-------------------
          Client Server
               NEWS
        -------------------
        New York and London
9-13 February 2004 Issue 534
Competitive Intelligence & Observations about Servers, Storage and related
Phenomena


HEADLINES
CSN 534-01 Marathon Stops Tripping Over its Shoelaces & Gets Back in
the Race
CSN 534-02 Microsoft Previews AMD64 Operating System
CSN 534-03 HP Acquires Novadigm, Consera
CSN 534-04 Sun Lets Early Tiger Loose
CSN 534-05 Bleeding Gateway Buys Profitable eMachines
CSN 534-06 HyperTransport Consortium Locks Down Next Generation
CSN 534-07 Google Makes Grown Bankers Cry
CSN 534-08 Prescott's Here
CSN 534-09 'OK, $9.4 billion Cash But Not a Penny More'
CSN 534-10 Oracle Prices Against SQL Server
CSN 534-11 Sun Wishes Eclipse Would, Well, Go Dark
CSN 534-12 Microsoft Countersues Teknowledge
CSN 534-13 ISA Server 2004 Beta Bows
CSN 534-14 Fujitsu Goes with Laptop Chip-based Blade Server
CSN 534-15 Oasis Kicks Off Push for Dataweb Standard
CSN 534-16 Oblix Mates with Confluent
CSN 534-17 Sony Takes Out $325m Insurance Policy
CSN 534-18 VoiceXML 2.0 Close to Standardization
CSN 534-19 StarOffice Lights On Solaris x86
CSN 534-20 Microsoft Upgrades Business Portal App
CSN 534-21 Oki Uses .NET in Newfangled Convergence Server
CSN 534-22 System X Trades Desktops for Servers
CSN 534-23 EC Watch
CSN 534-24 SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Debuts
CSN 534-25 Servers Heated Up in Q4
CSN 534-26 Danes Go For UBL

Drive Bay
CSN 534-27 EMC Product Launch Set
CSN 534-28 Broadcom Buys RAIDCore
CSN 534-29 Cornice Raises Mega Bucks

Linux Watch
CSN 534-30 SCO Amends IBM Complaint Again
CSN 534-31 SuSE Chief Moved to Novell Job
CSN 534-32 SCO Moves Site, Microsoft Shrugs Off Attack
CSN 534-33 SCOsource Linux Tax Called a Flop
CSN 534-34 OSDL Defines Data Center Linux, Seeks Reaction
CSN 534-35 Groklaw Editor Takes Day Job
CSN 534-36 LSB 2.0 Made Public
CSN 534-37 Now There's a Thought - Free Linux
CSN 534-38 Opteron Gets Real-Time Linux
CSN 534-39 Opera Puts Internet Demigod on its Board
CSN 534-40 OSDL Snags NTT
CSN 534-41 Voltaire Hires Ex-Brocade Guy
CSN 534-42 Trolltech Adds .NET Support
CSN 534-43 TimeSys Offers Linux 2.6 IDE for the PowerPC
CSN 534-44 Desktop Linux Summit Redux

Mail Bag
CSN 534-45 Inflatable Dolls Called Mommy
CSN 534-46 Practicing Law Without a License

BillyGrams
CSN 534-47 Darl's Phone 'Slashdotted'
CSN 534-48 School Daze
CSN 534-49 Microsoft Loses China Chief
CSN 534-50 India in Line for Microsoft Code
CSN 534-51 AMD Tries To Avoid Getting Clipped
CSN 534-52 Novell Gets Equal Time
CSN 534-53 Finger Pointing at CA
CSN 534-54 First Legal Bill: $1.6m
CSN 534-55 SAP Looking To Buy
CSN 534-56 Here, Amuse Yourself
------------------
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CSN 534-01 Marathon Stops Tripping Over its Shoelaces & Gets Back in
the Race

Fault-tolerant Windows pioneer Marathon Technologies Corporation has
been brought back Lazarus-like from the dead revitalized by an $8.8
million infusion of money from a bunch of VCs.

The last time anybody heard from Marathon its founder had been run
off in an internal revolt and it was in Chapter 11 hoping that by
reorganizing it could get the financing that it couldn't get before,
a shortage that forced it into Chapter 11 to begin with. That was
last March and apparently some court-approved debtor-in-possession
financing from Northern Technology Partners and Sumitomo Corporation
got it through (CSN No 490).

The new funding came from Atlas Ventures and Longworth Venture
Partners, with Presidio Venture Partners, a Sumitomo company,
participating. It's supposed to be used for sales, marketing,
business development and the launch of Marathon's new Endurance
Virtual FTserver software, a unique software-only adaptation of its
technology that it's been working on for ages.

The reborn company, a rival of Stratus Technology and NEC, claims
the widgetry is the only software to deliver simple, affordable,
continuous uptime for Windows servers on unmodified, off-the-shelf
Intel hardware, including the latest stuff. It also claims its fault
and disaster tolerance works on any Windows application,
shrinkwrapped or custom. The widgetry is supposed to deliver
mainframe-class, utility-grade availability better than 5Nines.

Marathon says it's got a multimillion-dollar OEM contract for the
stuff with Fujitsu Ltd and a big distribution arrangement with
Sumisho Electronics, which will handle Japan and Asia. Marathon's
also signed up 10 resellers and has hopes of more.

It made its first OEM deliveries last quarter.

It means to be indirect only. It says it intends to focus on the
entry-level and mid-level server market where fault tolerance, at
any rate, is something of an oddity. Marathon's software is supposed
to be geared to the cost-sensitive server and blade markets.

Marathon promises uninterrupted tolerance, not recovery (failover)
and says its stuff won't cause a loss of performance, state or
application context or in-flight data transactions. Systems are
repaired while they're operating and repaired subsystems
automatically rejoin their mates. There's integrated mirrored
storage and delta copy recovery.

