Michael Hall

“Unix Held Hostage, Day 98?” SCO, Linus Torvalds, and Open Source Initiative co-founders Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens unleash their fury with ‘open’ letters. But in all cases, are the real recipients even paying attention? In other news, SGI is SCO’s latest target; Sun’s pricing announcement for Orion looms on the horizon; and Novell elaborates […]

Months and months ago, Sun staged a press conference to let the world know about Project Orion: a “software train” of tightly integrated apps and innovative licensing that would revolutionize the way software is bought and (although it wasn’t quite phrased this way) put Sun back in the game after an unseemly period of post-bust […]

There’s a scene in the 1987 movie “Robocop” where a security robot, programmed to kill anyone holding a weapon, trains its guns on a junior executive holding a pistol to demonstrate how the machine deals with criminals. “Drop your weapon,” intones the robot, “you have ten seconds to comply.” The young executive drops the gun. […]

A few weeks ago, we looked at Sun’s on-again, off-again relationship with Linux, which has involved unseemly outbursts of costumed penguin love followed by cold denunciations and an understandable desire to pump Solaris x86. Hot on the heels of its move to indemnify its Linux customers, Hewlett-Packard took another step in the penguin courtship dance, […]

You’ve probably read a lot about Red Hat’s latest Linux release already, so we’re not going to go down the laundry list of features for you here. It’s enough to say that with support for 32-way servers, address space limitations that have soared to 256GB, and support for big iron across several platforms, the company’s […]

Last month, we briefly considered Sun’s Java Desktop System, a Linux-based desktop operating system with all the open source trimmings. At the time, we offered this forecast: “We suspect there will be much squawking and tooth-pulling before Linux desktops are widespread in many enterprises beyond the engineer and geek pools.” Sun hopes to bite off […]

Last week we took a look at SUSE and Red Hat, two long-time Linux stalwarts entering distinctly new phases. This week, another Linux veteran (a person this time) is back in the game. Former Caldera (now SCO) CEO Ransom Love has joined the board of directors of Progeny, an Indianpolis-based Linux company with a unique […]

There’s a sign popular among middle managers that reads “the beatings will stop when morale improves.” SCO’s variation on that might be “the suing will start unless revenue improves.” SCO’s legal maneuvers are looking more and more like a shakedown fueled by fear instead of facts, and Gartner has added words of caution to the […]

If you sense an expectant hush in the air this week, it’s probably because next week will see another LinuxWorld Expo descend on New York City. We expect that with the recent release of a new kernel and the ongoing (angry) buzz SCO continues to generate, this year’s East Coast LWE, which is traditionally the […]

Last week, we took a stab at prepping readers for this week’s LinuxWorld Expo in New York City. We failed, however, to make the two guaranteed slam-dunk predictions we could make every year: Somewhere, someone is going to say “this is the year Linux finally arrived in the enterprise” and that someone, somewhere is going […]

As Red Hat shifts from its old shrinkwrap business model to a more high-end image, it should be no surprise that some indicators of the company’s penetration are in flux. After all, Red Hat’s rather abrupt end-of-life announcements, which close out the last of its old “Red Hat Linux” product in just two months, sparked […]

Sun made two noteworthy bits of desktop Unix news this week when it released StarOffice 7 for Solaris x86, and announced a deal inked with an Indian insurance company to put the product on 10,000 Windows desktops. Sun is once again pushing Solaris for the desktop in the hopes of shattering Windows’ hold. Even the […]