Perens Joins SourceLabs as Developer Interface

Bruce Perens, one of the dozen or so luminaries in the open source community, has been working on books, public speaking, and private consulting engagements, at Hewlett-Packard as a consultant on its Linux strategy and as a software engineer on Linux clusters that HP managed for DreamWorks to make Toy Story II and A Bug's Life, and was a project leader on the Debian version of Linux and co-founder of Open Systems International with fellow luminary Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Perens is a hot item in the open source community, and now he is working for SourceLabs, which is trying to commercialize stacks of open source software for Linux and Windows platforms. Perens has joined the company as vice president of developer relations and policy.

"We're very excited about working with him," said Byron Sebastian, SourceLabs' CEO, in his blog entry announcing Perens' appointment. "Bruce's background in open source--as a developer, an advocate, and a policy expert--significantly adds to our expertise as we aim to provide and support systems that are both open and dependable. Bruce will help us make sure that the business model we are creating is fundamentally better for both the developers of software as well as the users of that software. Equally importantly, Bruce will continue in his numerous activities as an overall advocate for open source and the broader agenda of the movement."

In a statement, Perens said he would continue to devote half of his time to the open source community, specifically on the UserLinux distribution of the Debian implementation of Linux and working on political issues such as the expansion of software patenting.

Linux Networx Picks Seasoned Cray, SGI Exec as New CEO

Having raked in $40 million last November in venture capital funding, Linux cluster specialist Linux Networx is now building out its management team, and said last week it has hired Bo Ewald to be its new chief executive officer. Ewald has been around the supercomputer industry for a long time, and was at Cray between 1984 and 1996, eventually rising to be president and chief operating officer, before moving over to Silicon Graphics when Cray sold a portion of its business to SGI in 1996. Ewald was picked for the CEO job by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Ventures, who put up that $40 million.

In April, Linux Networx announced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had granted the company a patent for its Icebox management appliance, which is used to manage power distribution and cooling in Linux clusters while at the same time hiring Rene Copeland, who has spent two decades working at Cray and IBM, as its executive vice president of global sales and marketing.

Linux Networx said Bernard Daines would continue as the company's chairman and Dean Hutchings would continue as president and chief operating officer.

Mandriva Provides Linux Site Licenses for Academia

Franco-American Linux distributor Mandriva announced last week it would provide educational institutions with special low-cost site licenses to its Linux software to help them not spend a lot of dough on Linux support while at the same time making Linux available to their departments and students. Mandriva says while various Linux distros offer educational discounts and Linux source code is, of course, available for free, no other Linux distro offers academic institutions full support at a low price. The new Academia Program from Mandriva aims to change that.

Under the program, educational institutions can buy a site license with an unlimited number of seats at that site. Moreover, Mandriva is not requiring that these sites provide usage reports. Mandriva has created the academic distribution from its core Linux, and then tweaked it with some applications specifically aimed at educational institutions (called the Academia Add-On), such as online training modules, its knowledge base, and courseware backed by the Linux Professional Institute. Then, the institution sets up a local FTP mirror that Mandriva maintains and that students, teachers, and administrators can milk for their own personal Linux use.

Mandriva's Academia Program costs $2,999 ($2,499 euros), and the Academia Add-On collection costs $4,299 (3,499 euros).

Server Vendors Promote Command Line Standard for Server Management

Big Blue Promises to Open Up Cell Processor Specs

It is a coincidence of timing, but IBM and its partners in the Power.org consortium held a summit in Barcelona, Spain, last week, the same week that Apple said it would be moving off the PowerPC platform and onto Intel processors for its computers. IBM is obviously very keen to put the best face forward on PowerPC after Apple, one of the original PowerPC partners, split, and to that end IBM announced 11 new partners in the Power.org, adding to the 17 companies who formed the organization in December 2004. The new members are: AboveMicro, Anyka Cayman, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Celestica, DAFCA, Forte Design Automation, Rapport Incorporated, Teak Technologies, TimeLab, Universal Scientific Industrial, and Venture Corporation Limited. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the clear anchor member in Europe, having recently built a cluster from IBM's PowerPC 970-based BladeCenter JS20 blade servers in Madrid. This machine has 3,564 of IBM's 2.2 GHz PowerPC 970 chips, and delivers 20.5 teraflops of sustained number-crunching power. Most of the other members are chip designers, software firms that sell chip design applications, or provide turn-key electronics that use processors. The original Power.org members include: AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales Computers, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron. Interestingly, Thales is announcing a dual-processor embedded system based on the PowerPC 970 chip aimed at the avionics industry.

In addition to adding new members to the Power.org consortium, IBM said it would provide the specifications for the "Cell" processor, a future chip derived from Power cores that it has been working on with Sony and Toshiba for computers and consumer electronics such as game machines and HDTVs. The Cell chip is at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 console, and is expected to be used in a variety of electronics. IBM is also planning to provide certain software libraries to make use of the Cell chips as open source software, including a software development kit and maybe even a version of Linux tweaked for the chips.

HP, IBM Jockey for the Lead in the Tape Market

Tape technology has been around in commercial data centers for six decades, and it is not about to go away in the seventh. Vendors are still fighting over control of the prolific, if only moderately profitable, market for tape drives and tape libraries. IDC recently issued market-share report cards for the tape market, and IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the top of the class. IDC says HP had a 29 percent share of both shipments and revenues for tape drives bearing its label in 2004; IBM had only 17 percent of tape drive shipments in 2004, but because it tends to sell more expensive drives (particularly for mainframe and iSeries customers), actually raked in 33 percent of revenues. Dell and Certance (the former tape drive unit of disk maker Seagate Technology and, with IBM and HP, one of the three key developers behind the LTO tape standard) were cited as dominant tape drive sellers in 2004. If you don't think that adding the Compaq server line to the HP tape business hasn't been helpful to HP, you're wrong.

In the tape library market, HP accounted for 26 percent of shipments and 23 percent of revenue for automated tape loaders and full tape libraries. IBM also had 23 percent of revenues in this segment, but only had 22 percent of shipments--again, IBM sells bigger boxes to its bigger customers. StorageTek, which has just been eaten by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion, and ADIC were cited as the other dominant tape library suppliers in the IDC report.

AMR Says Small Manufacturers, Services Firms Looking at ERP Software Bigtime

According to a recent survey of businesses in the manufacturing and services sectors done by AMR Research and Managing Automation magazine, small businesses who do not yet have ERP solutions are getting fixed to buy them, and those that have recently installed them are looking to expand what they are doing.

In a survey of 550 companies, the small companies polled (those with fewer than 500 employees) were only using real ERP software 27 percent of the time. Midrange companies (with 500 to 2,499 employees) had ERP software installed 57 percent of the time, and large enterprises (with more than 2,500 employees) had ERP systems 70 percent of the time. It is important to note that 70 percent of the companies polled were in the manufacturing sector, while only 30 percent were in the services sector. AMR and Managing Automation found that 16 percent of companies participating in the survey were evaluating an ERP system for the first time this year, and that another 40 percent of companies polled had just completed their company's initial ERP rollout in the past two years. About half of the respondents said that they would be making substantial changes to their ERP systems in the next 12 to 18 months. Of course, how much of that is by choice--considering how much consolidation is going on in the ERP business--is unclear.