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Red Hat is trying to ramp up its profile in the open source community by spinning off its Fedora open source project into an independent foundation and ramping up its patent reform efforts in the U.S. and in Europe. As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support. The company makes its Red Hat Linux distribution available as part of Fedora and said this week that its newly introduced Directory Server and forthcoming Certificate...

RALEIGH - Billionaire Michael S. Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Inc., has placed a $99.5 million bet on Red Hat. Dell invested his own money in the Raleigh Linux software developer, taking the largest single chunk of $600 million in debentures offered by the company in January 2004. The investment was made by investment firm MSD Capital LP, which deploys an estimated $10 billion of Dell's personal wealth in public companies, private investments and real estate. The investment firm was given Dell's initials - MSD - as its name. "It is certainly a good endorsement for Red Hat,"...

Red Hat announced Tuesday it is restating earnings going back to 2002, as the company changes the way it accounts for subscription revenue. The Linux company, which recently reported the resignation of its chief financial officer, said it made the decision to change its revenue recognition after discussions last month with its independent auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Fedora Core 2 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images, and is available for both x86-64 and i386.

SCO's Motion to Dismiss has been denied in Delaware. The judge has also stayed any further activity in the Red Hat case until after the IBM case in Utah is resolved, unless things get bogged down there. Both sides have to file a letter every 90 days letting her know how things are progressing in the IBM matter. The judge will lift the stay if things don't hop along in a reasonable fashion in Utah. Considering how long it took for this overworked judge to rule on this motion, I don't see the order as a delay at all. The...

Linux Loyalists LeeryDaniel Lyons, 03.31.04, 1:49 PM ETNEW YORK - Two years ago, when Rick Carey was chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, he was crazy about Linux and especially about Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor. At the time, he was leading the charge to migrate all of the computer systems at Merrill to Linux. But these days, things have changed. Carey, who is now chief technology architect at Bank One (nyse: ONE - news - people ), says that although he still likes Linux, he's not rushing into any deployments of the open-source operating system. Chicago-based Bank One...

This is an article at Groklaw on the financial outlook for SCO done by Decatur Jones' Dion Cornette. The article at Groklaw has links to the PDF, and I have taken the text from Groklaw along with Pamela Jones introductory commentary. ++++++++++++++ Decatur Jones' Dion Cornett on SCO Friday, January 30 2004 @ 07:34 AM EST Here is the PDF of Dion Cornett's January 13 report on SCO. As you will see, the OSDL legal defense fund, the Novell indemnification, and the Open Source Risk Management vendor-neutral indemnification program seem to him meaningful events, which he believes make it unlikely...

The end game in the SCO fiasco is at hand. IBM's dissection of SCO's discovery wish-list is covered in exquisite detail at Groklaw. As yesterday's conference call demonstrated, SCO's lawyers are being forced to make increasingly bizarre arguments to just stay in the game. The company's last substantive filing demanded that the court find the GPL invalid and unconstitutional, and all software released under the GPL in the last three years to be public domain. At this point, it appears the entire SCO case will devolve to the nuts and bolts of contract agreements between IBM and AT&T. If you...

Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind. On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said that it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April and that it planned to support only its business version of the operating system. On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell surprised the high-tech world when announced an agreement to buy software maker SuSE Linux for $210 million. For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the communal operating system. However, many...

Here they go again. SCO has brazenly put up on their website the Powerpoint presentation from SCOForum 2003. And you don't need to sign an NDA to view it. It appears to be setting forth their legal position, including some cases that they seem to believe support them. Let's see if they do. And let's take a look and see what we can learn about the way they view their case. While it is missing whatever it was they said during the presentation at SCOForum, leaving some question marks in the air, it contains the following, which I will...

TOKYO -- The threat to Microsoft from the free Linux operating system could intensify with the help of a powerful Asian triumvirate: Japan and South Korea are prodding China to join an effort that promotes alternatives to Windows. Japan has earmarked $8.6 million for the project and will hold a meeting in November for the three governments to strengthen research in Linux, including versions that better handle Asian languages. Like some European countries, Japan, South Korea and China have long been wary of leaving too many government computers and networks dependent on Windows. Many experts see Windows as too prone...

Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets. Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com>, with help from many members of the Linux community. On August 18 at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claim was copied into Linux in violation of their copyright or trade secrets. The German publisher Heise photographed two slides of SCO's code show and made them public on their news ticker. Heise publishes c't, a popular German computer magazine. These are the slides: This slide has some of the "System V" source code comments deliberately...

On August 5th, Red Hat finally told The SCO Group and the world that they weren't going to take SCO's anti-Linux FUD anymore in a law suit filed in Delaware federal court against SCO. Reading from a prepared statement, Mark Webbink, Red Hat's general counsel said, "We filed this complaint to stop SCO from making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the open-source software development process." SCO isn't taking this lying down. SCO vehemently denies that they're spreading FUD. Instead, CEO and president Darl McBride claims that "We have been educating end users...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- For five months, the SCO Group Inc.'s claims that its proprietary code was unlawfully copied into the Linux operating system have been challenged by angry programmers and open-source software supporters. On Monday, leading Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. jumped into the fray with a lawsuit that asks a court to decide if any of its software infringes of SCO's intellectual property. It also seeks an order that would bar SCO from making "unfair, untrue and deceptive" claims. "We're seeking a resolution ... to all the rhetoric as fast as possible," said Matthew Szulik, Red...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bought the latest whiz-bang personal computer, but don't know what to do with your older, fully functional PC? One option would be to try breathing new life into it with Linux (news - web sites), the software standard that is presenting itself as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Windows operating system. With better stability, security and pricing in a desktop operating system with a look-and-feel similar to Windows, Linux advocates say they are getting ready to take on Microsoft, which dominates the desktop market. Since Linux is free to be copied and modified, unlike...

Red Hat's revenue increased 14 percent to $24.3 million for its third fiscal quarter with a small profit of $305,000, the Linux seller reported Tuesday. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company's performance for the quarter, ended Nov. 30, did slightly better than projections from analysts surveyed by First Call. Revenue was higher than the consensus expectation of $23.4 million, with break-even earnings per share meeting the estimate. It's the first time Red Hat has reported a profit using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), according to the company. In the year-ago quarter, it posted a net loss of 9 cents per share on...

If I tell you that I'll have to kill you: Red Hat fights the DMCA By John Lettice Posted: 10/16/2002 at 04:33 EST Red Hat has struck a small blow against the DMCA, by publishing a security patch which can only be explained fully to people who are not within US jurisdiction. The company's position here seems to be not altogether voluntary - according to a spokesman "it is bizarre, and unfortunately something Red Hat cannot easily do much about," but like it or not Red Hat has been recruited to the campaign to make the DMCA look ridiculous....

<p>Apple Computer is looking toward a 64-bit future for the Mac -- courtesy of PowerPC partner IBM.</p> <p>According to sources, IBM Microelectronics, a division of IBM, is working with Apple on a 64-bit PowerPC processor for use in the latter's high-end desktops and servers.</p>

Red Hat Inc. has formed a partnership with computer giant International Business Machines Corp. under which the Linux company will strike up a cozier relationship with Big Blue's hardware, services and software divisions, the companies said Monday. Under the alliance, Red Hat's new and more expensive software, called Red Hat Advanced Server, will be sold by IBM's consulting division and run across four lines of IBM servers and mainframes. In addition, a full line of IBM software popular with big businesses - including Web Sphere, DB2, Tivoli and Lotus - will be tweaked to run on Red Hat's version of...

<p>A new beta release of red hat linux, code-named Limbo, hit FTP servers earlier this month, giving users a first look at what is likely to become Version 8.0 of Red Hat Inc.'s most popular Linux distribution.</p> <p>In addition to the latest versions of GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice, Limbo includes a nice set of new system administration tools, which significantly ease tasks such as X server, network and peripheral configuration.</p>