Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Novells channel partners have not been happy lately. Novell knows that, and on Nov. 19, the Linux power announced a new initiative to increase revenue and profitability for solution providers and consulting partners that specialize in selling Novell technologies. Among other benefits, Novell will offer enhanced partner education, joint marketing opportunities and free technical support […]

York Capital Managements proposed Asset Purchase Agreement and its associated credit agreement for SCO make it clear that if the bankruptcy court lets York buy SCO, that York will be bankrolling SCOs continued lawsuits against Novell, IBM and other Linux-using companies. Groklaw published the APA and its associated credit agreement during the last few days. […]

The Free Software Foundation published the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 on Nov. 19. This new license, based on the GPLv3, enables those who use AGPLv3 software over a network to receive the source code for that software. The AGPL was created to deal with the so-called ASP (application service provider) loophole in […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is extending the Red Hat battlefield to the channel with an extension to Oracles longstanding alliance with IT reseller CDW. Oracle announced this week that it had entered into a multiyear agreement with CDW to sell support for Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Although Oracle distributes Unbreakable Linux, company officials say it is […]

Red Hat may be not be a super-computer company, but with its just-announced partnership with Platform Computing, it is ready to deliver the enterprise-grade high-performance computing goods. At the International Supercomputer Conferences in Reno, Nev., Red Hat and Platform Computing, a global leader in HPC infrastructure software, announced that they would be jointly offering a […]

It took just three days before 54,000 copies of Fedora 8, the Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported Linux distribution, were up and running. Fedora 8 was released on Nov. 8. Fedora 8 enhancements include the expanded ability for users to create custom spins or appliances, increased security features, a new look and feel, and numerous technical advances. […]

If you had asked me what computer vendor was the least likely to start offering Solaris on its servers, I would have said Dell or HP. Whoops. I sure got that one wrong. Sun has really changed its tune from back in 2003, when it was dismissing Dell, Linux and open source. Today, Sun sells […]

In the United States, SCOs Linux/Unix litigation has been stalled out while the companys bankruptcy trial is being dealt with. In Germany, however, several court cases have found SCO Group GmbH, SCOs Germany branch, guilty of lying about Linux containing stolen Unix code. In the first case, reported on by Heise Online, the pro-Linux German […]

When a desktop Linux distribution suddenly becomes popular before even DistroWatch starts tracking it, you know youve got something special. One new Ubuntu-based distribution, gOS, has managed to capture users attention purely by word of mouth over the Internet. GOS was introduced by Everex, a midtier PC vendor, in its inexpensive Green gPC TC2502 computer […]

Today, VMware has about 80 percent of the virtualization market. By 2011, I think it may be lucky to have 8 percent of the market. I believe that because everyone and their brother are now offering free or open-source virtualization of one kind or another. From the open-source world, youve got open-source software virtualization programs […]