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Linux leader Red Hat’s stock price recovered slightly Friday, but its market value has still dropped 30% since Oracle announced on Wednesday that it will offer lower-cost support of its applications running on Red Hat.

While it wasn't quite the Linux announcement that had been expected, Oracle Corp.'s latest move will definitely see the company butt heads with the leading distributor of the open-source operating system Red Hat Inc. Oracle will offer "full support" for Red Hat's Linux distribution to both Oracle and non-Oracle customers, Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., said Wednesday. He was giving the closing keynote at his company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Ellison was widely expected to announce an Oracle-branded version of Linux. He kicked off the rumor mill about such a development back in April when he...

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Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart. The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world's most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo video recorders and other gadgets. But while Torvalds has been...

Repeat after me: "There is no Oracle Linux." I don't care how many times you hear stock analysts say that Oracle is about to launch its own Linux. It's just not going to happen. Spread the word: digg this story The latest example of wishful thinking comes from Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert, who wrote on October 13, "Our independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.'" Jefferies, an investment bank, then cut its price target on Red Hat from $24 to $21. Red Hat's stock price...

For more than three years the SCO v. IBM lawsuit has been part of the backdrop of all Linux discussion. Initially, following SCO's filing in 2003 there was some genuine concern, at least among the less technically inclined, that there may have actually been some code from proprietary sources that had found its way into the GPL'd Linux codebase. The technical community gave SCO's claims little credence from the first and were quite annoyed by the many very public claims voiced by representatives for SCO. Those pronouncements and the antagonism of the Linux aficionados has raised the various lawsuits above...

Novell is changing the file system software used by default in its Suse Linux operating system, aligning with rival Red Hat and moving away from a project whose future has become entangled with the fate of a murder suspect. Novell said Thursday that new versions of Suse Linux Enterprise will use ext3 as the default file system, important foundational software that manages how data is stored on hard drives. The change demotes the current default, ReiserFS, to a secondary, though still supported, option. ReiserFS has been under the control of Hans Reiser, a programmer who this week was arrested on...

Vista Licenses Limit OS Transfers, Ban VM Use By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb Technology News Microsoft has released licenses for the Windows Vista operating system that dramatically differ from those for Windows XP in that they limit the number of times that retail editions can be transferred to another device and ban the two least-expensive versions from running in a virtual machine. The new licenses, which were highlighted by the Vista team on its official blog Tuesday, add new restrictions to how and where Windows can be used. "The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device...

The chief information officer of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division (ITD) resigned earlier this week, citing a lack of funding for the state's IT programs. Louis Gutierrez had been a champion of open standards and was a strong supporter of the state's plan to implement the OpenDocument format (ODF) and his resignation could slow the ODF rollout, which is scheduled to go live in January. Gutierrez had been sounding the alarm over the lack of funding since August when the state's legislature failed to approve a bond issue that would provide financing for various IT programs including the move to ODF.

Linux or open source seems to thrive wherever Left governments rule. And as Kerala schools log Microsoft out and boot open source systems, Linux world is buzzing with excitement over possibilities in the communist-ruled states. Though West Bengal and Tripura have to go whole hog to adopt a free software model, ideological closeness is more than evident. Kerala, most insiders’ feel, is turning out to be Richard Stallman's happiest hunting ground. His personal vibes with Velikakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan, even from VS's pre-chief minister era, are in play. It’s a picture watching the duo cozying together in a similar attire —...

Does SpikeSource represent the next stage in the evolution of open source software as a serious business tool? It hopes so, and it has some significant names to call on: Kim Polese, its CEO and co-founder, once co-founder of Marimba; Ray Lane, co-founder of SpikeSource and former president of Oracle; Bill Joy, SpikeSource director and former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems; Brian Behlendorf, on the SpikeSource strategic advisory board and founder of the Apache Software Foundation and Collabnet; Tim O'Reilly, also on the Spikesource advisory board and CEO of O'Reilly Media. Polese was the original product manager for Java at...