The company claims that unlike clusters, Endurance Virtual Ftserver
is simple to specify, configure, deploy, manage and support. There's
no failover scripting, testing or expensive networked storage.
Recovery is automatic. Marathon's got a couple of patent
applications pending.

To work, the system requires two identically configured Marathon-
qualified Intel servers based on 1.5GHz Xeon DP chips, 512MB of RAM,
two logical disks (either SCSI or RAID), four network ports and a
CD-ROM running either Windows 2000 (Server or Advanced Server) or
Windows 2003 (Server or Enterprise Server)

Compared to proprietary Stratus and NEC fault-tolerant solutions,
Marathon says its stuff is cheaper because it works on off-the-shelf
hardware and most peripherals. There are no proprietary drivers and
it'll support the latest-generation chips and clock speeds. It
claims easy administration and low TCO.

Marathon VP of sales and marketing Linda Mentzer said with the
product going through resellers prices for a complete system could
range from $12,000 to $20,000 depending on server brand. Next
quarter, she said, when the Marathon software that supports a single
HyperThreaded CPU ships, the company's larger resellers are expected
to have complete entry-level solutions based on two uniprocessors
for under $10k.


CSN 534-02 Microsoft Previews AMD64 Operating System

On Tuesday Microsoft materialized a preview copy of what it calls
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems cautioning
people that the thing is meant for AMD Athlon64 and Opteron boxes
and not Intel's 64-bit EPIC-based Itanium gear, two wholly different
architectures.

Interesting bit of timing considering Intel is supposed to demo
Yamhill, its AMD64 knockoff, at the Intel Developer Forum in mid-
February.

Chip watcher Nathan Brookwood thinks Yamhill, which is the new x86
Prescott chip with secret 64-bit extensions, isn't compatible with
the AMD64 extensions yet and won't be until Tejas arrives.

Microsoft, which only wants to deal with one set of 64-bit x86
extensions, said that the XP Extended OS is still under development
and that the preview is only intended for testing and evaluation
purposes, not production. It indicated that there will be other pre-
releases.

The final version is supposed to be available in the second half.
Sources suggest the server version of 64-bit Extended Windows may be
slipping into Q1 of next year.

Until GA, users are restricted to 32-bit Windows or Linux. Intel
won't productize Yamhill, which is apparently also known as CT,
until the Microsoft OS is established.

Rumors suggest that Microsoft may package the stuff in three desktop
flavors: a workstation, a "pro-sumer" and a general consumer
version. Different flavors of the server OS are also expected.

See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/downloads/upgrade.asp.


CSN 534-03 HP Acquires Novadigm, Consera

Hewlett-Packard is buying two management software companies -
Novadigm and Consera - to further its utility computing push. The
two provide automated change capabilities.

HP, which already owns 5% of Novadigm, is paying roughly $116
million in cash for the rest of the publicly traded Mahwah, New
Jersey concern. Its stock was trading at $4.75 and HP is paying
$6.10. The company lost $2 million, a dime a share, on revenues of
$13 million in its second fiscal quarter.

What HP's paying for Consera is anybody's guess.

Novadigm's software automates change and configuration management to
achieve a desired consistent end state.

The company is supposed to have 500 customers worldwide including
Schlumberger, 7-Eleven and the US and UK governments.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the first half. It needs
to be rubberstamped by Novadigm's shareholders.

Bellevue, Washington-based Consera's service-modeling software is
designed to help customers build a standardized IT environment that
automatically adapts to changing business demands.

The transaction is expected to be wrapped up in 30 days.

After the deals close, both companies will become part of HP
Software Global Business Unit. The products will be offered under
the OpenView umbrella.

Management software is considered crucial for large enterprises that
make hundreds of thousands of IT changes a week driven by business
decisions (well, theoretically, at any rate). However, a systems
administrator at a Fortune 500 can manage only 20-30 servers.

"This where management software comes in," HP's senior VP, adaptive
enterprise Nora Denzel said on a conference call. "Management
software can automatically manage IT and automatically match IT
supplies to the changes in business demand."

Denzel cited IDC data that suggests HP could be looking at a $10
billion opportunity in three years. "Management software is the next
big battleground for IT," Denzel said.

Consera's technology will let HP OpenView customers create models
that represent their business services, mapping to underlying IT
components. Novadigm's automation services will then utilize these
service models to automate IT changes, such as new software
implementation, patches or upgrades.

Since HP has been using Novadigm's software internally, the Novadigm
components are already integrated with OpenView.

HP claimed the acquisitions wouldn't change the partnerships it has
through its services unit and personal systems group with Altiris
and Opsware, which provide similar capabilities.

Novadigm and Consera mark HP's fourth and fifth software acquisition
in the past six months. In September, it bought Talking Blocks for
web services management and Baltimore Technologies' Select Access
business for identity management. Two months later, HP picked up
Persist Software to add information lifecycle management
capabilities.


CSN 534-04 Sun Lets Early Tiger Loose

On Thursday Sun set out the beta of Project Tiger, its Java 2
Platform, Standard Edition 1.5 (J2SE 1.5) with Java language
updates, new application monitoring and management features and
greater performance. Sun is evidently hoping for GA this summer.

It's another attempt by Sun to take on the redoubtable desktop,
which Java has found, well, a slippery slope.

The new stuff, meant to streamline development, supports Windows,
XP, Linux and Solaris,

The language enhancements are supposed to make Java faster and more
secure. New features include generics, enumerated types, metadata
and autoboxing of primitive types. Changes are meant to reduce
start-up time and shrink the memory footprint. The Java Virtual
Machine has apparently been auto-tuned to drive greater overall
application and development performance.

