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The Wine Project Goes Release 0.9, Asks for Corporate Beta Testers

The Wine Project, which has been working for years to bring an open source, emulated Windows environment to Linux and other POSIX-compliant platforms (namely, various Unixes and particularly the BSD Unixes and Sun Microsystems' Solaris, their cousin), announced last week that the core architecture for the Wine tools and related libraries are completed after long last and are in the Wine Version 0.9 release status. What that means is that the code is done and the Wine Project is looking for real commercial customers to put it through the paces in a beta test, which is a necessary process to shake the bugs out.

The Wine emulator will allow popular Windows desktop and server applications to run on Linux and Unix without the need for a Windows platform. This is a goal that many people have tried to shoot for in other operating systems--lxrun inside various Unixes and Windows 3.0 inside of OS/2, just to name two--and such emulation has received mixed results in the market because emulators tend to make emulated applications run slowly and emulators are often cranky and buggy. Now is your chance to see if the open source Win Project community can--and has done--a better job than prior commercial emulators of the past. I will be testing Wine on SUSE Linux 10.0, because I want to see if I can get Microsoft's Excel, Word, and Flight Simulator to run within Wine.

Alexandre Julliard, the lead coordinator of the Wine Project, says that Wine Version 0.9 has made some big progress on the technical front, but that work needs to still be done on it. Specifically, he says that it has "solid support" for all Linux kernels, but that "work needs to be done before Wine can stand on its own." Wine Version 0.9 includes a configuration tool called Winecfg, which means that programmers and users do not have to create customized configuration settings for the initialization of Wine and settings for the Wine environment each time that a Wine-enabled Windows application runs. The new version also has a complete set of clones of Microsoft's dynamic link libraries (DLLs), which means you do not have to download DLLs from the real Windows to get certain applications to work. The Wine Project has also done a lot of testing for specific application installers to make sure they run smoothly. And, perhaps most importantly, Wine has received a lot of support from CodeWeavers, which offers a commercialized version of the Wine tool called CrossOver and which is the place where Julliard gets his paycheck as chief technical officer. CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office 5.0 product, which was also announced last week, incorporates all of the code changes included in Wine Version 0.9.

Centeris Goes Beta, Company Announces $5 Million in Venture Capital

Systems management software vendor Centeris last week announced that the program it has under development, called Likewise, has reached beta status and that it has also received $5 million in Series A venture capital funding from none other than Ignition Partners, the venture firm founded by Brad Silverberg, one of the former hot shots in the Windows organization at Microsoft.

The Likewise product is interesting in that it allows Linux servers to be managed from within a Windows Active Directory systems management framework and the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). This is actually the third beta of the Likewise product, but the first one to be offered for public consumption and testing. Centeris says that it hopes to have Likewise 1.0 ready for commercial installations in December 2005. The company also said at that time it will release "a standalone component of Likewise" as a free and open source product. What component it will release is unknown. But you can bet that the full product will not be released as an open source tool. Likewise is comprised of a console, which runs on Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP, and an agent, which runs on Linuxes from Red Hat (Enterprise Linux 4) and Novell (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, plus the SUSE Linux and openSUSE desktop editions). A good guess is that the agents will be open sourced in an effort to get the open source community to adopt the agents for other Linuxes and--maybe, just maybe--a few Unixes, too. What you can do for Linux, you can do for Unix, too.

Centeris is not the only vendor to think up this approach to managing Linux. As we reported back in July, a product called InterStructures from QCD Microsystems that does exactly the same thing--allows the MMC tool from Microsoft to reach out to Linux servers and control them as if they were Windows servers.

IBM Launches WebSphere Community Edition

Last week, IBM launched WebSphere Community Edition, which is not an open source version of Big Blue's own WebSphere Application Server for J2EE applications, but rather the open source code that IBM promised it would release after it acquired privately held Gluecode Software, a provider of support for the Apache Geronimo Java application server, back in May. Gluecode was just about ready to launch its Joe application server, a commercialized implementation of the Geronimo project, when IBM snapped it up this past summer. Last week, IBM made good on its promise to make Joe open source and to offer commercial support for it. The Joe app server has been given the boring name WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

WebSphere CE is a J2EE application server, and it has hooks into Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases, and somewhat ironically, support for IBM's own DB2/400 database for the iSeries and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows is not yet available. The current 1.0 release of the software has tools for porting from Gluecode Standard Edition (the release prior to Joe from Gluecode) as well as from Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat servers. There are not, as yet, porting tools to move to proper full-blown WebSphere app servers, but you can bet that such tools are in the works. You can also bet that eventually WebSphere CE will end up on the iSeries in some way, shape, or form.