Excerpt: At the moment, I'm ticked off because the Debian community's recent hissy-fit over the Mozilla Corp.'s trademarked Firefox logo has led them, and others, to forking the Firefox code to avoid the use of the logo. Gnutella, part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, is creating "the 'GNU/Linux' version of same, to be dubbed 'IceWeasel.'" This may, or may not, become the logo-free version of Firefox that Debian will ship in its next distribution. Regardless of how this turns out, the Firefox "bug" has been removed from Debian. What are these people thinking! It will mean more work...

Novell Inc. received a delisting notice from Nasdaq and a default notice from Wells Fargo, both related to the company's delay in filing third-quarter results. The Waltham, Mass. open source software maker said in a release Thursday that it plans to appeal and request a Nasdaq panel hearing on the matter. The company's stock will remain listed on Nasdaq until the panel makes a decision. ADVERTISEMENT In August, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL - News) launched a voluntary probe of past stock option grants. The company is one of 46 investigating past stock option grant practices. While the review is underway, Novell...

Red Hat ranks no. 29 on Fortune's 2006 list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Companies. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company saw profits rise at a rate of 143% and revenues grow 47% with a stock return of 46% on average annually over the past three years. ADVERTISEMENT click here Each year, Fortune's ranking of Fastest-Growing Companies provides a snapshot of America's economy, and this year the picture is drenched in oil. Last year 18 energy firms cracked the top 100 - up from four in 2000. Now more than a third of the roster - 34 companies - are in the...

Novell plans an October launch for its Suse Linux Enterprise Real-Time product, an operating system geared for Wall Street traders and others who watch every microsecond of the clock. Real-time operating systems can respond to external events within a guaranteed time frame, a feature that mainstream business computing doesn't generally require but that's necessary for some areas, such as aircraft radar. But in a move that indicates the flexibility of Linux, Novell plans to begin selling the real-time variant of the open-source operating system next month. High Impact What's new: Novell plans an October launch for its Suse Linux Enterprise...

Microsoft's decision to not enforce patents on Web services standards underscores the growing acceptance of core open-source tenets. The software giant on Tuesday published the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a document that says that Microsoft will not sue anyone who creates software based on Web services technology, a set of standardized communication protocols designed by Microsoft and other vendors.Reaction to the surprise news was favorable, even from some of Microsoft's rivals. "The best thing about this is the fundamental mind shift at Microsoft. A couple of years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Now it is real. This is really...

ark Shuttleworth is rich enough to cause some havoc in the feel-good Linux community. In January 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Shuttleworth sold his South African security software firm, Thawte, to VeriSign for $700 million in stock. Shuttleworth cashed out almost immediately, walking away with the entire purchase price, just as VeriSign's stock began its rapid descent. “Life has been kind to me,” he says. But the 32-year-old has no children and doesn’t feel much need to hang on to his money. He spent $20 million in 2002 to orbit the Earth for a week in a...

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Is the time rapidly approaching when OpenVZ becomes accepted as the second player behind VMware -- or at least, the one that isn't Microsoft? Or is it destined to fall into the gap between two increasingly polarised camps? In the virtualisation technology market right now, there are two main bidders for second fiddle behind clear market leader VMware -- and they're both open source projects: XenSource, which develops Xen, and SWsoft with OpenVZ. From the point of view of many, Xen has been the favoured platform until quite recently. It carried an open source halo, was heavily linked with Linux...

Department of Defense study urges open source adoption 8/20/2006 6:50:40 PM, by Ryan Paul The Open Technology Development road map, a recently authored government report, advises Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Sue Payton to integrate a comprehensive open source strategy into defense department procurement and development policies. Written by consultants for Advanced Systems & Concepts in collaboration with major technology companies and the Open Source Software Institute, the 79-page report advocates adoption of open technologies, support for and adherence to open standards, and discusses topics like licensing and software project governance. The report argues that the standard practices associated with purchasing...