Sun said the widgetry would let apps it builds be deployed into
existing SNMP-based enterprise management systems. That way the JVM
software can be monitored and managed at higher RAS levels. The
stuff also includes Java Management Extensions (JMX) for out-of-the-
box deployment to management systems that support JMX.

Sun wants developers to use NetBeans as their IDE. It said NetBeans
4.0 would be fully optimized to take advantage of J2SE 1.5 features.
NetBeans 3.6 is compatible. From Sun's point-of-view, the important
thing about NetBeans is that it's not Eclipse.

Sun is working on a tool called Java Creator that's supposed to
attract Visual Basic developers. VB with drag-and-drop is supposed
to be easier to use than Java.

Sun claims 110 million downloads for the J2SE SDK and Java Runtime
Environment (JRE) since it first appeared in December of 1998. It
says consumers have downloaded 27 million copies of the JRE, six
million in just the last 30 days.

Sun also says that - despite having been foiled in its attempt to
piggyback on Windows by getting a court order telling Microsoft it
must carry Java - the JRE is now being installed at the factory by
60% of the PC market.

See http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.


CSN 534-05 Bleeding Gateway Buys Profitable eMachines

Struggling Gateway is buying privately held eMachines in a deal
valued at about $235 million to boost sales of its consumer
electronics gear and help it return to profitability. The price
includes $30 million in cash and 50 million shares of Gateway stock.

eMachines CEO Wayne Inouye will become CEO of Gateway and Gateway
founder and CEO Ted Waitt will continue as chairman.

The acquisition will make Gateway the third largest PC vendor behind
Dell and Hewlett-Packard in the US and No 8 worldwide.

Gateway figures to leverage eMachines' retail channel and low-cost
distribution model to expand distribution of its consumer
electronics products beyond its existing direct channels. With its
PC business in disarray, Gateway has been trying its hand at higher-
margin products like Plasma and LCD TVs, home theaters, MP3 players,
and DVD players and recorders. Non-PC revenue accounted for 31% of
its total revenue in Q4.

eMachines sells its PCs through retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit
City, Comp USA, Costco and Wal-Mart. It reportedly generated about
$1.1 billion in revenues last year. The fourth quarter was its ninth
consecutive profitable quarter. By contrast, Gateway lost $114
million, or 35 cents per share, In Q4 on revenues down 17% year-
over-year to $875 million.

Gateway has had losses in 12 of its last 13 quarters and its PC
sales fell 24% last year to 2.1 million units.

Gateway-branded desktops, notebooks, servers and storage will
continue to be offered through Gateway's existing direct channel and
eMachines only through retail channels. Gateway intends to keep the
eMachines brand.

Gateway, which employs about 7,500 people, didn't acknowledge that
it was thinking about layoffs but said it expects the combined
companies to drive significant performance improvements that will
yield cost savings and margin synergies annually. eMachines has a
headcount of a lean 138 people.

Gateway is hopeful of returning to sustained profitability in 2005
as a result of increased sales, cost savings and other synergies
associated with the acquisition.

While the deal, which should close by the end of March, gives
Gateway a shot at profitability, eMachines acknowledged that it
needed a leg up to grow beyond current levels. "Gateway has the
capital, the scale, the product line and the management expertise to
help us dramatically increase our own growth," Inouye said.

However, Bear Stearns thinks that the real reason for the
acquisition is so Gateway can shut its pricey, loss-making stores
and leverage eMachines' retail channel. The broker still described
the arrangement as a solid recipe. "This deal will significantly
change the face of Gateway, most notably in its management ranks and
its distribution strategy," it said.

Expressing a similar opinion, Merrill Lynch's ace analysis Steven
Milunovich wrote, "While Gateway is acquiring eMachines, we see the
eMachines model and management taking over." According to
Milunovich, the acquisition will not impact Dell or HP materially.


CSN 534-06 HyperTransport Consortium Locks Down Next Generation

The second rev of the HyperTransport chip-to-chip I/O connectivity
specification is in the can. It's expected to last for a very long
time while the rest of technology catches up with it, according
Mario Cavalli, the general manager of the HyperTransport Technology
Consortium, the collective charged with the spec's care and feeding.
It is, he said, "far beyond known OEM plans." It's already a
"futurish" roadmap to the higher performance levels needed for next-
generation systems. It offers a 70% throughput improvement over what
exists now.

Release 2 defines three new speed levels and new mapping to PCI
Express, the emerging I/O interconnect architecture expected to
become an industry standard. It's Mario's job to make sure that
HyperTransport isn't mistaken for other technologies like PCI
Express, Infiniband or Rapid I/O. They don't do exactly the same
things. HyperTransport is unique and offers functionality other
technologies don't deliver, he says.

HyperTransport's new speed specifications define 2.0, 2.4 and 2.8
GigaTransfers/second performance levels using dual-data rate clocks
at 1GHz, 1.2GHz and 1.4GHz. Its new maximum aggregate throughput is
now 22.4 Gigabytes/second, close to doubling its existing 12 GB/s
throughput, which is already 48 times faster than PCI, 12 times
faster than PCI X and 10 times faster than Infiniband using 4
channels.

Despite the speed gulf between the first and second iteration of the
specification, HyperTransport 2.0 is backwards-compatible with
HyperTransport 1.05 and 1.1. To preserve the value of existing
investments in HyperTransport-enabled products, the electrical
protocols that support the new clock rates are compatible with
previous HyperTransport electrical specifications.

HyperTransport is the first high-performance I/O technology to reach
volume shipments. Its disciples include the Microsoft's Xbox,
Apple's G5 PC, Cisco routers, IBM servers and some of the AMD64
desktops.


CSN 534-07 Google Makes Grown Bankers Cry

Looks like there's not going to be a mammoth, awe-inspiring IPO by
Google this spring.

Evidently the company's financial advisers think it could do better
if it waits until the stars that govern the market are more
auspicious - although something more auspicious than Google's
currently rumored $20 billion valuation seems a bit vulgar.

