Earthlink Offers Cheap PCs To New Subscribers, May 27, 2005

Earthlink Inc. on Thursday offered new subscribers to its premium dial-up service a desktop PC for $69.99 or a laptop for $399.

Interest is swirling around the Linux-advocacy site Groklaw.net, following the weekend posting of an article by Linux Business News, which purports to uncover information about the identity of site editor Pamela Jones.

The Mozilla Foundation took the newest edition of its browser and e-mail suite one step closer to a final release.

Mozilla 1.7 RC2 (Release Candidate 2) of the open-source Internet suite -- which includes the Mozilla browser, an e-mail client, and a chat client -- is the final pre-release edition planned before 1.7 goes final this summer.

Linspire, formerly known as Lindows, is giving away its desktop Linux operating system for the first time as a way to publicize its name change.

According to CEO Michael Robertson, the offer is valid "for the next few days." Users can download the Linspire OS 4.5 software, which until now Linspire has resisted giving away, unlike other Linux distributors, direct from the Linspire Web site.

Hewlett-Packard Co. says it is yielding to large clients' demands and expanding Linux distribution, a decision that could force Microsoft to reconsider some of its corporate pricing for Windows.

HP announced a wider partnership on Wednesday with Novell Inc. and plans to package its SuSE version of Linux with computers bound for corporate clients.

'What's interesting is the possibility it will give Microsoft the impression that it's actually in a competitive market,' IDC analyst Roger Kay said. 'It would act like a competitor rather than a monopoly and use price as a competitive tool.'

As I was doing my billing recently, I remarked to my boss that I always feel bad billing for services I enjoy doing. "Sure," he replied, "and wouldn't it be great if everyone chipped in to help pay your mortgage and feed your kids? Oh, wait. That's called communism." He's right, and it's a sobering context in which to consider open source.

If we follow my boss's line of thinking, open source, or "free software," might be considered communism. But to business and IT managers, open source isn't about code we don't have to pay for. In this case, free means freedom, as in the freedom to choose and use software as we wish, with no proprietary barriers.

As general manager for platform strategies at Microsoft, Martin Taylor leads the software company's charge to contain and eventually eliminate open-source technology. Needless to say, that means Taylor does not shy away from controversy. In an interview with CRN Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, Taylor discusses the lessons Microsoft is learning from customer interest in open source and how the company may ultimately respond with more modular, component-based server offerings that would allow it create a more competitive solution in any given market.

IBM on Wednesday announced it had sold a supercomputer based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit processors to pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Meyers Squib, giving a boost to AMD's Opteron technology.

The supercomputer, a cluster of 64 IBM eServer 325 machines running Linux, each packing a pair of Opteron processors, will be used by Bristol-Meyer for drug and healthcare treatment research, said the two companies.

Linux, said Forrester, will cement its position in the data center in 2004, thanks to a maturation in the operating system distributions targeting enterprises. By the end of 2004, said the IT managers surveyed, close to 10 percent of the Global 2000 companies will have moved from Windows-based servers to Linux for their basic network infrastructure.

The Massachusetts state government's attempt to push open source software is being challenged by one state lawmaker who is questioning the state IT leadership's actions.

"We want to know what their authority is," said Senator Marc Pacheco, who has formally asked the head of the state's Office of Administration and Finance (OAF) to provide him with the legislative authority for its relatively new policy of advocating open source software.

Even as it considers filing a legal claim against a Linux customer, The SCO Group must produce by week's end some proof to support its lawsuit against IBM.

Following a court order issued early last month, the Lindon, Utah-based Unix company has until the end of the week to specify and hand over to IBM attorneys the hundreds of thousands of lines of Unix System V code it says IBM improperly donated to the Linux kernel.

Microsoft's recent decision to pursue a royalty-bearing licensing strategy, which includes its internally developed FAT Allocation Table (FAT) file system, is stirring up new theories in the technology world.

Where many industry watchers applauded the move by the world's largest software company to open up its intellectual property, others saw it as a move to put a stumbling block in the way of Linux, the open source operating system whose growth threatens the dominance of Windows.

While Linux users have retracted accusations that SCO made up its claims to have been victim of a distributed denial-of-service attacks, doubts about SCO's claims linger.

In the face of third party evidence that the attacks did happen, Linux users retracted accusations that SCO was lying. But Linux and security experts stood by their statements that SCO's description of the attacks make no sense, and that competent network administrators can easily protect themselves against the type of attack SCO says happened to it.

Linux is making sufficient inroads into the embedded systems market to send vendors scrambling. The latest example was Wind River Systems, which experts say has 30 percent of the market for the tiny operating systems that run millions of devices ranging from cellular phones to airplane navigation gear.

Webmaster's note: Those interested in seeing the original SCO "open letter", you can find it here

As if on the stand, McBride stated his case in no uncertain terms. "The GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws," he said in the letter.

Will the combination of an old-line proprietary software company with roots in Utah and an up-and-coming open-source distributor in Nuremberg, Germany, add to Linux's momentum? That's the thinking behind Novell's planned acquisition of SuSE Linux AG for $210 million, disclosed last week, which brings together Novell's large installed customer base with SuSE's business-ready Linux operating system. It may be the best of two worlds--if Novell can pull it off.

Ballmer flatly rejected the notion that Linux--with its user-driven rather than vendor-driven development process--is doing a better job than Microsoft at addressing security. "We get a lot of questions. People say, 'We have a security problem; let's fix it. What's your road map for this? What about this? What about this? What about this?' " he said. "There's no road map for Linux. There's nobody to hold accountable for security with Linux. There's nobody's rear end on the line."

SuSE, the second leading Linux distribution vendor, announced that it will ship this fall a $449 standard edition of its Linux server for the SMB market.

SuSE Linux Standard Server 8, due to ship in November, will provide a full range of capabilities including support for Advanced Micro Devices and Intel 32-bit processors, two-way multiprocessing, Internet access, e-mail, file and print services and graphical configuration wizards to simplify setup, the company said.

OpenOffice.org, the open-source group of developers working on the free OpenOffice suite of applications, beat Microsoft to the punch and released the final version of its 1.1 bundle on Wednesday.

OpenOffice 1.1, a competitor to Microsoft in the productivity suite space -- Microsoft will release its newest edition, Office 2003, later this month -- is available now for downloading in Windows, Linux, and Solaris editions.

Webmaster's note: At the time of the posting of this article here at Linux.org, 15:50 UTC, Netcraft was still showing www.microsoft.com running Linux

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company "respects the fact that [its partners and vendors] may have diversified business models and operate in mixed IT environments. Microsoft's main concern is doing whatever it takes to help ensure customers can get to the Blaster worm patch to protect their computers.... Microsoft is using Akamai's extensive worldwide network to distrubte the massive traffic that is illegally being directed at Microsoft by hackers."