Linux Gram articles from September 2007

Linux Gram archives from September 2007

Time Out.
September 3, 2007... Because of the Labor Day weekend the next issue of LinuxGram will be dated September 17-21. See ya.

US Court Scuppers Injunction Bid in Rare Open Source Case.
September 3, 2007... Seems a federal court judge in San Francisco has denied the plaintiff in a copyright infringement dispute over software governed by the open source Artistic License the right to seek a preliminary injunction to protect against further...

SCO Asks Leave To Appeal Novell Decision.
September 3, 2007... Having been flayed alive by a couple of federal judges in its hometown district court in Salt Lake City, SCO wants to seek succor in Denver by appealing to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit there. In a motion filed...

FSF Tries Holding Microsoft's Feet to the Fire on GPL 3.
September 3, 2007... If you cast your mind back to July 5, you'll remember that was the day that Microsoft told the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that it could take its GPLv3, rewritten in an attempt to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, and put it...

Google Apps 'Career Limiting': Burton Group.(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... "Google has caught the attention of enterprises with the low price [of $50 per user per year] of its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) solution. However, there's a catch: limited functionality and new information technology (IT) risks." ...

Wait for Longhorn Longer Still.
September 3, 2007... Microsoft was ever so prescient in calling the next Windows Server Longhorn because it's taking a formidable length of time to get here. On Wednesday, Microsoft confessed that it has been delayed still again. The company had...

Acer Buys Gateway, Sends Lenovo Back to Square One.
September 3, 2007... In a rousing early Monday morning game of checkers, Acer, the increasingly aggressive Taiwanese PC maker, wiped its nearest global rival and thorn in its side, the Communist Chinese Lenovo, off the board. Acer is buying what's left of...

California Group Takes One Last Stab at Tightening Screws on Microsoft.
September 3, 2007... The so-called California Group, the hardcore collection of states attorneys general who fought Microsoft's antitrust settlement down to the wire, have filed a brief with the court overseeing the case questioning the effectiveness of the consent...

Dell Reports Nominal Rise in Earnings.(Financial report)
September 3, 2007... Dell reported its fiscal Q2 results Thursday, a week after it confessed that its books were manipulated to meet projections, but Wall Street had to settle for a dry press release. There was no conference call to tease out color and won't be...

Vista SP1 Due Early '08.
September 3, 2007... Microsoft has now managed to articulate the thought that the first Vista Service Pack will arrive sometime in the first quarter of 2008, which, if memory serves, was when the smart money thought it would be out anyway. Expectations of...

SugarCRM Voices IPO Dreams.
September 3, 2007... SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM house, is now in beta with Sugar 5.0 and - given its success in attracting customers - the company is telling the press that it's on the road to going public sometime in the next couple of years. It...

Novell Losses Narrow.
September 3, 2007... Novell's losses, as they say, narrowed in the July quarter and it did better than Wall Street expected. It posted its results Wednesday for its third fiscal quarter and said it lost only $3 million, a penny a share, as opposed to last year...

Sourcefire Buys ClamAV.(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... Snort creator Sourcefire, the open source network security house that went public in March to subsequent poor reviews, has acquired ClamAV, a popular open source network anti-virus toolkit and associated copyrights from its developers on...

Barcelona Shipping: Report.
September 3, 2007... Lehman Brothers is pretty sure AMD has started shipping the first of the (up to 2GHz) Barcelona chips for revenue and that the widget will in fact start shipping in boxes in September. There's been concern the device would be delayed further....

Caneland Launch Imminent.
September 3, 2007... Intel is on the verge of its Caneland intro, the platform that the new Tigerton high-end Xeon MP quad fits in, the last of the Mohegans to move to the company's Core microarchitecture in the one area that AMD still has strong share in....

Microsoft Copies FDR.
September 3, 2007... In a move reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Supreme Court, it appears that Microsoft has been meeting resistance from the forces of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to the ISO standardization of its ECMA-approved Open XML format by...

Google CFO To Retire.(George Reyes, chief financial officer)(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... Google has started looking for a new CFO. The post's current occupant 53-year-old George Reyes said Tuesday that he wants to retire. Google said he'll stick around to help with the search and ensure an orderly transition, a process it expects...

Cheapo Intel Laptop Third World-Bound.
September 3, 2007... Asustek, the largest of the motherboard makers and one of the top 10 laptop makers, is supposed to launch a $199 Linux-based laptop developed with Intel and bound for the third world in September. A sister unit with more features will go for...

