But Wait, There's More

Red Hat Launches Customer Summit, Reports Good Financials

Commercial Linux juggernaut Red Hat has come of age in many ways, which is perhaps why it has enough critical mass to host its first customer and partner event, the Red Hat Summit, between June 1 and 3, 2005, in New Orleans. The summit bills itself as an arena where open source luminaries, developers, partners, and users can attend general sessions in the morning and technical or business sessions in the afternoon in order to get more specific training on aspects of the Linux platform. It will cost $999 to attend the summit, which is a fair price, considering that this fee includes meals and a three-day stay at the hotel sponsoring the event.

Red Hat also announced its sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2005, ending August 31. Overall revenues were $46.3 million, up 60 percent, and net income was $11.8 million, a 225 percent increase compared with this time last year, and up 8 percent sequentially from the company's fiscal first quarter. Red Hat said that it added 10 percent to its employee roles in the quarter, that operating profit was $6.7 million, or about 15 percent of revenue, and that it shipped 115,000 Enterprise Linux server shipments in the quarter and 29,000 units of Linux for the high-performance computing and desktop markets.

Red Hat is Webcasting its annual shareholders meeting today. You can log on to www.redhat.com and watch it from the archive.

Arkeia Supports Linux 2.6 with Network Backup

Arkeia, a tape backup specialist in Carlsbad, California, announced this week that Network Backup 5.3 now supports Linux distributions based on the Linux 2.6 kernel and that the company has added support for Linux systems running in 64-bit mode on Itanium 2 and Opteron processors. Network Backup 5.3, available October 4, also has 448-bit encryption, using an algorithm called Blowfish, and has expanded support for Debian packages, and will also support Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copt Services protocol, which is part of Windows 2003, and the NDMP protocol, used in network-attached storage arrays. Network Backup comes out of the box supporting Linux, Windows, and MacOS, and costs $490 for supporting one tape drive, one backup server, and two production servers.

JBoss 4.0 App Server Takes on IBM, BEA, Oracle

JBoss has turned up the heat in the middleware market now that it has delivered JBoss Application Server 4.0, the first open source application server to be certified as a J2EE 1.4 application server. The software, being released under the Lesser General Public License and as a commercial product through JBoss, is the result of three years of development, and it is sure to upset some of the marketing plans of commercial J2EE application server makers IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle.

JBoss AS 4.0 comes with other open source components, including the Tomcat 5 Java server, which has been integrated with JBossCache, a distributed Java cache for transactional Java objects. JBoss AS 4.0 also includes Hibernate 2.1, a Java object relational mapping engine that allows simple Java objects to have persistence qualities that you would normally have to create Enterprise JavaBeans to get the same effect. The application server also includes the JBossIDE development tool. This software is all free, but you have to pay JBoss for support.

Verari Systems Gets $13.3 Million in Venture Capital

Blade server maker Verari Systems (formerly known as RackSaver) announced last week that it has secured $13.3 million in a second round of venture capital. The funding was led by The Carlyle Group, which has former IBM Chairman Louis Gerstner as its relatively new chairman and has $19 billion in private equity, invested in various defense contractor and high-tech industries. To date, Verari has raised $34.2 million in equity. It currently has 275 employees and 4,000 customers.

Samba Flaws Allow Denial of Service Attacks

The team of open source coders behind the Samba clone of the Windows print and file server announced this week that Samba 3.0.7 is now available. The update has 11 relatively minor bug fixes, six new features for managing Samba clients and printers, and fixes for two security vulnerabilities in the Samba server that could allow a malicious hacker to knock out a system or seriously degrade its performance through denial-of-service attacks. Neither of these flaws has been exploited by hackers to date on the Samba 3 server, which runs on Unix and Linux servers and allows them to link to Windows clients and servers.

Vintela Provides Windows Group Policy Extensions to Linux

If you can't actually have a homogenous network, making user access across heterogeneous platforms consistent is the next best thing. And this is what Vintela, a systems management software vendor based in Lindon, Utah, does. Vintela Authentication Services extends the Active Directory user access and management framework from Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers to Unix and Linux servers. This means system administrators can use Active Directory to manage access to Unix and Linux servers without having to know a lot about the platforms (which have very different ways of managing users).

Vintela announced this week that it has broadened its compliance with Active Directory's features by allowing Vintela Authentication Services to manage groups of users, rather than individual users. Vintela Group Policy does exactly what the name suggests: the group policy function of Active Directory can now use the group policy feature of Active Directory to manage groups of users on Unix and Linux machines. This feature is an add-on to the newly released Vintela Authentication Services 2.6, which supports AIX 5.1 and 5.2, Solaris 9 on X86, and Solaris 2.6 on Sparc. Vintela Authentication Services 2.6 also includes a software development kit that provides Unix APIs that allow LDAP, Kerberos, and GSS to link into Active Directory. Vintela Authentication Services 2.6 costs $200 per server and $25 per user account. Pricing and licensing details for Vintela Group Policy 1.0 were not announced.

SCO Negotiates Ceiling on IBM Suit Legal Fees

The SCO Group didn't mess around when it hired Boies, Schiller & Flexner to represent the company in its Unix-Linux lawsuit against IBM. But these attorneys, who are well known in the IT business (David Boies did most of the arguing for the U.S. government in the recent Microsoft antitrust lawsuit and was one of the lead attorneys for IBM at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore when Big Blue wiggled out of its antitrust consent decree), do not come cheap.

As SCO tries to boost Unix software sales, and because it needs to increase development on its core Unix products, the company cannot easily afford mounting legal bills. So SCO has worked with Boies Schiller to put a ceiling on its legal fees, while at the same time increasing the contingency fees in the event that SCO prevails and is awarded damages. SCO has spent about $15 million on the case so far, and now has a $31 million cap on fees related to the IBM case. Boies Schiller was originally contracted to get a 20 percent contingency fee if SCO wins, and now it will get fees that slide between 20 and 33 percent, varying upward as the settlement amount increases.

SCO outlined the new legal fee schedule while announcing financial results for its fiscal third quarter, ending July 31. SCO had $11.2 million in sales, down 44 percent from this time last year, when SCO sold $7.3 in Unix intellectual property licensing, compared with $678,000 in this year's third quarter. SCO would like to blame IP licensing on the drop, but both Unix software and services revenues were down in the quarter, with SCO selling $8.9 million in software (down 17 percent) and just under $2 million in services (down 19 percent). SCO reported a net loss of $7.4 million, almost exactly the same as the $7.3 million it spent on legal fees. SCO expects revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter, ending October 31, to be between $10 million and $12 million, and says that Unix IP licensing is exceedingly difficult to predict.