According to the Times, as in the Times of London, Google CEO Eric
Schmidt was in the City last week and indicated that the IPO had
been postponed. When asked about going public in a series of closed-
door meetings, he reportedly said, "An IPO is not on my agenda right
now" then wouldn't comment on the remark. He supposedly said Google,
believed to be profitable to the tune of a reported $350 million on
sales of $1 billion, didn't need the money right now.

Google's primary owners are Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
Google's investment bankers were of course expecting a windfall.

Any delay of course brings Google that much closer to becoming the
next Netscape, a role Microsoft thinks would suit the search firm
divinely. To listen to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Microsoft is poring
over Google patents looking for the company's soft underbelly.


CSN 534-08 Prescott's Here

Intel has delivered itself, as expected, of the Pentium 4 chip code
named Prescott that is distinguished by being Intel's first 90nm
silicon using 300mm wafers and by being the first Intel x86 chip to
be secretly 64-bit like AMD's hybrid 32/64-bit Opterons.

These secret 64-bit Yamhill extensions are expected to reappear in
the upcoming Nocona Xeon DP chip and the Potomac Xeon MP and then
again in the Tejas. By the time Tejas gets here, the extensions are
supposed to be compatible with AMD's extensions in a historic
turnabout. At least that's the speculation.

Intel's got four models of Prescott ranging from 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz,
all have a 800MHz front-side bus, all have 1MB of on-die L2 cache
and all support HyperTreading. The low end goes for $178.

A top-of-the line Prescott costs $417 or will when Intel delivers
them later in the quarter. They're expected to wend their way into
low-end servers. RackSaver, for instance, bellied up to the bar in
support of Prescott.

Prescott is pin-compatible with the earlier Pentium 4 Northwood,
which ought to make upgrading a snap.

Intel lengthened the Prescott's pipeline setting the stage for the
widget's clock to ramp to maybe 4GHz later this year, 5GHz next year
at the sacrifice of some performance, even up against the Northwood.


CSN 534-09 'OK, $9.4 billion Cash But Not a Penny More'

Oracle has gone and done what it didn't want to do, but had to do if
it's going to keep on pursuing PeopleSoft. It raised its bid from
$19.50 to $26 a share or from $7.1 billion to $9.4 billion cash.

Larry Ellison, who started at $16 a share, swears the 33% sweetener
is absolutely positively his final offer.

The price on offer is probably the only problem associated with
Oracle's hostile tender offer that was easy to solve. Oracle just
had to grit its teeth.

Oracle, whose sincerity about the acquisition has been in doubt, had
to raise its price because PeopleSoft shares have been up over the
$19.50 floor for months now.

Oracle moved when PeopleSoft shares were dipping. PeopleSoft's
board, which may now be in something of a quandary and under some
pressure, has said it will meet to consider the new price.

When last spotted, however, the quarry was doing what it could to
prevent itself from being run to ground. In what it called an effort
to bring its situation with Oracle to a head, PeopleSoft moved up
its annual stockholders meeting by two months to March 25.

PeopleSoft stockholders are supposed to vote on who they want on the
board at the meeting.

Oracle of course is making moves to pack the board with Oracle
friendlies. PeopleSoft has four incumbents it wants re-elected.
Oracle, which needs the PeopleSoft bylaws changed for its scheme to
work, is fielding a slate of five alternates. If they get on the
board, the board would quit voting again Oracle's hostile bid.

Then again, at some point between now and then the Justice
Department could finally render its decision on whether it would
allow an Oracle-PeopleSoft merger. The latest speculation suggested
the agency will quash it.

Meanwhile, PeopleSoft posted its fourth-quarter earnings. Sales were
up 34% to $685.2 million and profits dropped 70% to $17.4 million,
or five cents a share, because of costs associated with its JD
Edwards acquisition. Without those costs, earnings would have been
20 cents. License revenues were up 29.5% to $185.4 million.
PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway said, "It could have been a better
year."

The company lowered its guidance for this quarter to $625 million-
$635 million with license revenues of $130 million-$140 million and
earnings of 17 cents or 18 cents. Its year is supposed be backend-
loaded but one Wall Streeter cracked that the company didn't benefit
from the Q4 upside and is taking advantage of Q1's seasonal
downturn.

PeopleSoft's announcement gave Oracle the opportunity to wade in and
say that, "We are not surprised that PeopleSoft management wants its
shareholders to vote on its board slate before they have a chance to
see the results of the first quarter, particularly since PeopleSoft
just lowered its guidance for the quarter."

By the way, that cute little refund program PeopleSoft put in place
to ward Oracle off had a liability of $1.5 billion at the end of
December. A total price of, like, $12 billion might be a little
steep for Oracle shareholders to countenance.

Oracle has $8.1 billion in cash and a $1.5 billion credit line. The
tender offer is supposed to run till March 12. Presumably Oracle
expects a decision from the DOJ by then.


CSN 534-10 Oracle Prices Against SQL Server

Oracle can now deliver its new 10g system on Linux or Unix. Windows
will take a while longer.

Oracle is going after smaller fry because it's lost share in the
mid-market to Microsoft and IBM. Thanks to a price cut at the entry
level, it's saying the thing costs the same as SQL Server. Oracle's
Standard Edition One is now priced at $4,995 a processor. Two
processors are needed to qualify for the price. Named user licenses
are $149 a head with five seats minimum.

The regular 10g Standard Edition is still $15k per CPU and $300 per
named user with a four CPU minimum. It includes a free copy of
Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) for performance and
failover. It's good for a 4p cluster.

The 10g is supposed to take 10 minutes to install off a single CD.


