Showing headlines posted by tadelste

LAS VEGAS—To buttress its anti-Linux product strategy, The SCO Group Inc. is working with third-party partners that include MySQL AB and EnterpriseDB Corp. on databases, Borland Software Corp. on tools, and NeTraverse Inc. in the virtual server arena, SCO executives said during an annual user conference here this week. Although Oracle Corp. has declined to support to SCO's software servers, SCO already has long-time commercial database partners that include Computer Associates International Inc., Progress Software Corp., and IBM's Informix group. (Editor's Note: Could this be someone's idea of a joke?)

IBM is making good on its pledge earlier this year to invest US$100 million in Workplace software for the Linux platform. Big Blue and one of its business partners will offer new products designed to give customers more choices for collaborative solutions while helping to manage costs and increase flexibility through cross-platform support. The new products are browser-based messaging software with support for Firefox 1.0.X, and software that integrates Lotus Notes access into IBM Workplace Managed Client. Ericom, an IBM Business Partner, has a new Linux plug-in for IBM Workplace Managed Client. These solutions run on many platforms, including Linux, and offer alternatives for customers looking for a client-side Linux solutions.

The server that handles theLinux Kernel Mailing List [archive] recently got an upgrade. Matti Aarnio explains, "folks at Dell have donated a new machine to be VGER, and folks at RedHat have installed it into [a] co-location facility with [a] 1000Mbps network connection into the machine." The upgrade offers much more performance for handling the extremely high-traffic mailing list.

The Linux Kernel Mailing List is usually referred to as the lkml. It evolved many years ago from the "Linux Activist" and otherearly Linux mailing lists run in Finland. Eventually the early mailing lists were replaced by theMajordomo powered lkml, managed by David Miller at Rutgers University on a server called "vger". When David went to work at RedHat, the server and mailing list went with him. To this day, it continues to be housed at RedHat. Even though it has a kernel.org domain name, it is not actually part of the Linux Kernel Archives [story] or their infrastructure. Instead, it's included in the kernel.org domain due to its function as the primary Linux development mailing list.

With more and more African governments and policy makers looking at free and open source software as a viable alternative to proprietary software, Bridges.org today released a research report that looks at the current stat of FOSS usage on the continent and offers some suggestions on how decision makers can evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of switching to free software.

While Linux and open-source software keep making progress in the server market, could this be its time to break through in the wider enterprise? eWEEK.com looks at the state of the market from the floor of LinuxWorld San Francisco, August 2005 .

Since Knoppix burst dramatically into the Linux scene there has been an explosion of Debian-based distributions. This is welcome news to us lonely souls who have long been preaching that Red Hat is not Linux. Linux covers a far wider spectrum, as a quick peek at DistroWatch demonstrates. You'll find everything from tiny specialized Linuxes that fit on embedded devices, USB keys, floppy diskettes, or miniature CDs, to full-blown "kitchen sink" distributions that fill a DVD. Red Hat deserves a substantial amount of credit for supporting Linux development, popularizing Linux, and spawning a host of other Linux distributions. Just don't think that Red Hat is all there is to the Linux world.

LinuxWorld is in town and I haven't seen this much activity around a trade show in years. Actually, if you think about it, this is not surprising because it is becoming such a bedrock foundation of today's enterprise software world. Linux, as the spearhead for the open source movement, has also become the metaphor for how to succeed in today's IT world. The metaphor is: take advantage of community property and layer your secret/proprietary sauce on top.

New Version Provides Simplified, General Purpose Cluster File Management at No Cost

ObjectWeb, an international nonprofit consortium of companies and research organizations who have joined forces to produce next-generation open source middleware, today announced that ObjectWeb is the only nonprofit organization to be evaluated in two reports published by Gartner (http://www.gartner.com).

STRONG FOOTING. Any discussion of open-source software and the law begins with software licenses. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the world's most widely used open-source software license. It continues to be a very good license for different kinds of software. The competitors to Linux and open source always stress the risk that users and companies face if they use this software to run their business. You may be surprised to learn that the GPL has never been successfully challenged in court since it was introduced in 1991. That's a very good thing to know if your business runs Linux.

IBM plans to make its enterprise search middleware, designed to facilitate searches of unstructured data, available as open-source code. It's called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, and IBM says more than 15 knowledge-management companies intend to support it as a standard framework. The company also is wedding the latest iteration of its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition with UIMA. Its goal is to make enterprise search results more relevant and make it easier to apply third-party analytics software.

Mobility equals productivity and Motorola is delivering on both counts with three new devices: the A910, A728 and A732, designed to deliver a seamless mobile office experience for today’s on-the-go professional. Leading the charge is the A910 which delivers the freedom of WiFi connectivity plus a flexible Linux software platform for top technology performance. Technology experts and novices alike will easily navigate the handset’s features and functions using Motorola’s next generation user interface.

VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that it is working with industry leaders AMD, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Broadcom, Cisco, Computer Associates International, Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Novell, QLogic and Red Hat to advance open virtualization standards. This effort is open to vendors that share a common goal of accelerating the adoption of open standards for virtualization. VMware will contribute technologies based on its seven years of extensive innovation and market leadership to this standards development effort.

SONY HAS stuck an interesting sentence into the very last line of a release that tells us the wonderful technological heights that the console will be able to aspire to. The company said: "The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)."

Based on our Clear Choice Test of OES, we think it's a major breakthrough in Novell's long-stated intention to marry its directory and administrative applications to Linux. OES layers a highly competitive directory service onto Linux, provides decidedly evolved administrative and management components and offers very good, egalitarian client support.

More than 11,000 people, fans of the Linux operating system and its penguin mascot, dive in to the annual LinuxWorld conference at Moscone West this week. The conference, featuring 180 companies, runs today through Thursday.

Sometimes and usually in the rarest of instances, experience converges at the least-expected moment to form an important insight. Abraham Maslow would call this a peak experience or a moment in life that takes us beyond our ordinary perceptions, thoughts and feelings. I thought I had spotted such a moment in an article I read by Doc Searls. So, I called him and asked him about the following quote, which he said surfaced while on-stage giving a presentation:

A longtime Microsoft ally whose organization has been on the software maker's payroll is now President Bush's pick to be the U.S. representative to the European Union. Bush this week named C. Boyden Gray, a Washington lawyer, to the post -- which comes as the European antitrust bureaucracy is embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with Microsoft (including a 497 million euro fine). Gray's nomination, which has the rank of ambassador, requires Senate confirmation.

The idea for this list comes from Hilbert's problems. In 1900s Mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems, 10 were announced at a conference, the full list published later, very influential. He notes that all of these things were obvious, suggested or proposed by others.

Basing its claim on data from IDC's China Linux Market Analysis, 1H2005, Novell leads the Chinese Linux industry in revenue with a 32.9 percent market share, as well as in units shipped at 30 percent. "Novell grew faster than the market average in the first half of 2005," said Nielse Jiang, market analyst at IDC China, in a statement.