SCO targets federal supercomputer users, Mar 20, 2004

The SCO Group, the company that's hoping to profit from its assertion that Linux violates its Unix intellectual property, has threatened legal action against two federal supercomputer users, letters released Thursday show.

SCO sent letters raising the prospect of legal action for using Linux to two Department of Energy facilities, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Four months after acquiring SuSE Linux AG, Novell Inc. continues to hammer out the details of its open source strategy. It announced plans Friday to make its GroupWise software available for the Linux operating system for the first time, and confirmed that it plans to release the source code for a popular SuSE tool for managing Linux servers to the open source community.

GroupWise 6.5 for Linux will be available March 30 for both Suse Linux and Red Hat Inc.'s Linux distribution, said Marina Wasler, Novell's director of marketing for central Europe. GroupWise lets users access e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging and other applications. It is offered currently for Novell's NetWare operating system, Windows NT and Windows 2000.

Agencies can now get free advice from the new Government Open Source Advisory Committee, which includes some of open-source software’s most influential leaders.

Miguel de Icaza, for instance, heads up development of the Gnome desktop interface found in nearly all Linux distributions. Roy T. Fielding is a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, which developed the Web server freeware running on about 67 percent of Internet servers, according to estimates by Netcraft Ltd. of Bath, England.

“They basically agreed to be available to talk with agency program managers, guide them and answer whatever questions they may have,” said Tony Stanco, head of the Center of Open Source and Government and associate director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University in Washington.

HP is touting its new line of PCs as a simplification of its PC strategy that will give customers a larger selection that meet a variety of business needs, from high end to low end.

The HP Compaq Business Desktop dx2000 includes an Intel Celeron or HyperThread-enabled Pentium 4 processor with speeds of up to 3GHz. Retailing at about $389 with an up to 80GB hard drive, it has GB of double data rate (DDR) SDRAM and a choice of optical drives. Users can also choose between Microsoft's Windows XP or Mandrake Linux.

The news yesterday that China's largest software testing organization was joining the OSDL was at the same time a bit exciting and scary to me as an American-based developer.

The government-funded Beijing Software Testing Center was founded in 2002 with a primary goal of accelerating the development of China's software export industry.

What this means for Linux could be great -- I mean having the government of the most populous nation on earth pouring resources into the development of Linux is amazing. This should have a real impact of Linux's development -- especially in the Chinese market and other markets in Asia.

Massachusetts on Wednesday took the wraps off a new software repository designed to let government agencies make more efficient use of open-source software. The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative, a newly formed group of seven states and four municipalities that will contribute and download open-source software and proprietary software designed by government agencies for their use.

The repository will consist of a MySQL database, Z Object Publishing Environment application server, Apache Web server, OpenLDAP authentication service for storing membership data, and Debian Linux operating system running on an Intel-based rack-mounted server. The University of Rhode Island will serve as the repository's home.

2.4.26-pre5 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 39
Files changed: 523
Files removed: 12

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