Big Blue Tries to Promote Open Source Storage, Whatever That Means

A decade ago, the battle cry was open systems standards, and now, the battle cry is open source standards. One little word change has not made much of a difference. Last week, IBM got together with Cisco Systems, Engenio Information Systems, Fujitsu, Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, McData, Brocade Communications Systems, and Computer Associates to form an organization called Aperi, which aims to create open source storage management software. Aperi is a Latin verb meaning "to open," and it might have just done that to a can of worms.

I don't know about you, but I get suspicious about any organization that claims to be starting a standard where half of the major players in the market are not present. EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, and Dell, among others, all have huge storage businesses and in the case of the first three, their own storage management software. And where are Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell? You can't have a standard without them, and I cannot even imagine so many players agreeing on creating a single, open source--which means shared--storage management software program. The idea is not technically unthinkable--such software can surely be written--but it is politically and economically difficult to conceive of. Moreover, Aperi, for all of its goals of creating harmony among rivals, misses the fact that standards emerge from markets and through the action of market forces, not because vendors say so, but because customers do, and that you don't start writing a software first and then make a standard later, but rather a standard specification with customer requirements is written up first, there is much argument and disagreement, and then the standard is hammered out. Only then can each vendor in its turn implement the software that adheres to that standard. You cannot skip steps. Even the Eclipse Foundation that IBM helped spawn to form an open source framework for integrated development environments--to its great credit--did not bring enough people to the table immediately. Microsoft and Sun were noticeably absent, and still are. That is not a standard when two of the most influential application development tool providers and the standard bearers for .NET and Java are not at the table.

Aperi probably should not have launched until the other storage players were on board. But, because we are optimists, perhaps some good may come out of this in the long run. It is hard to say, really.

Stratus Picks Red Hat for Linux-Based Fault Tolerant Boxes

Stratus Technologies said last week it will soon be offering Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Server 4 AS edition on its ftServer fault tolerant Linux-based servers, the first time that a stock Linux version has been available on the machines. Up until now, Stratus has shipped the boxes with its own variant of Linux, called "ft Linux, " which is based on the Linux 2.4.18 kernel. This Linux kernel is obviously getting a bit long in the tooth and lacks many important features. By supporting RHEL 4 AS, Stratus can get out of the business of making sure that Linux applications run on its own version of Linux; Red Hat support is expected in January 2006. The question now is when and if Stratus will support Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Computer Security Institute, FBI Release 10th Annual Computer Crime Report

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Computer Security Institute (CSI) last week released their tenth annual Computer Crime Report, outlining the nasty things that go on inside corporate data centers and on corporate desktops that no one wants to talk about publicly. The FBI-CSI survey of 700 companies, which you can read in full here, showed that attacks by computer viruses still represent the biggest financial losses for companies, but denial of service attacks have moved into the slot two position when it comes to causing the most economic damage. While cybercrime--by which the FBI and the CSI mean manual rather than viral unauthorized access to computer systems--was up slightly in 2005, the amount of economic damage it caused was down. Web sites are getting slammed more frequently. In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported ten or more incidents of hacking or attempted hacking on their Web sites.

Across the 700 companies surveyed, 639 suffered economic damage, and the total bill for computer crime at these sites came to over $130 million. $42.8 million was the result of viruses, $31.2 million from unauthorized access, $30.9 million from the theft of proprietary information, $7.3 million from denial of services attacks, $6.9 million from employee Internet abuse, and $4.1 million from laptop theft. Misuse of a public Web application only accounted for $2.2 million in damages, lower than the $2.6 million in damages from financial fraud.

SMBs Are Ill-Prepared for Security Threats, Trend Micro Says

Smaller organizations without dedicated IT professionals suffer the most for lack of security, according to a new study by security software firm Trend Micro. The study compared the security concerns of small- and medium-size business (SMB) users across the world, and found that the same security threats don't necessarily track across the globe. For instance, spyware is "much more likely" to be encountered by computer users in the U.S. than in Germany and Japan. However, the incidence if spyware encounters is growing the fastest in Japan, where one out of three users say spyware has increased in the last month. The Germans are more security conscious than their Americans and Japanese SMB counterparts, and are more likely to request security guidance from their IT department. However, only slightly more than half of German and U.S. SMB firms, and about a third of Japanese SMBs, even have an IT department. "Smaller businesses face a dilemma," says Steve Quane of Trend Micro. "Encounters with security threats are rising faster in smaller organizations, but these same organizations are restricted by time, cost, and available resources." The solution, according to Trend Micro, is to buy and use software that provides protection from online security threats, such as antivirus software, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems.