Linux author makes no fuss about his fame, Mar 25, 2004

Corporate jets fly him to a rock-star welcome from thousands of laptop-toting admirers, and, at age 34, he already has earned his place as a technology demigod.

For Linus Torvalds it has been a long, strange road since 1991, when, as a computer-science student and erstwhile hacker at the University of Helsinki, everything changed -- though he didn't have a clue at the time it had.

That was the year the then-21-year-old Finn finished eight months of work on an innocuous little computer operating system he dubbed Linux. What he did next, though, led to the program today being a serious challenger to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows empire.

HP announced that it will begin certifying and supporting a desktop version of Novell's SuSE Linux software, called SuSE Linux Professional, by the second half of the year. HP already supports SuSE Linux on its server products; and in certain regions, it sells desktop systems with Linux from a variety of Linux vendors, including MandrakeSoft SA and Turbolinux. Under the terms of the new agreement, however, SuSE Linux will become HP's standard worldwide Linux distribution across its line of business desktop and notebook PCs.

IBM can now preload SuSE Linux Enterprise Server across its full range of servers, including EServer ISeries, PSeries, XSeries and ZSeries, and its EServer BladeCenter systems, Novell said on Wednesday. Novell will continue its development and support of SuSE Linux on IBM's servers, it said.

Microsoft will appeal the European Commission's record €497m fine and ask the courts to suspend the antitrust sanctions imposed on it until a final judgement is reached.

Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, said in a conference call that a final ruling is likely to drag on for many years yet.

"This case has another four or five years of litigation ahead of it," he said. "The EC has had the first word but the European courts will have the final word."

Red Hat Inc. said it swung to a profit in its latest quarter as rising numbers of subscriptions to the company's Linux software helped revenue rise 43 per cent .

Red Hat said it posted fiscal fourth-quarter net income of $5-million (U.S.) or 3 cents a share for the period ended Feb. 29.

Novell, which sells Linux for servers and desktop computers, is considering a move into the market for embedded computing for devices such as mobile phones and vending machines.

The company is thinking over a choice of developing its own technology, signing a partnership with another embedded Linux company, or buying a company outright, Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman, said in an interview at the company's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. "We're going through that analysis now," Stone said. "Linux has a huge opportunity."

Swedish open-source database maker MySQL AB plans to release a new clustered database product with high-availability support next month, company officials disclosed. The new MySQL Cluster combines the company's flagship open-source database with a clustering architecture officials say is designed to deliver database applications with so-called five-nines availability (99.999%, or less than five minutes of downtime per year).

The new cluster capabilities are based on technology from Alzato, a start-up venture created by European telecom equipment maker Ericsson in 2000 and acquired by MySQL AB last October. Officials describe the technology, called NDB Cluster, as a high-availability data management system designed for the telecom/IP environment. MySQL Cluster is designed to automatically shift workloads among as many as 32 servers, presenting the company with an opportunity to target larger organizations with its products.

The product is scheduled to debut at the MySQL Users Conference in mid-April, according to MySQL AB Marketing VP Zack Urlocker.

Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

“We’re trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved,” McNealy said.

Last month Eric Raymond, noted open source programmer and president of the Open Source Initiative advocacy group, posted an open letter to McNealy calling for Sun to make Java open source. “Sun’s insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl,” Raymond wrote.

The open-source community has released GIMP 2.0, a free software tool for image manipulation.

GIMP isn't new – it has been available for Linux and Unix systems since 1995, and was designed to fill the gap left by the lack of Photoshop for those platforms.

GIMP 2.0 has been in development for three years by a group of volunteers. Described by the group as the "most professional release of the GIMP ever", the developers add: "It is the first stable release that is officially supported not only on Unix-based operating systems, but also on Windows and OS X."

2.4.26-pre6 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

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