Linux Whirled

Eeyaaaaaghaaa! The frozen Furball screamed, Dean-like, as he popped at long last through one of the few open entrances to the Big Apples Jacob Javits Center for the LinuxWorld show. Limiting the number of accessible doors to the complex in lieu of beefed-up security must have seemed like a good idea at the time to some bean-counting event planner, but it just cried out “low budget” to His Hirsuteness.

Spence quickly thawed out, thanks to heat from the catfight among vendors such as HP, Novell and Red Hat, which have all indemnified customers against any fallout from SCO lawsuits. The companies took cheap shots at one another, each claiming to offer the best legal umbrella. As one rival exec described HPs offering as a cheap marketing stunt, another company said Red Hats proposal wasnt worth the paper it was written on, while yet another vendor trashed Novells plan by saying “zero plus zero equals nothing.” “I remember when LinuxWorld was a cozy community of eccentric enthusiasts,” mused the Mouser. “Who let the suits in?”

Attempting to tune out IBMs irritating Orphan ads playing endlessly in the Javits chow area, the kibble-copping Kitty tuned in to a bigwig from a European Linux outfit that claimed Vienna, Austria, may soon take the open-source pledge. Inexplicably craving a sausage, the hungry Hairball cross-examined a domestic penguin peddler who said a major airline—whose name he withheld, yet noted its corporate Song is familiar to some—is also set to convert to Linux. The noshing name-dropper nyuk-nyukked when he heard IBM exec Jim Stallings lament that the companys next version of the DB2 database, code-named Stinger, will likely get a blander moniker. “We do some really cool code names, but we always end up calling it AS/400 or something,” Stallings said.

The Spencer was feeling like The Donald as he boozed and schmoozed the evening away at Manhattans posh 21 Club. There, a partying penguin pal soon said that although IBM is a poster child for the corporate Linux revolution, Microsofts extended support for Windows 98 may be good news for Big Blues worker bees—at least those not part of the reported Linux desktop migration. Many IBMers are still running Win 98 on their laptops due to a corporate mandate not to upgrade from that release, according to the pal. As Spence tried to comb the fur on his pate into a Trump-like coif, his “open” source asserted that CEO Tom Siebel didnt get religion on hosted CRM on his own but was talked into launching Siebel CRM OnDemand by IBM, whose earlier on-demand CRM relationship with Onyx was going nowhere, forcing Big Blue to hook Siebel to push the model instead, said the pal. “Given Siebels declining licensing revenue and the ripple effect that could have on IBMs database and service revenues, I bet it wasnt a request,” cackled the Kitty.