KIPA has been actively pushing open source use in government. One of its projects resulted in a local version of Linux (called Buyeo) now used in nearly 200 schools in South Korea.
The users are asking, ok screaming, to Microsoft to please, oh please, don’t take our XP Pro away from us. So far the big dumb company from Washington state is ignoring their customer pleas.
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Dell offers Ubuntu 7.10 on several of its systems and Dell will soon be offering Ubuntu 8.04 on its PCs, laptops, and its forthcoming UMPC. Acer will soon be offering Linpus Linux on its UMPCs and laptops.
What makes this device more interesting to us is that it runs Linux and Tagan is more than happy to let its customers modify the unit and write their own software.
Opengear has integrated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring tools in its uClinux-based remote access equipment. Opengear’s console servers (pictured at left) now include tools derived from the open source Network UPS Tools (NUT) project, says the company.
Now the GPL, the GPL and other copy-left licenses sort of prevent that from happening by saying, no; you need to share–you need to insure that the freedoms that you had when you received the work are something that can be passed on downstream. And that’s a tactical decision because the FSF who sort of puts out the GPL and continues to modify it–modifies it believes that by insuring that the downstream users have freedom and continue to have freedom that there will be more freedom overall. The more people that will release their stuff as free software, the more people will be encouraged to keep things more free in the long run and that ultimately there will be more free and open source software as a result. So–and the GPL is designed to protect that.
Not helping its case is the fact Sun put OpenSolaris under its own license – Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Sun joins a league of other vendors including Microsoft who have written their own licenses rather than use existing open-source licenses. Debian, by contrast, got to its position in the industry using a spread of different, and existing, licenses. Another complication is the Sun-domination of the OpenSolaris work.
“As new form-factors such as netbooks and MIDs (mobile Internet devices) bring Linux to users, they are often and largely unaware of the operating system. Distributions such as Ubuntu, Xandros and others have proven Linux can be as easy to use as Windows. Vendors are also making Linux easier to run, offering options to run Linux inside of Windows, alongside Windows, on USB and LiveCDs, so that complication/difficulty factor is changing,” he explained.
The news coming out of the Canonical camp is that developers will be trying to merge as many of Gobuntu’s changes back into the mainline Ubuntu code-base as possible. By default though, Ubuntu will continue to ship with firmware, binary-only drivers, and the rest.
Linux will be a top OS in MIDs (mobile Internet devices), suggests a report from Forward Concepts. The report, aimed at quantifying MID-related opportunities for chip makers, identifies TI and Qualcomm as well-positioned in an emergent market expected to reach 40 million unit shipments globally within four years.
A friend in need, the saying goes, is a friend indeed. And the next time your Windows PC goes belly-up at the worst possible time, your new best friend just might turn out to be a Linux rescue CD.
“Linux is clearly open source, but quality-wise it rivals traditionally manufactured software and has arguably some better support than commercial proprietary systems,” he added.
Opportunistic acts of desperation, living in past glory
Novell has let loose quite an ambitious press release. It claims that Novell dominates supercomputing and also suggests that it has conquered the top 3 facilities.
Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R). According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux* of choice on the world’s largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three — IBM* eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI* Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.
Red Hat is not to be neglected, but before getting to the ‘meat’ of our argument, watch this: Supercomputingonline.com did a little “copy, paste, and then edit” press routine. Sys-Con does this a lot and SJVN was accused by Dan Lyons of doing the same thing at times. It looks almost like plagiarism. See the press release from Novell (above) for comparison:
World’s three most powerful supercomputers run SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell: Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux of choice on the world’s largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three — IBM eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.
Unfortunately for Novell, the world’s most powerful supercomputer runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As this new story suggests, there’s probably a mistake here. Maybe Novell relies on out-of-date information and claims some sort of a victory while it lasts, i.e. just before Red Rat formally claims the honour.
The story Novell tells its investors and customers in this case is not new, but it seems as though it’s bound to ‘expire’. Novell take advantage of this last opportunity and SUSE on supercomputers is bad news for this reasons at the very least. Novell is Microsoft’s HPC Trojan horse (for Windows). █
As more people leave to go on vacation this time of the year, there’s also less news. Here are just a few picks which were left out from previous Saturday posts because they are not directly related to GNU/Linux.
Novell has filed its Response to Debtors’ Second Motion to Extend Exclusivity [PDF], and you could sum up its message to the court like this: Enough already, but if you do grant another extension, please let it be the last.
Virtualisation
Novell’s acquisition of PlateSpin got is a little closer to the virtualisation arena. It will have some presence in this new conference.
Stephen is a seasoned IT veteran, now in a senior Business Development role with Novell. Prior to Novell, Stephen was founder and CEO of PlateSpin and led the long-term business strategy for the company. PlateSpin was recently acquired by Novell.
Novell does not get omitted from this list, either.
Is Virtual Storage required for datacenter agility?
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It would appear to me that the last thing an IT decision-maker would want is to have processing automated and orchestrated by products such as those offered by, Cassatt, Scalent Systems, Racemi, VMLogix, Novell, Virtual Iron, or VMware, while storage (application and data files) was tied to specific systems
It’s always useful to keep track of Novell clients or companies that Novell employs. AppLabs falls into the latter category.
Global IT services firm AppLabs specializes in testing and quality management.
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Q: Who are your customers?
A: We generally have two types of client typically in the top Global 2000: established service providers who we already have a relationship in place and bring AppLabs on board to do testing as a third party. That makes up 60% of our business. The second group, making up 40% of our business, are companies that have never really done much work on outsourcing and testing is the first thing they are thing about outsourcing. Customers in the US include Novell and Sun, while in the UK we have Nationwide, Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Turquoise equities exchange, which is due to go live in October.
Here is an optimistic take on Novell’s recent financial results, which also tells the story of SiteScape’s and PlateSpin’s integration into the company,
Novell also delivered on its second strategic ambition (to grow product revenues at or better than market growth rates) for Linux, systems and resource management, and identity and access management. Workgroup product revenues did shrink, as usual, but only by 1%, and invoicing increased for the first time, positioning Novell to deliver its the third strategic ambition, to achieve workgroup product revenues of at least $285 million to $300 million (of which $209 million have already been delivered).
The SiteScape and PlateSpin acquisitions did not impact its revenues much, though. While we expect Novell to eventually leverage the latter, we have doubts about the former. We agree that SiteScape enables GroupWise to catch up with the competition, but Novell needs to do better to turn GroupWise’s improved position into actual market traction. The company believes that GroupWise will be able to piggyback on Novell’s growing success in the Linux area. We do not share this belief.
Not a busy week, but nonetheless, the week to come will be a busy one for SUSE. Novell will try to generate OpenSUSE hype amid the big release. █
Scalix, the award-winning Linux email, calendaring and messaging company, today announced the implementation of the first stage of a new, flexible, workgroup collaboration technology with a new ‘Proxy Folder’ feature in the latest 11.4 Scalix release.
For enterprises wanting to roll out SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on notebooks, the lack of 3G, or UMTS, wireless broadband card support was an annoying hole compared to the available Windows support.
With the May 21 release of SLED 10 SP2 Novell included a graphical applet and plug-and-play support for wireless broadband in addition to improvements to Network Manager, and support for new hardware devices.
This is the last weekly report about OpenSUSE which comes before the release of version 11.0. There have been no major developments in the past week, but OpenSUSE is getting some final touches.
In this article we will be covering all of the changes in and around the package management stack in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0. There have been a plethora of both visual and behind-the-scenes changes. We’ll also be talking to Duncan Mac-Vicar, YaST team lead, ZYpp and KDE developer, to find out a little more later.
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