But Wait, There's More

Linux Not a Direct Threat to Windows, Gates Says

You may have thought that Microsoft considered Linux a threat to sales of its Windows Server operating system, especially in light of the vendor's "Get the Facts on Windows and Linux" campaign. But apparently Microsoft isn't too concerned about losing sales to the upstart open-source operating system, which is currently the fastest growing server operating system by revenue and by shipments, according to IT analysts Gartner and IDC. Speaking at the Computer History Museum near San Jose, California, Bill Gates, the chairman and chief technology officer at Microsoft, said Windows is pretty safe from the Linux onslaught, and that Unix is being displaced by Linux. Of course, Windows competes with Linux, Gates said, adding, "The shift of Unix share to Linux has been dramatic," according to published reports. Windows and Linux will eventually dominate market share, Gates predicted.

SteelEye Rolls Out HA Software for Linux/Apache/MySQL

High availability software maker SteelEye has extended its LifeKeeper software for Linux to cover the most popular open source infrastructure components in its new LifeKeeper for LAMP release. LAMP is short for the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the three Ps of program development, Perl, PHP, and Python. The LifeKeeper software provides high availability clustering for all elements of the LAMP software stack, provided protection for unplanned downtime as well as a means of keeping applications running during planned dowmtime. The software runs on the 32-bit and 64-bit variants of Red Hat and Novell Linux distributions, and has hooks into SCSI, Fibre Channel SAN and NAS arrays. The software is sold on a per-processor licensing fee of $2,250 per processor, and is available from through SteelEye's partner channel, including Hewlett-Packard. IBM, and Ingram Micro.

Mountain View Data Supports Opteron, Linux 2.6 with Provisioning Software

Mountain View Data, which provides server provisioning software for the Linux platform, has announced PowerCockpit 2.1, its latest release. The updated program supports the new Linux 2.6 kernel and has been certified to work on Red Hat, Novell, Turbolinux; it already works with various Linux 2.4 distributions. PowerCockpit is uses to provision bare metal servers and install their Linux and then manage the updates and changes to those Linux instances as they are used in the data center. PowerCockpit 2.1 is also able to support the 64-bit memory extensions on the AMD Opteron platforms. The software has been tested on Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Rackable Systems.

SpikeSource Gets Big Backers As It Launches

The Linux community has long since figured out that the open source development approach leads to great software that can be maintained in a relatively inexpensive and reasonably timely manner. But what the vast majority of IT shops want besides good, open source software is support and some kind of guarantee that the various open source programs are integrated, certified to be so, and kept in some sort of lockstep. That is where a new company being run by Silicon Valley luminaries, called SpikeSource, hopes to come in and bring some assurance to the market.

SpikeSource was founded in May 2003 by Kim Polese (who worked at Sun Microsystems on the Java team and who was the former CEO of patch management software maker Marimba) and was incubated by Ray Lane (former number two at Oracle and a general partner at Silicon Valley venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers. Polese is CEO and Lane is chairman of the company, and the two are keeping a low profile for now. SpikeSource plans to go into beta testing in December, and intends to certify and support two particular stacks of software, which it calls LAMP and LAMJ, which are short Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/Python/PHP and Linux-Apache-MySQL-Java. These are the core Linux software stacks, as we all know. SpikeSource plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Red Hat 9, and Fedora Core 1, and Novell SuSE 9.0 Linux variants, and has had the alpha variants of its certified stacks in alpha testing since April 2004. The LAMJ stack includes Tomcat, JBoss, Hibernate, and Axis. SpikeSource will be a direct competitor in the open source support market with SourceLabs, which has the backing of former Microsoft hotshot Brad Silverberg and his Ignition Partners venture capital firm. SpikeSource was founded several months ahead of SourceLabs, and now the race is on to see who can do open source integration and support first and best.

Novell to Defend Open Source with Its Patent Portfolio

Commercial Linux distributor Novell knows that enterprise customers are wary of investing in open source technologies because of the potential legal problems associated with these programs. And so, apropos of nothing, Novell has announced that it will use its extensive patent portfolio to protect its open source offerings and the customers that use them.

"Open source is a disruptive technology. As a collaborative development model, it delivers economies of scale and a quality of software that traditional software vendors are hard-pressed to match," said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell in a statement accompanying the announcement. "Because of its disruptive nature, open source threatens entrenched interests, some of whom are fighting back with vague accusations of intellectual property risks in open source technologies. Novell today is taking an active stand in defense of the software we offer--both proprietary and open source--by stating our willingness to use our own patent portfolio to help our customers. We urge other vendors with relevant patents to make the same commitment."

Exactly how Novell intends to use its patent portfolio to protect open source programs is unclear, but it seems likely that if some company claims that a certain piece of open source code violates a company patent, Novell will scour its database of patents and try to prove either that it holds a patent covering that feature of the software or to dispute that a company holding a patent for a certain technology actually has that patent free and clear. Novell will, in effect, defend in the courts the Linux kernel and other open system components as if it had developed them even though the open source community.

Mandrakesoft Spearheads Super Secure Linux Project

French commercial Linux distributor Mandrakesoft is riding point on a project to take Linux up to the next level--the highest security level, that is. A consortium comprised of Mandrakesoft, Bertin Technologies, Surlog, Jaluna, and Oppida (the latter four companies specializing in security and certification) have been awarded an $8.5 million contract by the French Ministry of Defense to create a variant of Linux that meets the Common Criteria-Evaluation Assurance Level 5 (CC-EAL5) security standard. Both Red Hat and Novell have had their respective Linuxes run through the paces to be certified at the EAL 4 level, which is good enough for a lot of government work, but not for the tightest security requirements. Mandrakesoft hopes to get about $1.2 million of the contract to create this super-secure Linux.

Itanium-Linux-Oracle Combo Sets TPC-C Price/Performance Record

Hewlett-Packard is ever-eager to demonstrate the superior bang for the buck of the Itanium platform, and has released a new TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test on a two-way Integrity rx2600 server that delivers over 50,000 transactions per minute for under $2 per TPM. Specifically, the rx2600 was configured with two 1.3 GHz Itanium 2 processors with 3 MB of L3 cache memory, 24 GB of main memory, and 1.8 TB; this system was configured with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 AS and Oracle 10g. It could process 51,506 TPM at a cost of $1.81, making it the least expensive 64-bit platform on the test and also making it only about 10 percent more expensive (in terms of cost per TPM) than a uniprocessor 32-bit Xeon machine that does only about 19,000 TPM. The rx2600 delivered the best bang for the buck of any two-way machine yet tested.