InfoWorld - Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and CTO at the Linux Foundation. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena versus Linux.
PC Magazine - OpenOffice.org said Wednesday that it had made the beta version of OpenOffice 3.0 available for download. On tap: a better "Start Center," and improvements in the Calc spreadsheet application.
InfoWorld - Capabilities to integrate workflows between software developers and artists are being developed for NetBeans, Sun's open source IDE, Sun Vice President James Gosling said this week.
InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems officials on Monday acknowledged issues the company has had to deal with in offering products such as the OpenSolaris OS and Java via an open source business model.
HP is racing to the rescue of those threatening to drown in their own data, but that Web 2.0 lot had better be able to hold on until the fourth quarter when HP can deliver what it calls 'Extreme' storage, the NAS-style ExDS9100. It's a 10U BladeSystem that can hold 820TB of SATA-based data and through the wonders of HP's PolyServe clustering can be strung together into a multi-petabyte system - along the lines of what EMC is promising to do with Hulk and Maui widgetry - that can be managed by a single administrator.
Linspire announced the support for the Linux Mint operating system. To gain access to the free CNR Service, Linux Mint 4.0 users simply install the free CNR Client that is available at CNR.com. With Linux Mint support, CNR.com now offers its one-click software delivery service to five Linux distributions available, including Freespire 2.0, Kubuntu 7.04 & 7.10, Linspire 6.0 and Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 & 8.04 (32bit).
Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a Microsoft network using Active Directory. Oracle Linux now claims 2,000 customers give or take.
Linux programmer Hans Reiser has been found guilty of the first-degree murder of his estranged Russian-born wife Nina, who went missing after dropping their two small children with their father on Labor Day weekend 2006. Reiser, who's been in jail since October of 2006, is now looking at a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. First-degree murder assumes the killing was premeditated.
Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called 'Trends in Open Source,' a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it's still only 6% of the global spend.
Likewise Software announced support for IBM zSeries servers that are using either Red Hat or the Novell SUSE Linux platforms. Customers that rely on zSeries for their mission critical applications can now use Likewise Software products to directly join their systems to MicrosoftR Active Directory. zSeries servers are used by IBM customers for business-critical installations where scheduled and unscheduled downtime costs are high.
Microsoft and Novell have taken it into their collective head to push their peculiar axis into China - and elsewhere - to convert unsupported Linux users to SUSE. They say they've had demand 'to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software and provide interoperability and IP peace of mind,' a claim that set off guffaws across the open source community considering China's reputation for ignoring IP rights - among other civil liberties - and the fact that it's been a big-time Windows pirate.
One Laptop Per Child, the effort to put technology in the hands of third-world kids, has lost its number two guy Walter Bender, who was president, software and content until last month when he was shifted to head of deployment although not many of OLPC's novel Linux-based XO machines have been getting deployed. Bender, credited with building OLPC, has now reportedly gone off to develop XO's icon-based Sugar GU interface - meant to be an intuitive educational tool - and port it to other species of Linux besides the Red Hat Fedora operating system XO uses.
Acronis announced a partnership with Technalign to bring Acronis backup and disaster recovery software to Linux users. As an Acronis Gold Authorized Solution Provider, Technalign will be able to offer its customers Acronis True Image Echo Server for Linux software for trial and evaluation, as well as providing discounted customer support and training. Acronis True Image allows IT administrators to capture a hardware image and to restore it. The software also helps increase hardware utilization for better datacenter ROI by backing up both physical and virtual computers.