CSN 534-11 Sun Wishes Eclipse Would, Well, Go Dark

Sun would love to sear its brand into the flank of that headstrong
little pony, Eclipse, the IBM-organized IDE and Java tools
initiative that Sun doesn't belong to because it says it would mean
giving up its own NetBeans IDE and rewriting its tools.

Eclipse claims Sun wouldn't have to decommit from NetBeans to join.

Sun, which started what could easily be mistaken for a counter-
Eclipse movement a few weeks ago and set itself this straw horse,
thinks Eclipse is unreasonable and that Eclipse's membership rules
"conflicts with the concept of choice and diversity."

Sun says this in an odd, contradictory, part-carrot part-stick open
letter that it penned to Eclipse right before Eclipse got its
emancipation papers from IBM the other day. In it Sun says it's been
actively trying to negotiate some approachment with Eclipse since
last July and claims the sticking points have been more business-
related than technical although their designs diverge. Eclipse
allows different GUI for different operating systems. Sun doesn't.

In the letter Sun ostensibly wants to work with Eclipse in the name
of making Java a better, broader tools platform and, to persuade it,
tries spooking it with talk of "fragmentation."

On the one hand Sun exhorts Eclipse to be a unifying force for Java
technology. Then in a divide-and-conquer gambit, it tries to create
unrest with talk of the new "independent" Eclipse's director being
too powerful, the thought that IBM still controls 70%-80% of the
project's staffers, who will effectively operate outside of whatever
the Eclipse's new board says, and suggests that Eclipse is
insensitive to the business needs of its vendor members by being
interested only in technology for technology's sake.

Sun claims Eclipse needs to adopt outside IP and of course if Sun
and Eclipse could just come to terms then Sun would love to be a
Eclipse contributor and throw in, oh, say, the NetBeans IDE and its
Swing GUI components.

It tells Eclipse not to "define interoperability on [its] own
terms." There is strength in diversity, it says. It suggests Eclipse
become interoperable with the Java Community Process and the new
Java Tools Community.

"The question is no longer," it says, 'Will the Java tools industry
move to one common source base?' That's always been a non-starter
when you think about the players involved. The question is: 'Will
the new Eclipse work with tool vendors and developers to provide the
richest set of offerings and maintain the Java technology and
platform leadership in a competitive marketplace?'"

Eclipse, as expected, reorganized into a not-for-profit the other
day. Its technology and source code remain open and royalty-free. A
board of directors has been set up that includes representatives of
IBM, HP, Montavista, SAP, QNX, Intel, Ericsson and Serena Software.
The organization is interviewing for an executive director.

Eclipse is being stratified into four membership levels including
Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers, Add-in Providers and
Open Source project leaders, who join for free. Membership of
Strategic Consumers can run $500,000; Strategic Developers can pay
$250,000; being an Add-in Provider costs $5,000. The operation has a
budget of $1.2 million, which means it has the wherewithal to get
into new areas like embedded.

Eclipse claims 19 million download requests since it started and has
close to 50 members.


CSN 534-12 Microsoft Countersues Teknowledge

Microsoft has countersued Teknowledge Corporation, the company that
charged Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and Yahoo with infringing its so-
called HotBox patent last July.

Teknowledge claimed Microsoft was treading on technology to alert
users to web page changes or the availability of software updates.

Microsoft filed suit on Tuesday charging Teknowledge with infringing
two of its patents, one on e-bill payments and the other on
information aggregation.

Teknowledge, describing itself as being 10,000 times smaller than
Microsoft, complained that Microsoft didn't give it any advance
warning or offer to license the widgetry.

According to Teknowledge president and CEO Neil Jacobstein,
"Possibly Microsoft wanted to send a message that small companies
shouldn't dare sue Microsoft. Based on our preliminary analysis, we
believe Microsoft's patent counterclaims to be utterly without
merit."

Last month, a federal court in California consolidated the
Microsoft-AOL-Yahoo suit with the suit Teknowledge filed in defense
of HotBox against Akamai, Inktomi and Cable & Wireless Internet
Service in the summer of 2002. The Markman hearing is now scheduled
for June 28. The Teknowledge patent is number 6,029,175.


CSN 534-13 ISA Server 2004 Beta Bows

Microsoft has put out the public beta of its Internet Security and
Acceleration Server 2004, which provides an advanced application
layer firewall, VPN, caching features and an enhanced user
interface. It's at www.microsoft.com/isaserver.


CSN 534-14 Fujitsu Goes with Laptop Chip-based Blade Server

Fujitsu Computer Systems, which used to be Amdahl, has unpacked a
new Primergy BX300 Pentium M-based two-way blade server that's
packaged as a 3U that can house up to 20 ultra-compact server blades
and is supposed to have low power dissipation.

Pricing starts are $6,500.

An optional PCI slot accommodates either gigabit Ethernet or Fibre
Channel. The mobile Pentium chip can support up to 4GB of main
memory.

Fujitsu says that between the chip's 1.6GHz clock speed and large L2
cache a user can get a 25% increase in output over existing 2p
blades.

Its server chassis is designed with redundant and high-plug power
supplies and fans. The system's management blades are also redundant
and hot-pluggable. The 300 provides for remote management over a LAN
or serial connection via a single dedicated interface. The company
has deployment software that fits out individual blades or clones
existing installations.

The box supports both Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2003.


CSN 534-15 Oasis Kicks Off Push for Dataweb Standard

OASIS wants to create a standard for sharing, linking and
synchronizing data over the Internet and other networks using XML
documents and Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs), the URI-
compatible abstract identifier scheme OASIS also developed. The new
OASIS XRI Data Interchange (XDI) Technical Committee is supposed to
enable implementers to automatically interchange XDI documents and
to express controls over the authority, security, privacy, and
rights of shared data as XDI links.

