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U.S. Tech Workers Experiencing Angst

IT workers in the United States are feeling "angst" over offshoring and outsourcing, according to a survey commissioned by WashTech, the alliance of technical workers in Washington State, which is part of the Communications Workers of America Union. Both issues have been hot topics for about a year, and are now making their way into the mainstream press and political circles. The WashTech study was conducted by polling firms Evans/McDonough and Harris International. The survey indicates that U.S. tech workers are worried about declining wages, benefits that get skinnier by the year, and about offshoring of work overseas.

About 25 percent of the 410 people responding to the survey of IT workers said that their company had moved work in their IT department to overseas facilities. Some 20 percent said that they had been required by their employer to train their replacements before getting the ax, or they know someone who had to do it. About 75 percent of those polled said they thought H1-B visas and similar foreign worker programs were unnecessary, given the large pool of unemployed IT workers in America, and 81 percent said they would like to see laws that restrict the use of such visa programs. Some 93 percent of IT workers polled said they were worried about the offshoring of jobs, 91 percent of them were registered voters, and 87 percent said they vote in major elections. Those are big numbers for any politician, particularly for those seeking to garner the support of motivated, relatively well-off, connected voters, as IT workers tend to be. And the issue cuts across political boundaries. About 41 percent of those polled were Republicans, 26 percent were Democrats, and 32 percent were not affiliated with any party but were mostly politically active.

The politicians who control Uncle Sam's purse strings in Congress could set a good example by employing indigenous IT workers for government contracts. About 86 percent of the IT workers polled said they would support a law that would compel the U.S. government to do its own IT work at home. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, introduced the "Jobs for America" bill, which would force public companies to disclose how many jobs they are sending overseas, where they are going, and why they are being sent overseas.

In introducing the bill, Daschle said the Bush administration's policy has been to embrace outsourcing and offshoring. "This is Alice in Wonderland economics," he said. "America has lost 2.9 million private sector jobs since January 2001. Nearly every state in the nation has lost manufacturing jobs, and contrary to the Administration's economic theories, there is nothing good about it. The administration is putting corporate profits ahead of American jobs. And the exporting of jobs is hurting millions of Americans and countless communities across the country." Senators Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts), Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York), and Debbie Stabenow (Michigan) are cosponsors of the bill. The proposed bill would require any company that lays off 15 or more workers to send those jobs overseas to give three months' notice to those employees and to send reports to the Department of Labor so it can monitor the effects of offshoring. Quite frankly, no one knows how many jobs are being offshored, and this is one of the problems with the phenomenon.

Play the Tech Worker Challenge

Why did the tech worker cross the four-lane highway? To try to keep his job.

If you like gallows humor and video games, you are going to love a new game on the TechsUnite site called The Tech Worker Challenge. TechsUnite is an online community for IT workers; it is not a union.

The object of the game is to get as many IT workers across the highway as you can without being hit by vehicles that represent Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. We wonder if Craig Barrett, Sam Palmisano, Scott McNealy, Carly Fiorina, and Bill Gates are actually driving the trucks in the game. Wouldn't that be funny? Then again, maybe not.

Sun Brings Back Founder Bechtolsheim Through Kealia Acquisition

Sun Microsystems might be reselling a version of an Opteron server from either Newisys or Celestica to get the Sun Fire V20z out the door, but the company's acquisition of Kealia last week shows that over the long haul, Sun is undoubtedly going to be designing its own Opteron machines.

Before Sun acquired Kealia last week, not much was known about the company, which was founded by Andreas Bechtolsheim, one of the four original founders of Sun along with Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, and Vinod Khosla. Bechtolsheim was in charge of Sun's technology between 1984 and 1995, and left just before Sun brought in a new set of techies through its acquisitions of Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and a portion of Cray. Joy, who created the Berkeley Systems Design variant of Unix (which is at the heart of Solaris), left Sun late last year. With Bechtolsheim back, Sun is once again a serious technical contender in the workstation and server markets.

Bechtolsheim and some five dozen compatriots at Kealia were secretly working on Opteron designs for network devices and servers. Bechtolsheim founded a Gigabit Ethernet switch company called Granite Systems after leaving Sun in 1995, and a little more than a year later sold that company to Cisco Systems for $200 million. He stayed on at Cisco for a few years, but then got itchy and started Kealia in February 2001, which was rumored to be working on video server technology. No one knew anything else about Kealia except for its address in Palo Alto, California.

Well, now we know, and the joke is not on Sun, but on its competitors.

PeopleSoft Rejects Oracle's Bid, DoJ Frowns on Deal, Too

Oracle might have sweetened its bid for rival application software maker PeopleSoft two weeks ago to a $9.4 billion all-cash offer, but PeopleSoft has decided the deal does not adequately value the company. Moreover, says PeopleSoft, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division has submitted a report to Hewitt Pate, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust issues, which against allowing Oracle to acquire PeopleSoft. The Justice Department is expected to make a ruling on the issue no later than March 2.

Plenty of people are talking conspiracy theory on this deal. Oracle low-balled its initial bid for PeopleSoft right after PeopleSoft acquired JD Edwards, which made PeopleSoft a much better rival to Oracle's own application software unit. Many people think that Oracle launched the takeover bid just to be a spoiler. But Oracle has to be careful, because a disingenuous takeover bid might land it in court if PeopleSoft contends that Oracle just did this to mess up PeopleSoft's business.