Google Phone Rumored Again.
September 3, 2007... The perennial rumors of a mobile phone from Google are currently in full flower with the Engadget blog claiming to have heard from reliable sources that Google's been working on a Linux mobile device OS and shopping it around to carriers and...

Well, Somebody Likes SCO.
September 3, 2007... The Savings Bank of the Russian Federation (Sberbank) is upgrading its 3,000 branch offices to SCO OpenServer 6 with more reportedly to come. SCO can thank its local reseller Business Console. Sherbank controls a quarter of Russia's national...

Barcelona Arrives.
September 17, 2007... Monday night AMD finally launched Barcelona, its first quad-core chip, the save-the-company device that proved harder to build than AMD thought it would, costing it critical quarters in the marketplace, months that have paid off nicely for...

Heavens to Betsy! Sun To Preload Windows.
September 17, 2007... The world as we knew it changed on Wednesday. That was the day that the ever-changeable Sun, once Microsoft's most scathing critic pledged to its utter destruction, ate a royal serving of crow and signed up as a Windows Server OEM for the...

Monday is Microsoft's Judgment Day.
September 17, 2007... After 17 months of thinking about it, 13 judges of the Court of First Instance in Switzerland are supposed to rule early Monday morning on Microsoft's closely watched appeal from the European Commission's 2004 monopoly abuse findings, sanctions...

Intel Served Second Statement of Objections.
September 17, 2007... The Korean Fair Trade Commission, which raided Intel's offices 18 months ago, last week sent Intel a secret statement of objections (SO) understood to resemble the antitrust charges that the European Commission made against the company six...

NetApp Sues Sun.
September 17, 2007... Network Appliance has sued Sun and its prized Zettabyte File System (ZFS), which Sun open sourced, charging seven counts of patent infringement. ZFS is one of the few innovations in Solaris that the open source community appears to be...

Capgemini To Push Google Apps.
September 17, 2007... In the first, possibly serious, quasi-defection to the online software-as-a-service Google Apps Premier Edition, Capgemini SA, the $10 billion French consultant, said Monday that it will recommend the stuff to its clients which include major...

IBM Joins OpenOffice.com.
September 17, 2007... Ahead of Sun's OpenOffice conference in a few days, Sun's new best friend, IBM, says it's joining OpenOffice.org, the anti-Office open source project, promising to contribute some Lotus code to the effort. It's going to throw its weight...

Sun Buys Lustre.
September 17, 2007... Sun is buying the open source Lustre File System along with most of the rest of Colorado-based Cluster File System's intellectual property, business assets and people on undisclosed terms for Solaris and Linux, pledging to enhance the parallel...

Intel Makes Bomb Run over Barcelona.
September 17, 2007... Monday, as AMD was in the throes of rolling out its precious Barcelona chip, Intel boosted its revenue target for this quarter from $9 billion-$9.6 billion to between $9.4 billion and $9.8 billion, citing demand for its processors and...

States Want Microsoft Consent Decree Extended.
September 17, 2007... The so-called California Group, the hardcore collection of state attorneys general who fought Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement with the US government down to the wire, has, as expected, asked the court to extend its oversight of the...

VMware Buys Management Software.
September 17, 2007... With Opsware and its management software gone to HP, VMware said Tuesday that it had acquired little-known Swiss-based Dunes Technologies for its server-based process orchestration software for virtual environments. Terms were not disclosed....

Egenera To Resell VMware.(Brief article)
September 17, 2007... Egenera, who's got its own form of virtualization, has cut a deal to start reselling VMware's Infrastructure 3 widgetry and support to customers who ask for it in Q4. VMware ESX Server, now only a part of the VMware Infrastructure, was ported...

Patent Reform Bill Passes House.
September 17, 2007... In a 220 to 175 vote, the US House of Representatives has approved watered-down, doubtlessly imperfect, perhaps even ill-advised reform legislation - said by critics to have "foreign and domestic technology thieves licking their chops" - that...

AMD Claims Advances in China.
September 17, 2007... AMD has been circulating an e-mail calling attention to the fact that Gartner is giving it almost 30% of the overall Chinese market, more than 50% of the Chinese retail market and 43% of the local desktop market. It's apparently seen...

Dell Buys All Extreme Edition Core 2 Duos Intel Can Spare.
September 17, 2007... Dell is relieving Intel of all of the new 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition processors that aren't going into games machine for its new top-of-the-line Precision M6300 Mobile Workstation with a 17-inch screen. It's unclear how long this...

