Aladdin releases, Apr 30, 2001

Aladdin Systems, Inc., has unveiled public beta versions of StuffIt, its award-winning, powerful compression technology , and StuffIt Expander, a decompression utility, for Linux®, including the popular Red Hat® operating system and Sun's Solaris operating systems.

Big Blue IBM has teamed up with Red Hat to deliver Linux services to SMEs, in a partnership announced today.

The deal will allow value added resellers to sell IBM's eServer xSeries platform, pre-configured with Red Hat Linux.

By forcing registration, Microsoft risks losing market share and mind share to cheap, more-than-adequate alternatives. Since it's been difficult for Microsoft to continually add new features to its suite, the competitors have had time to catch up in the race to offer features. StarOffice is particularly threatening because it allows a user to take a second step and maybe run the program on the efficient Linux OS. The savings a large corporation would make if it bought 10,000 white box machines running StarOffice on Linux could easily be $200 a machine or more, depending on the license agreements.

Your computer person knows what it is. So do Microsoft President Steve Ballmer and Lou Gerstner, IBM Corp.'s chief executive. Your 18-year-old neighbor kid does, too.

They are all buzzing about Linux -- say lyn-nucks -- a software operating system developed for PCs in 1991 by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, with help from an enthusiastic group of hackers from across the Internet, instead of a big company or government research lab.

Linux can literally scale from the PDA to the mainframe. In other words, Linux is slowly becoming the Universal OS. The reasons are simple: Linux is incredibly stable, which is as important for cell phones as it is for a datacenter. Linux is extremely portable. No other OS (except perhaps NetBSD) can boast the kind of cross-platform hardware support that Linux provides.

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