Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Merrill Lynch, the troubled financial service company, put aside its own sub-prime woes to slash and burn its ratings for the enterprise software sector. Citing an expectation of low software sales, worries about the overall economic picture and enterprise softwares unusually slow first quarter, Merrill Lynch went on a cutting spree. Merrill Lynch analysts wrote: […]

As expected, Google has released an “early look” version of its SDK (software development kit) for mobile phones. The Eclipse-based Android SDK lets users write Java applications that run on Dalvik, a virtual machine designed to run on top of Linux in embedded applications. Few guessed the importance Java was to play last Monday, when […]

Red Hat has delivered an early Christmas present to ISVs. At a press conference Nov. 7, the leading Linux company announced that in 2008 it will release a new appliance version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1: Red Hat Appliance Operating System. With RHAOS, and its associated SDK (software developer kit), ISVs will be able […]

Can SCO escape Novells wrath? Will SCO CEO Darl McBride emerge rejuvenated and ready to continue the Linux legal wars by selling SCOs Unix business? These and many more questions will be answered in the next episode of “As SCO Turns.” In our last chapter, SCO appeared in front of a bankruptcy court on Nov. […]

At the time, the news that Novell and Microsoft were becoming partners was shocking. But, a year into the alliance, what has really come from it? The analysts give their two cents on the first, and most surprising, of the Microsoft and Linux vendor partnerships. According to the companies, the deal has exceeded its original […]

After almost a year since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, its time to re-evaluate it and decide if its finally the equal of the best of the desktop Linuxes. Thats not a facetious question. Yes, in terms of market share, desktop Linux hovers just over 1 percent of all users, while Microsoft claims that Vista […]

On Nov. 7, Red Hat joined the cloud and software as a service market by announcing the beta availability of RHEL 5.1 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable server capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of RHEL 5.1, including […]

Red Hat announced Nov. 7 the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization. In claims that Red Hat representatives were well aware are extremely broad reaching, they said the new release will provides the most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, with its industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat’s newly […]

Red Hat Executive Vice President of Engineering Paul Cormier on Nov. 7 predicted that Red Hat’s new Linux Automation strategy, which allows Red Hat-certified applications to run anywhere, at any time, will help the company to more than double its current server market share. In addition, he said, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will have “over […]

I have never heard so many complaints about a Mac OS upgrade. Back in 2000/2001 when Apple users were switching from its older System operating system to the BSD Unix-based Mac OS X, I also heard many a die-hard Mac user cursing at the changes. Then, however, everyone knew that there was going to be […]