Microsoft Delivers Carmine.
September 17, 2007... Racing to catch up with VMware, Microsoft has delivered Carmine or System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), the interface and controls for handling the logical partitions and VMs created by the currently available Virtual Server 2005 R2...

iPhone Sales Top a Million, Apple Says.(Brief article)
September 17, 2007... You have perhaps heard that Apple sold its millionth iPhone over the weekend after cutting its carriage trade $599 price down to $399 and doing away with the 4GB $499 model, a supposedly pre-holidays "go-for-it" move that ultimately had Steve...

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab Opens.
September 17, 2007... Microsoft and Novell have opened that interoperability lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts promised in their controversial November accord. The location is right under the nose of the disapproving Free Software Foundation. The idea is to...

SCO Heads to Court.
September 17, 2007... There'll be no running off to Denver to save the day for SCO. It had asked the Utah district court hearing its case against Novell to let it appeal the court's summary judgment finding that Novell owns the Unix copyrights to the Court of...

Intel's Barcelona Squeeze.
September 17, 2007... Lehman Brothers has been sifting through the Penryn rumors and suggests that Intel may be able to come up with a low-power 3GHz/80W chip to checkmate AMD's attempts to field what may be a 2.5GHz/75W Barcelona penciled in for December.

Longhorn RC, Viridian CTP on Tap.
September 17, 2007... From VMWorld this week, Microsoft promised the first Windows Server 2008 release candidate (RC0) would be out by the end of the month along with the very first public sighting of Viridian, its virtualization hypervisor, in the form of a...

Linux Growth Slowing: UBS.
September 17, 2007... UBS thinks that Linux fever may have mitigated. After surveying a bunch of CIOs it found that the half (47%) who aren't using Linux already pretty much intend to stay Linux-free - at least this year - a deviation from the historical trend....

Sun Continues To Tinker with its Stock.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
September 17, 2007... Having just changed its ticker symbol, belatedly, to Java, Sun now wants to do a one-for-four reverse stock split to give its shares, stuck in the doldrums for years now, more heft. It would have 25% fewer shares, but each would be worth four...

Egenera Gets New CFO.(John Mitchell, chief financial officer)(Brief article)
September 17, 2007... Egenera has finally gotten itself a new CFO after incumbent Tom Sheehan moved to Crossbeam Systems in January and its financial director John Mitchell got recruited as CFO by the New England Patriots, a hard act to compete with. It's hired...

Sun & Rambus?
September 17, 2007... There were rumors abroad on Wall Street the other day that Sun might buy Rambus.

Eudora Redux.
September 17, 2007... Eudora, the pioneer e-mail program that Qualcomm gave up on last year, has been open sourced. Mozilla is now distributing a beta version for Windows and Apple under the code name Penelope that's based on Mozilla and the Thunderbird e-mail...

Firefox Hits 400m Downloads.
September 17, 2007... Firefox, the open source IE-alternative browser, has hit 400 million downloads, a pretty milestone that does not explain how many are actually in use. US consultants Janco thinks Firefox has 19.4% of the market, up 5.6% in the last year while...

Intel Breaks Ground on China Plant.
September 17, 2007... Intel has broken ground for Fab 68, its first 300mm wafer fab in China, heck, its first in Asia. The plant, Intel's way of sucking up to the Chinese, is expected to cost $2.5 billion and be in operation in 2010. It's supposed to lure other...

Hmmm.
September 17, 2007... That cloud that formed over AMD when its chief sales and marketing officer Henri Richard, a key man, bolted right before Barcelona launched didn't clear any when he turned up in the same job at Freescale. AMD sales is now split into four...

IBM Moves Against Office.
September 24, 2007... The barbarians outside the gates of Microsoft's Office attempting to scale the walls with rope ladders and the odd shot of Greek fire have just been reinforced. IBM, which has little to lose in the exchange, has deployed a free,...

First GPL Suit Filed.
September 24, 2007... In what promises to be a closely watched case, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), watchdog of the GPL, has filed what it says is the first ever US copyright infringement suit based on an alleged violation of the GPLv2. The two...

SCO Lives To Fight Another Day.
September 24, 2007... Much to the chagrin of the open source community, the surprise of Novell and doubtless the irritation of Judge Dale Kimball, it looks like SCO - by jumping from federal court in Utah to a state bankruptcy court in Delaware - has averted being...

GlassFish Hits Next Major Rev.
September 24, 2007... According to the boys at Sun, the super-saturated market for application servers is cracking open again because of the money it takes to keep them stoked. Sun made this observation when it turned up the other day to usher in the new major...

