a statement saying it would defend any patent threat to its open source software with its patent portfolio. "Vendors that assert...

Hey, Wanna Duck IP Issues?(Black Duck)(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Given the mounting concern over the IP liabilities that open source use may present, Black Duck's timing is impeccable. It's about to fill out its software compliance management suite with the piece meant for lawyers so they can keep track...

SGI Takes On the Graphics PC.
October 18, 2004... SGI has taken its tradition Mips/Irix Onyx workstation and morphed it into a standards-based Itanium/Linux box it's calling the Prism - the company's very first Linux workstation - though it hates it when we call the widgetry a workstation -...

MontaVista To Push Linux into Hard Real-Time.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... MontaVista has launched an initiative to improve Linux' native real- time responsiveness by "orders of magnitude" by extending it to achieve hard real-time performance. The company is hosting an Open Source Real-Time Linux Project and has...

OpenOffice Turns Four.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... My, how time flies. It appears that OpenOffice is four-years-old and to celebrate its friends are bragging about the reported 40 million OpenOffice/StarOffice downloads, about how the European Union has recommended that OpenOffice become its...

SCO Watch.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... SCO, whose business, such as it is, could use some bucking up, is going to distribute Microlite's BackupEdge backup, restore and disaster recovery widgetry for SCO UnixWare and OpenServer outside North America. The deal is exclusive.

Unisys as Border Patrol.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Unisys will be peddling its ES7000 behemoths to airport facilities and border control checkpoints with IdentiPort, Linux software that combines face recognition, document authentication and fingerprint verification technologies in a single...

Paris May Switch Out Windows Boxes.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Reports out of Paris say the city is entertaining a proposal to exchange its 17,000 Windows desktops and servers for Linux written by Unilog, the same consulting outfit that did a feasibility study for Munich. Microsoft is fighting back,...

Imagine, a Supercomputer Compiler for Embedded.(Reservoir Labs)
October 18, 2004... Under a new strategic partnership, New York-based Reservoir Labs is going to peddle SGI's drop-dead supercomputer-class Blackbird compiler to the embedded market - those nascent next-generation multi-core "inconceivable-a-few-years-ago"...

So Much for a Harvard Education.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... If there's a palace coup and nobody except the guy whose ambitions were stymied realizes it, does that qualify as a palace coup? Reportedly such a thing has quietly happened at Novell. Novell vice- chairman Chris Stone supposedly went off to...

Red Hat To Take Another Shot at Embedded.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Red Hat has started a so-called Runtime Partner Program intended to supplant proprietary embedded solutions and homegrown embedded operating systems with its brand of Linux. It's got in mind hardware appliances, network servers, telecom...

Novell Schedules Open Enterprise Server.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Novell's Open Enterprise Server, its mix of NetWare and SuSe Linux, is supposed to start shipping in February after its closed beta ends after Thanksgiving and its open beta begins.

Diamond To Peddle RTLinuxPro.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... FSMLabs has inked a distribution deal with embedded board vendor Diamond Systems to push its RTLinuxPro hard real-time Linux. The Socorro, New Mexico-based FSMLabs expects the deal to garner greater exposure for its RTLinuxPro with...

HP To Resell PathScale.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... HP is going to resell PathScale EKO Compiler Suite, which is supposed to accelerate Linux clusters, with both its AMD and Intel servers.

HP To Build Itanium Blade.(Brief Article)
October 18, 2004... Illuminata is expecting HP to turn up in the first half of next year with an Itanium-based BladeSystem, its first blade to run HP-UX. Illuminata says it will contribute to cutting the price of HP-UX servers - even more when Itanium and Xeon...

IBM Tells SCO Court It Can't Find AIX-on-Power Code.(Advanced IBM Unix)(International Business Machines Corp)(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
October 25, 2004... SCO and IBM met in federal court in Utah again Tuesday for another go-round over the discovery that IBM hasn't produced in SCO's $5 billion lawsuit against it. At the hearing, one of SCO's lawyers, another young thing from Boies, Schiller...

VA Linux Class Action To Go Forward.
October 25, 2004... Three hundred and ten IPO class actions were filed after the bubble burst in 2001 charging fraud under the 1993 Securities Act. All of them were consolidated in the Southern District of New York under Judge Shira Scheindlin. Scheindlin...

Red Hat Raids Sun's Executive Suite.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Red Hat, whose business has been built on raiding Sun's business, has now picked off one of its execs. Red Hat has named Karen Tegan-Padir, who had been VP of engineering for J2EE platforms and application server products at Sun, VP of...

SGI To Open Source SpeedShop.(Silicon Graphics Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... SGI says it's developing a new open source version of its traditionally Irix-based SpeedShop performance analysis tool to accelerate high-performance Linux-based systems. It'll be called Open/SpeedShop and should be ready in 2006. ...

BMC Cuts Red Hat Integration Deal.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... BMC Software has cut a deal with Red Hat to deliver cross-platform IT management solutions. They're going to tighten up the integration between BMC's Marimba Server and client management widgetry and the Red Hat Network for application...

Unisys Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Lab )(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Unisys, until recently one of the most stalwart of Microsoft's followers, has joined the Open Source Development Lab in the name of Linux in the data center. It has also tied up with the SAS Institute to advance 64-bit business...

Cogent Makes Linux & Windows Exchange Data.(Cogent Real-Time Systems)(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Ontario-based Cogent Real-Time Systems says the latest release of its Cascade DataHub and Cascade Connect middleware will let Linux and a lot of Windows programs exchange data in real-time across a network or the Internet without doing a heap...

Black Duck Lowers Price.(Black Duck Software Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Black Duck has changed the price of its brand new lawyer-targeted protexIP/license management service, the stuff that's supposed to help lawyers keep track of the hundreds of open source licenses, analyze the issues created by developers...

Metapa Gets Another $8m.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Metapa, a Sherman Oakes, California business intelligence house that does Linux-based database clustering, has picked up $8 million in C series funding to advance its sales and marketing and further develop its Cluster Database software. ...

SAS Hired Ex-Red Hat CFO.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Kevin Thompson, the former Red Hat CFO whose badly managed departure knocked the stilts out from under the company's stock price four months ago, a decline it has yet to recover from, has gone to work for the SAS Institute as its CFO, a job...

Red Hat Backs Anti-Patent Push.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Red Hat, MySQL and an outfit called 1&1 that's part of the $500 million German-based United Internet group are underwriting a new lobbying campaign, organized by open source activist Florian Mueller of SWM Software-Marketing GmbH, to try to...

Timesys Meets Carrier Grade Spec.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Timesys, the RTOS house, has become the first company to register a Linux distribution that meets the Open Source Development Lab's Carrier Grade Linux Definition 2.0.1 specification. The Timesys code runs on both PowerPC and x86 platforms with...

AMD Goes to Sanmina.(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... With Celestica, which made Opteron boxes for it, going through financial contortions, and closing down parts of its loss-making server operations - like the key unit that sold to the channel - AMD has cut a deal with that other contract...

Apple Upgrades Xserve RAID.(Redundant Array of Independent Disks)(Brief Article)
October 25, 2004... Apple has enhanced its Xserve RAID storage system to provide up to 5.6TB of capacity. At its maximum capacity, the new rack storage system features 14 400GB drives with 8MB of cache per drive. The upgrade also includes dual RAID...