IBM's 'Linux: The Future Is Open' Ad, Sep 10, 2003

Webmaster's note: This is not news per se, but a visitor was nice enough to let us know about links to viewing IBM's Linux commerical being aired in the United States. With Linux, you can see the spot via RealPlayer, mplayer and xine.

Mr. McBride, in your "Open Letter to the Open Source Community" your offer to negotiate with us comes at the end of a farrago of falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations. You must do better than this. We will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of dishonesty.

Penguin Computing has released the Altus 4200 server utilizing the AMD Opteron processors. The Altus 4200 supports dual or quad processor systems using the AMD Opteron processor 800 Series, specifically Models 840, 842, 844 and the new Opteron processor Model 846 just announced by AMD. The Altus 4200 supports up to 32Gb of PC2100 ECC DDR RAM, and is designed specifically for customers requiring high performance, symmetric multiprocessing and support for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

The fact is that Asia doesn't like the idea of being beholden to an American company, especially when they can knock up their own operating system using their own citizens. Microsoft has meanwhile tried to stem the flow towards open source by offering price cuts and generous discounts, but it seems to be losing the battle.

Novell, at BrainShare Europe 2003, Monday bolstered its support for Linux with a variety of products it claims will work across operating system boundaries.

The company announced that Ximian’s Red Carpet management services will be included in its Nterprise Linux Services 1.0 package, scheduled to be released later this year. Nterprise Linux Services, which Novell expects to put into an open beta test program in mid-October, includes a variety of existing Novell products that run on Linux.

Webmaster's note: The key words here are paid for by Microsoft

A Microsoft-commissioned study has found that companies could save up to 28 percent by developing certain programs with Windows instead of Linux, the software company plans to announce on Tuesday.

The study, conducted by Giga Research and paid for by Microsoft, compared the likely costs over four years for a dozen medium-size and large businesses that were developing Web-based portals. Giga examined the costs of creating a portal using Microsoft's Windows operating system and related development tools as compared with those of Linux-based systems using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) tools.

In a 'Meet the Press' session following his keynote address at OracleWorld 2003 in San Francisco, chief executive officer Michael Dell responded to questions on Linux after his rather bullish statements on how Dell was embracing open source.

When asked whether the SCO Group's move to secure license fees for the use of Unix in Linux was affecting Dell's Linux plans, Michael Dell replied, "Not at all."

And his answer to the question "Are you paying licence fees"? Michael simply replied "Nope."

Linux luminary Eric S. Raymond is taking the fight with The SCO Group right back to the basics: he has developed a utility known as a comparator that looks for common code segments in large source trees and which, on an Athlon 1.8 GHz box, has an effective comparison rate of over 55,000 lines per second.

Raymond, the president of the Open Source Initiative, declined for legal reasons to say whether he had developed the comparator specifically to compare older Unix code to Linux so as to be able to refute SCO's claims that the 2.4 kernel and beyond contain proprietary Unix code.

The people installing Linux systems are not dunces, and (particularly if they're installing them on what Microsoft regards as it's own turf) they'll have gone into the costings pretty damn thoroughly. They're not going ahead with Linux because they don't know any better, they've got their own "facts", based on their own research and experience. If Microsoft products really are, or become, more cost-effective then customers' experiences and perceptions will change in Microsoft's favour. As politicians all know, really, when you say it's a matter of getting the message across you really mean that the customers have figured out the product stinks. So once they've kicked you out you stop whining about the message and get down to fixing the product.

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