"The goal of XDI is to do for controlled data sharing what the web
did for open content sharing," said Drummond Reed, the co-convenor
of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. "XDI does not displace any
specialized XML vocabulary designed to support specific applications
or web services. Rather, it augments them by providing a standard,
generalized way to identify, describe, exchange, link and
synchronize other XML documents encoded in any XML language or
schema - tying them all into one global 'Dataweb.'"

The basic idea is to make the Internet more capable.

XDI will address interoperable, automated data interchange across
distributed applications and trust domains.

Committee members include representatives of AMD, AmSoft Systems,
Booz Allen Hamilton, Cordance, Epok, Neustar and NRI.


CSN 534-16 Oblix Mates with Confluent

E-business house Oblix Inc, the identity management and web
authentication people, is supposed to acquire Confluent Software,
the policy-based web services management folks.

Evidently Oblix wants to use Confluent to validate applications.

Confluent enforces policies by means of policy pipelines and pre-
packages the stuff by chaining common operational concerns including
things like QoS, security and logging. Confluent can support Oblix'
flagship NetPoint identity system as a pre-packaged policy step so
NetPoint customers, without coding, can enforce application-level
end-to-end authentication and authorization schemes that are
compliant with WS-Security and SAML.

In similar moves Computer Associates acquired Adjoin and HP picked
up Talking Blocks for Unicenter and Open View respectively.


CSN 534-17 Sony Takes Out $325m Insurance Policy

Last week IBM moved its unprofitable albeit state-of-the-art chip
unit in under the sheltering wing of its server operation. This week
IBM said that the Sony Group will pour $325 million into IBM's next-
generation 65nm/300mm process in the name of getting "capacity" for
the mysterious new multimedia-oriented Cell chip that Sony, IBM and
Toshiba have been developing at a joint lab in Austin, Texas.

IBM expects to start pilot production of the Cell and other chips
for Sony in the first half of next year.

Evidently Sony is buying a fast ramp to volume.

Sony is reportedly going to spend a billion dollars in its next
fiscal year on the production of Cell and its little friends.

Bear Stearns says Sony has aspirations to be the "Intel of the
consumer electronics world."

The Cell is supposed to be small and process 10 times the
information that current game chips do.


CSN 534-18 VoiceXML 2.0 Close to Standardization

W3C has advanced VoiceXML 2.0 to the status of a proposed standard,
what it calls a "recommendation." It is in final review.

The widgetry, a part of the consortium's Speech Interface Framework,
brings web-based development and content to interactive voice
response applications. It allows developers to create audio dialogs
that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of
spoken or touch tone key input, recording of spoken input, telephony
and mixed-initiative conversations. VoiceXML controls how an
application interacts with the user.

There are eight known implementation of the stuff in both prototype
and released products.

The W3C's Voice Browser Working Group is one of its largest and most
active, W3C says, including all the usual suspects. The group's
royalty-free licensing policy was referred to W3C's Patent Advisory
Group where it was decided that the core VoiceXML 2.0 spec be
royalty-free.


CSN 534-19 StarOffice Lights On Solaris x86

StarOffice 7-on-Solaris x86 has reached that magic moment known as
general availability, according to Sun. That puts Sun a step closer
to porting its newfangled Java Desktop System to Solaris x86 later
this year.

Last time it counted Sun had a half-million registered Solaris x86
licenses, it said. The operating system costs $79.95.

Thanks to Sun's Project Atlas, Solaris x86 is supposed to be 30%
faster than Linux 2.4.

Sun is also bragging about United India Insurance Company tossing
Office out and substituting StarOffice 7 on 10,000 machines to save
money.

There are supposed to have been upwards of 40 million cumulative
StarOffice or Open Office downloads last month.

To amuse himself, Sun's software prince Jonathan Schwartz directed
an open letter to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano the week before last
offering him Sun's Java Desktop System for $50 per employee.
Palmisano of course had challenged all of IBM to move to a Linux
desktop by the end of the year. And of course Palmisano is dreaming.
The software's not there.


CSN 534-20 Microsoft Upgrades Business Portal App

Microsoft has upgraded its Business Portal software, the stuff that
lets organizations deploy a role-based portal that builds on their
network security schema.

Launched last May, Business Portal enables access to data,
applications and services for employees, customers and business
partners via a browser.

The key enhancement in Release 2 is the adoption of Windows
SharePoint Services as Business Portal's foundation. Using
SharePoint means Business Portal can offer users document libraries,
calendars and announcements to record activities, share and edit
documents, track meeting notes and provide links to other relevant
sites.

Business Portal is integrated with Microsoft's Great Plains and
Solomon business apps. Microsoft also enhanced the HRM Self Service
Suite in Great Plains and introduced a new Payroll Time and
Attendance module for Solomon customers.

Redmond said the upgrade would allow SharePoint Web Parts created by
other developers to be deployed through Business Portal, thereby
increasing the range of information and services that can be
delivered through the portal.

The price of Business Portal 2.0 has been reduced to $20-$40 a user
based on the number of licenses purchased, with an unlimited user
license going for $40,000.


CSN 534-21 Oki Uses .NET in Newfangled Convergence Server

Oki Electric Industry Company Ltd unwrapped a telephony server based
on .NET Tuesday that it said was the first of its kind. Officially
the thing is called IP Convergence Server IPstage SS9100 that, as
its name suggests, converges large-scale IP-PBX functionality with
mission-critical business applications such as ERP and EIP as well
as web services. (Think authentication and payment processing, for
instance.) The widgetry is supposed to enable various modes of real-
time communication such as unified messaging from inside the
business apps for improved management efficiencies. The system
provides voice mail, instant messaging and e-mail. It goes on the
Japanese market next month.


CSN 534-22 System X Trades Desktops for Servers

Apple's folks want us to know that Virginia Tech, which built System
X that amazing record-making supercomputer - the third-fastest in
the world - out of Apple desktops last fall, is going to find good
homes for all of those 1,100 Power Mac G5s as it migrates the
cluster over to Apple's now-available Xserve G5 rack-mounted 1U
servers.