Oracle's Bet Pays Off.
September 24, 2007... Oracle's great $25 billion acquisition gamble is paying off. The company came in with Q1 earnings up 25% to $840 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenues up 26% to $4.5 billion during a season, ending in August, that's generally its...

AMD Puts Ghidorah-like Chip on its Roadmap.
September 24, 2007... AMD says that quad-core desktop chip have taken only 2% of the market since Intel started shipping the wee beasts in November - a fact Intel lays to their premium prices and the lack of software that can take advantage of them - so a seemingly...

Intel To Surround Barcelona with Penryn Army.
September 24, 2007... Intel has confirmed that Penryn, its 45nm Barcelona slayer, will be out in November. It was studying the calendar trying to pick an auspicious day for the server and high-end desktop gismos and lighted on Monday November 12. Intel...

EC Tells the DOJ To Mind Its Own Business.
September 24, 2007... Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes got ticked off over the criticism that the US Justice Department leveled at the antitrust verdict handed down Monday against Microsoft by Europe's second most powerful court, the Court of First Instance...

Itanium Software Reaches Critical Mass.
September 24, 2007... The Itanium now claims a catalogue of 12,000 applications and next year Symantec, for one, is supposed to turn up with security software for both Windows and Linux running on the chip. Meanwhile, the Itanium Solutions Alliance says that the...

MIT To Start Kerberos Consortium.
September 24, 2007... MIT is staring up a Kerberos Consortium for the expanded, many-handed development of its old-time network authentication scheme now gone open source and built into all the major operating systems like Microsoft (think Active Directory and...

Start-up Offers the Post Office a New Business Model: Be a Cross Between Microsoft & Google.
September 24, 2007... Eventually conventional post delivered by a mailman to one's front door will go the way of the Pony Express. It's just a matter of time and technology. Of course this is a hard fact that post offices the world over have a lot of trouble...

VMware Q2 Earnings Doubled, Revenues Up 90%.(Financial report)(Brief article)
September 24, 2007... VMware's earnings more than doubled in Q2 to $34.2 million, or 10 cents a share on revenues up nearly 90% to $296.8 million, according to a filing it made with the SEC Monday. Its licensing revenue hit $204.4 million, up 80%, and its...

Does Novell Want To Torpedo OpenSolaris?
September 24, 2007... There's a theory taking shape that says the real reason Novell is non-negotiable on the matter of that license that Sun got from SCO has nothing to do with the money SCO made that Novell claims belongs to it. But rather because the license let...

Windows Server 2008 RC Due.
September 24, 2007... Seems we can expected the first Longhorn release candidate next week. It will include a test version of Viridian, Microsoft's virtualization hypervisor, which can apparently exploit a quad-core CPU.

And They Say Virginia is for Lovers...
September 24, 2007... According to CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog, Sun's 10-day-old arrangement to resell Windows on its x86 servers means Microsoft will be supporting Sun's Project Virginia, its soon-to-be announced hypervisor platform, and that Sun will be able to...

Bloomberg Says SEC Has Subpoenaed Jobs.(Steve Jobs)(United States. Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief article)
September 24, 2007... The SEC wants to depose Apple CEO Steve Jobs for the backdating case it's building against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen so it's subpoenaed him, according to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources. Given how freeform...

Dell Testing Ubuntu Upgrade.
September 24, 2007... Dell has been testing Gutsy Gibbon, the Ubuntu upgrade due the middle of next month.

Dell To Open Russian Retail Store.
September 24, 2007... Dell is going to open a retail store in Moscow next month, its first in the country.

Google Throws in its Lot with the California Group.
September 24, 2007... Google, apparently in the name of its desktop search ambitions, is supporting the California Group's attempt to get US antitrust supervision of Microsoft extended past November, when Microsoft will be pretty much free of legal oversight. It has...

UBS 3.0 Promoter Group Formed.
September 24, 2007... Intel has started a USB 3.0 Promoter Group and recruited HP, NEC, Microsoft and TI. The backward-compatible USB 3.0 is supposed to deliver 10 times the performance of USB 2.0 or around 5 Gbps and will be the first I/O interface to support both...

Microsoft Cuts Another Patent Cross-License.
September 24, 2007... Microsoft has cut its latest patent cross-license with Cadence Design Systems. This time there was no explicit mention of Linux patents. No money was mentioned either.

Moore's Law To Be Overturned Eventually: Moore.
September 24, 2007... Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said at IDF this week that Moore's Law only has "another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental" - like reaching a place where small just can't go any smaller. "You can't...