If Oracle was looking for a way to wiggle out of the proposed PeopleSoft deal without invoking the wrath of the government for launching a definitely hostile but not quite real takeover, this sounds like the ticket. With the antitrust commissioners in Europe murmuring that it doesn't like the deal, either, Oracle doesn't look like it could acquire PeopleSoft for any amount of money, whether it wants to or not. The affect of the Oracle-PeopleSoft deal on the Unix market would be considerable. But Oracle may be a big promoter of Linux, especially on clusters to replace big monolithic Unix and mainframe iron. An Oracle-PeopleSoft combo with a lot of wood behind the Linux arrow would be a serious weapon in the IT marketplace. But the odds do not favor such a union, and both Oracle and PeopleSoft still rely on Unix to drive a lot of their application software.

SCO Ups the Ante in IBM Unix-Linux Lawsuit to $5 Billion

It's been almost a year since The SCO Group launched its Unix-Linux lawsuit against IBM, and the damages that SCO is seeking have continually risen ever since. The initial suit, which alleges that IBM let loose Unix-related intellectual property owned by SCO into the Linux operating system, and that IBM is in violation of the Unix licensing agreement at the heart of its AIX operating system, was originally set at $1 billion in damages. Last summer, as the legal briefs were flying back and forth between the two parties, SCO raised the ante to $3 billion, after claiming additional violations by IBM. Now SCO has raised the damages to $5 billion.

SCO is now claiming that IBM is violating its copyrights, but it has dropped the claim that IBM has violated trade secrets related to SCO's development of Unix and the rights to the trade secrets owned by SCO when it acquired the rights to Unix from Novell nearly a decade ago, which bought them from AT&T. SCO is now trying to get a recent copy of the source code for AIX 5L and the last release of Dynix/ptx, the Sequent Unix variant, so it can assess exactly how much of this code was moved into Linux 2.4. So far, SCO has been apparently working with older versions of the AIX and Dynix/ptx code, and has only been able to identify snippets adding up to a few thousand lines of code. This is in stark contrast to the millions of lines that it thought it would find.

If these lines of code have indeed been lifted from the AIX or Dynix/ptx variants of Unix and moved into Linux, as SCO suggests, you can bet that IBM will begin arguing about what does and does not constitute a derivative work. And you can also bet that Novell will be tag-teaming with IBM, asserting that some of the rights that SCO claims to have over Unix--such as copyright--are not in its control, but rather Novell's.

Last week, in an even more bizarre twist, Novell waived SCO's rights to sue IBM concerning any matter relating to Unix, a right it claims that it retained through the retaining of Unix copyrights. Whether SCO or Novell actually controls the copyrights related to Unix will be the subject of a lawsuit pending between those two parties.

These cases are going to be plenty ugly once they go to trial, and since Unix and now Linux is in one way or another embedded in modern operating systems, it affects the 18 million servers out there in the world.

HP Says It Will Hit High End of Estimates in Q1

Hewlett-Packard, which will on February 19 report its financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended on January 31, last week pre-announced those financial results, saying that it would come in at the high-end of estimates.

Specifically, the company said that it expects to report revenue of $19.5bn and non-GAAP earnings per share of 35 cents in Q1; after adjusting earnings for amortization of purchased intangibles (gained through recent acquisitions), GAAP earnings will be 30 cents or 31 cents a share. This, according to an HP statement released by its investor relations office, is consistent with guidance that HP provided for the quarter three months ago. Back in November, the company said that it would have sales between $19.1 billion and $19.5 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call had an average expectation of non-GAAP earnings per share of 35 cents and sales of $19.4 billion. So HP has more or less pegged expectations. Of course, all large companies "manage" expectations through the analyst community, so this is not necessarily much of a surprise. In fact, it is always much more of a surprise when a company does not hit its targets, at HP has done several times under the stewardship of chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. She doesn't like surprises any more than Wall Street does.

HP's spokepeople were saying that the company was pre-announcing Q1's results because of speculation in the past several weeks in the analyst community. There has been talk that the printer business being weak in January. HP didn't say this wasn't the case, and if it was indeed weak, the company made it up elsewhere. Either way, HP said it will hit its numbers, and it is probably not a coincidence that the company said this as Sun Microsystems was finishing up its two-way shindig with analysts and press for its first quarter product announcements. All last week, these two were trying to steal each other's thunder. What are the odds that both companies would launch their dual-core RISC processors within 24 hours of each other? Well, the odds are 100 percent if you are talking about HP and Sun--and that is not a coincidence. It is planning.

GST's AIT Drives Can Now Connect to Unix Servers

Tape storage vendor GST says that its AIT drives now work with Unix, Linux, and Windows servers as well the OS/400 servers that it initially supported. The Lake Forest, California, company has announced open systems support for its AIT-1, AIT-2, and AIT-3 tape drives. "Our initial success with our AIT tape products in the iSeries market encouraged us to complete the engineering and testing for Unix, Linux, and NT users," says David Breisacher, GST's chairman and chief executive. "The iSeries connectivity took a tremendous amount of engineering to accomplish. In contrast, getting these products to run on the more open systems in the Unix/Linux/NT world was quite straightforward and yielded excellent results." The company also announced support with the AIT-2 and AIT-3 drives for write once, read many (WORM) capabilities, which some organizations require to comply with certain regulations for data archiving.