The servers and desktops are based on the same 64-bit PowerPC G5
chip.

The Xserve is supposed to deliver 15 gigaflops of peak double-
precision processing power per system.

The system runs the Panther release of the Unix-based Mac OS X, the
first rev to support 64-bits.

The switchover, expected to be done by May, will cut the amount of
space Apple desktops take up, cut down on heat and power and provide
server management. The school says it's a matter of
price/performance.

Assistant professor of computer science Srinidhi Varadarajan, who
built System X, wrote a package called Déjà vu that provides a
fault-tolerant software environment so that if any one component
failed, the queuing system is alerted and a free node takes over so
calculations don't have to be restarted.


CSN 534-23 EC Watch

The European Commission may have lost its stomach for a so-called
"must-carry" provision that would insist that Microsoft include
rival media players in Windows as a penalty for tying its own Media
Player to the operating system, according to the Financial Times.

The penalty was conceived of as an alternate remedy to the EC's idea
of making Microsoft offer a version of Windows without the Microsoft
plug-in when the EC formally charged Microsoft last summer.

Meanwhile, a German magazine called Focus claims "informed" EU
sources say the EC is considering imposing a record fine of EUR
100,000,000 ($123,840,000) on Microsoft. EC spokeswoman Amelia
Torries dismissed the story as "pure and utter speculation."

The Economist puts the fine between $300 million and $500 million.
Worst case is something like $3.2 billion.

Microsoft evidently wants to cut a settlement that prevents future
run-ins with the regulators as it goes on tying new features to
Windows. "We want to find a solution that we can apply to future
situation, that can be generalized in other situations," Microsoft
deputy general counsel John Frank is quoted as saying.


CSN 534-24 SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Debuts

Microsoft launched SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, the business
intelligence add-on for the database, as expected.

The reporting tool, which integrates OLAP, data mining, warehousing
and data extraction, transformation and loading tools, is supposed
to provide real-time information from any data source to any device.

A SQL Server 2000 license is required for every server that
Reporting Services is deployed on.

Best Buy, Cox Communications, RF Micro Devices, ASB Bank, and Mary
Kay are among the companies that are supposed to have started
implementing Reporting Services.


CSN 534-25 Servers Heated Up in Q4

Gartner says server shipments were up 25% year-over-year in Q4 to
1.59 million units, 91% of the things x86. The numbers were the best
in three years. For all of 2003, they were up 20%. HP was first
(462k), Dell second (319k), IBM third (274k) and Sun fourth (84k),
but quarter-over-quarter HP grew the least (21%). IBM was first
(39%), Sun second (33%) and Dell third (30%). HP also lost a point
of share landing at 29% at a time when even wounded Sun and
Sparc/Solaris gained a little back and had 5.3% of the market.
Dell's share was up fractionally. IBM gained almost two points to
close at 17.2%.


CSN 534-26 Danes Go For UBL

Denmark has adopted an early version of the Oasis Universal Business
Language (UBL 0.7) as a standard for e-commerce in the public
sector. It's going to be used to integrate state systems with a
newly implemented portal for public procurement (www.doip.dk). UBL,
whose 1.0 version is in beta, is an XML library of common business
data components along with a set of standard business documents such
as purchase orders and invoices that are assembled from the
component library.


Drive Bay


CSN 534-27 EMC Product Launch Set

EMC has scheduled a conference call for Monday February 9 apparently
to unwrap new Symmetrix arrays called the DMX2s - doubtless because
they're supposed to be twice as powerful and have twice as many
drives as their predecessors - as well as new CX300, 500 and 700
Clariion widgetry. There's reportedly some low low-end CX100s and
CX150s floating around as well.


CSN 534-28 Broadcom Buys RAIDCore

Broadcom has acquired Nashua, New Hampshire-based RAID and
virtualization software start-up RAIDCore Inc and its RAID software
stack for single- and dual-processor servers.

RAIDCore's software is OS-, I/O bus- and hardware-independent and
can reportedly be used with existing and future server RAID products
including SATA RAID and SAS RAID.

Broadcom said the acquisition would give it a complete set of RAID
products for the server storage market.

Initial products from the acquisition are supposed to focus on
integrated RAID-on-chip and RAID-on-motherboard gear for entry-level
and mid-range server applications.

RAID is used for redundancy and improving data transfer rates.

Broadcom valued the deal at up to $16.5 million including cash
acquisition costs and future compensation expenses.


CSN 534-29 Cornice Raises Mega Bucks

Storage start-up Cornice has secured a whopping $51 million in
second-round funding, taking the Longmont, Colorado concern's total
funding to $81 million.

Existing investors CIBC Capital partners, Nokia Venture Partners and
VantagePoint Venture Partners as well as newcomers BA Venture
Partners and GIC Special Investments participated.

Founded in August 2000, Cornice provides a high-capacity embedded
storage device called a Storage Element for portable consumer
electronic devices such as digital music players and digital video
capture devices.

Although the Storage Element shares some architectural kinship with
hard drives such as a spinning platter and a read/write head,
Cornice executives argue that it's not a drive. Hard drive features
such as elaborate caching and buffering mechanisms, built for PCs
and servers, have been stripped out of it because they're not needed
in consumer electronics.

The 2GB Storage Element, launched last month, was designed into
products that turned up at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The first-generation Storage Element with its 1.5GB capacity was
launched last June.

Samsung, Rio, RCA, iRiver and Digitalway have incorporated the
Storage Element in their consumer electronics devices.

Texas Instruments, an early investor in Cornice, has helped the
company develop and manufacture its ICs.

