Reversal of Fortune, Oct 11, 2003

When I asked Szulik what was one of the reasons for Red Hat's success in the face of lawsuits, free software, cross-licensing difficulties and Microsoft's marketing muscle, enthusiasm for the company's mission was his first response. "Our guys call the Microsoft developers the Microsoft bourgeoisie," Szulik said. His main task is to channel the mission-driven zeal of Red Hat's developers into a Wal-Mart-style low-cost, high-value business model.

IBM is teaming up with the government of Brazil to develop the country's expertise in open-source software such as Linux, the technology giant announced Friday.

Big Blue signed a letter of intent with the South American country, stating a shared vision of developing technology that's based on open-source software and open standards, according to a statement released by IBM.

Information worker productivity is at a tipping point, becoming a workspace for innovation, integration and teams, with Microsoft itself making a major transition and working with its partners to make this happen, Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president on productivity and business solutions, said Friday.

Addressing several thousand attendees at the Worldwide Partner Conference, he took a swipe at Linux, open source and StarOffice, saying, "they simply accept the view that what they have is good enough. That view does not foster innovation. Being where we were with Office 1997 is not good enough for us," he said.

The Dreambox DM7000 from Dream-Multimedia-Tv (DMM) is a $395 Linux-based digital radio and digital TV (DVB) satellite (or cable) receiver with digital video recorder (DVR) functions and PC connectivity. It is implemented using IBM's STB04500 set-top box chipset, which provides the necessary DVB functions like transport stream demultiplexing and MPEG2 decoding inexpensively. A minimalistic, GPL'd Linux-based software implementation has made the DM7000 popular with Linux programmers and TV device hackers.

The SCO Group's Australian and New Zealand general manager, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, confirmed today the organisation had written to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to refute complaints made against it by open source advocacy group Open Source Victoria.

While declining to comment on the specifics of the SCO Group's response, O'Shaughnessy confirmed "we have refuted that SCO is doing anything improper or is in breach of Australian trade practices legislation".

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