Sleepycat – the world's leading (open source) database vendor?, May 31, 2005

Log on to the Sleepycat web site and you will find that it claims to have 200 million users of its database, Berkeley DB. 200 million! In the immortal words of John McEnroe: you have got to be kidding me! Well no, actually.

What's the difference between Edward John Smith, the Captain of the Titanic and Darl McBride, CEO and President of SCO. Well, for one thing, Captain Smith didn't steer his doomed ship towards the iceberg, he hit it by accident.

The principles of economics, as Computerworld reports, are finally affecting Linux. Linux is increasing its market share so rapidly that, in consequence, some companies find it difficult to secure the resources to handle Linux development and installation.

The latest legal interchange between SCO and IBM concerns discovery. That Big Blue meanie, IBM, is asking the judge to dismiss the case and thus kill the entertaining stream of news that it regularly produces. SCO accuses IBM of not handing over millions of lines of code for SCO to analyze - indeed stonewalling - in order to deny SCO the ability to prove its ever-so-reasonable case. (After all, what's $5 billion between friends). SCO is also asking for IBM to provide a roadmap to help it analyze the code.

The latest news to emerge in the Linux v Windows battle is that Microsoft has cut its prices (rumour suggests by more than half) in an effort to dissuade the city of Paris from moving to Linux on the desktop. Paris is in upgrade mode and intends to spend nearly $200 million with IT suppliers in the next three years, a significant proportion of which could go to Microsoft.

Mozilla, in case you didn't know, is a project to build an open source web browser (Firefox) and email suite (Thunderbird). I had cause to use it recently when I ran into a little browser plug-in (from a security company called CoreStreet) that plays back to you the name of the web site that you are on. It's a neat little applet that CoreStreet intends to distribute for free to assist web users in seeing through some of the Phishing scams that are currently in play.

The GPL is, as far as I can see, the most innovative adjustment to copyright and IP contracts that has occurred for decades - maybe even centuries. The idea is, in essence, a simple one. Previously creators and collaborators in the creation of IP (or works covered by copyright - software happens to fall into both categories at times) chose either to defend their legal ownership via copyright and/or the lodging of patents or they chose to make it freely available. The GPL plows a middle course, allowing free usage of software source code on condition that whatever is added (source code and IP) is also provided to others on the same basis. It thus encourages collaboration by those who wish to share the fruits of their labour without direct commercial reward, but wish to retain a level of control on it usage.

Caldera has pledged that developers and education users will get access to UnitedLinux binaries, after the four member distros have pooled their resources. But as the story unravels, it looks like the per-seat pricing looks like a stayer, at least for Caldera.

A group of developers in one of IBM's German Labs decided to run Linux under VM, provoked by a member of the Linux community who wanted to see Linux run everywhere.

By October of this year IBM claimed to have shipped its 1000th zSeries machine in about 9 or 10 months, mostly with the help of Linux

The good news is that worsening economic conditions should make open source software more attractive. The bad news is that the leading open source vendors continue to lose money. This week, Red Hat announced a second quarter of loss $55.3m while Caldera announced a restructuring, with 8 per cent of the company (51 staff) to be laid off.

Whilst everybody in the media seems to be concerned about Linux hitting its tenth birthday last weekend, those people running data centres are still trying to figure out if Linux is ready for an implementation in their mission critical environments. But it's not just Linux they've got to choose from, Unix and Microsoft would also claim to be a front runner, the question is, who's telling the truth?

he featuring of the Linux watch at the Zurich conference was an indication that IBM now has a Linux story to tell and the Linux watch is just the smallest part of it. It was not presented as a PR gimmick, but as evidence that IBM can tailor Linux to suit the small environment. IBM is now able to demonstrate a commitment to Linux across the range, which no other hardware vendor can currently match or even comes close to. Linux runs on every box in IBM's rebranded eServer range.

Early demonstrations of Eazel have given glimpses of a system that has the potential to take Linux onto the desktop in large numbers by providing the simple point and click functionality expected of a operating system to be used by simple, ordinary users.