Palamida Exec Chides Verizon For Not Responding On GPL Suit, Jan 13, 2008

The Software Freedom Law Center filed suit against Verizon Communications in a bid to uphold the terms of the General Public License. A month later, Mark Tolliver, CEO of Palamida, said Verizon's ongoing silence is the wrong response.

Popular open source projects such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, Tcl dynamic languages, and Amanda were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures.

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two.

He's a technologist, venture capitalist, social experimenter, philanthropist, and Russian-trained space traveler. Oh, and Mark Shuttleworth originated the world's fastest-growing Linux distribution, Ubuntu.

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.

The Linux kernel is surrounded by hundreds of interested parties. How is it that none of them gains a commanding influence over the kernel's development priorities?

We really are pretty much all over the map. One of the fun things about Linux, and certainly the thing that has kept it interesting over almost two decades now, is how different people have different goals and the hardware keeps changing under us too.

To Michael Prince, CTO at Burlington Coat Factory, Oracle on Linux is a good idea. "We run all the Oracle we can under Linux," he says. When it comes to Linux technical support, however, he turns to IBM.

As I talked to Wim Coekaerts, VP of Linux engineering at Oracle, about "Unbreakable Linux," a gap emerged between what he was saying and what Red Hat's product management director, Joel Berman, was saying. Riders of Linux's impressive upsurge are advised to "mind the gap" and try not to fall into it.

Last month, Gartner analyst George Weiss predicted applications will no longer be developed to run on Unix. This is a little like predicting the death of the mainframe—Unix is going to be with us a long time yet--but after looking at the Linux kernel development process, I think I know what he means.

Not all these features will get in, showing the stop-and-go road for improvements to make their way into the Linux kernel.

How would you set a value on Linux? It's widely used in highly competitive businesses, such as Travelocity, Google, Amadeus, Amazon. It's used by start-ups. It's used by individual developers and in mainstream business.

VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum says virtualization will be a feature of hardware, rather than a feature in the operating system.

The Linux Foundation on Wednesday has come out against ISO/IEC member countries adopting Microsoft(MSFT)'s Open XML as a document standard. The voting is currently underway around the world, with the outcome still uncertain.

The French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroen is slated to become one of the few large scale conversions to desktop Linux.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian says it is in his interest to give customers GPLv3 code when they are seeking updates, even if the customer was paying for Novell support through Microsoft certificates.

One of the unsung features of GPLv3 is its grant of compatibility to the Apache and Eclipse open source licenses.

Christy Wyatt, VP of market development at Motorola, said Linux should be advancing more quickly to support mobile devices. "Linux will take a significant--I'm not allowed to say 'dominant'--market share of mobile phone operating systems," she predicted. Motorola expects 60% of its phones will use a version of embedded Linux "in a short time," Wyatt said.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit started off with a town-hall-style question-and-answer session with about 70 representatives of kernel developers, Linux users, and independent software vendors.

"Touch one member of the Linux community and you will have to deal with all of us," Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin warned Microsoft in a column that appeared 25 May on the BusinessWeek "Viewpoint" slot of its Web site.