Cornice is the brainchild of former Maxtor executive Kevin Magenis
and former Quantum exec Curt Bruner. Magenis is Cornice's CEO and
Bruner its CTO.


Linux Watch


CSN 534-30 SCO Amends IBM Complaint Again

The SCO Group has amended its $3 billion worth of charges against
IBM and, according to SCO CEO Darl McBride, has added copyright
complaints to its largely breach-of-contract suit.

McBride suggested that IBM was making more of SCO's original
misappropriation of trade secrets charge than SCO likes and that the
copyright issue would somehow get SCO back in the direction it
wanted to go.

In mid-January SCO was threatening to press copyright claims, but it
was assumed the company meant against end users since its lawyers
had indicated that would be their grounds. This is a horse of a
different color.

Before the MyDoom distraction, when it was turning over its evidence
against Linux to IBM, SCO was sounding a bit airy about whether
Linux was copied from AIX and Dynix or not, telling the court it was
"almost certainly" copied or derived.

Anyway, the parties are supposed to be in court sorting out all the
existing motions and counter-motions on Friday, February 6. IBM is
more than likely to come in all disgruntled with SCO's answers to
its discovery questions - SCO left a lot unsaid claiming it needs an
up-to-date copy of IBM Unix system AIX to get to the bottom of
exactly what IBM poached and depositions from Linux programmers to
learn the source of the code.

SCO of course has a motion pending to get AIX, but was ordered by
the court to make its case against Linux first. If it got AIX and
Dynix, it told the court it would need 90 days to sort through it
and give IBM its evidence.

 Doubtless IBM will try to set things up for a summary judgment.

IBM is unlikely to get a summary judgment out of the magistrate
dealing with all the housekeeping on behalf of the judge whose case
it really is.

By the way, one legal opinion claims that SCO left itself wide
opened when it filed suit against Novell. Supposedly it's dead in
the water if it doesn't come out of it with exclusive rights to the
IP.


CSN 534-31 SuSE Chief Moved to Novell Job

SuSE boss Richard Seibt has evidently gotten his reward. He's going
to run Novell EMEA as president as Novell transitions to a Linux
house. The post's former occupant, Gerard Van Kemmel, has been made
chairman of Novell EMEA.

Richard, an ex-IBMer, has control of day-to-day operations. Gerard
is supposed help with strategy and developing relationships with
government agencies, large system integrators and strategic
customers. One might wonder how long this arrangement will last.

According to a canned statement attributed to Novell CEO Jack
Messman, the Richard move is supposed to show Novell's commitment to
open source and Linux.

SuSE, a Novell business unit since it got bought, has been turned
over to Markus Rex, the guy who was SuSE's VP of R&D until this
apotheosis.

Rex will be general manager and will report directly to Novell vice-
chairman Chris Stone. Rex is supposed to develop the SuSE properties
- from desktop to server - and deliver other Novell units a complete
Linux solution stack. There's no mention of the unit having other
responsibilities.

Meanwhile, Novell is offering new certifications to promote Linux
adoption. One offers a Professional certificate in SuSE and the
other one is a Certified Linux Engineer program.


CSN 534-32 SCO Moves Site, Microsoft Shrugs Off Attack

For the duration of the MyDoom attack, now deemed the largest Denial
of Service attack in human history - SCO normally gets 600,000 hits
a day was flooded with 50 times that number - the company has
changed its web site from www.sco.com to www.thescogroup.com.

For all the warning SCO got, a lot of the new site's hyperlinks
initially took the visitor back to the inoperable www.sco.com, a
situation that was subsequently fixed.

The new site also provides links to security vendors like Network
Associates and Symantec that the MyDoom.b variant was scheduled to
try to interrupt.

SCO said moving the web site is the first step in a layered
contingency plan believed to consist largely of moving the site
around if need be. It simply pulled the plug on sco.com.

SCO repeated that it and Microsoft had posted a $500,000 reward for
the capture of MyDoom's author or authors.

Microsoft, one of the sturdier web sites, withstood the very much
smaller MyDoom.b assault - the second worm infected very few boxes -
on Tuesday although it also set up an alternate web site that
customers who couldn't reach www.microsoft.com could use. It's at
https://information.microsoft.com/. MyDoom.b was supposed to
aggravate Microsoft until the end of the month.

Virus researchers currently think that based on internal evidence
both MyDoom and MyDoom.b are the work of one hand, possibly someone
named Andy. Microsoft is expecting a MyDoom.c to be developed that
will come after it.


CSN 534-33 SCOsource Linux Tax Called a Flop

Decatur Jones Equity Partners LLC, an equity research house that
follows Red Hat, Citrix, Wind River and the SCO Group, the later
making it a rarity, has cut its projection on revenues coming in to
SCO from the SCOsource licensing effort by roughly 90%.

It figures Novell's willingness to indemnify its customers, the Open
Source Develop Labs' willingness to contribute to end-user legal
bills and Novell's claims to Unix copyrights has given companies the
Dutch courage to defy SCO and not pay the Linux tax.

Decatur's prognostication says, "We believe it is now unlikely that
SCO will generate meaningful end-user SCOsource revenues in 2004."
It figures SCOsource can only do a piddling $625,000, down from $7
million.

Decatur is also betting that SCO comes in with a loss of 43 cents a
share instead of profits of 20 cents a share thanks to its mounting
legal costs.

When it posted its October quarter, SCO confessed it wasn't
expecting much in the way of royalties in the January quarter or
that it could predict how SCOsource would do this year.


CSN 534-34 OSDL Defines Data Center Linux, Seeks Reaction

The Data Center Linux (DCL) working group over at the Open Source
Development Lab (OSDL) has released a DCL Technical Capabilities 1.0
document saying it wants feedback from developers and the industry.

The move is the step before OSDL locks down its DCL requirements
document, the reference blueprint for Linux distributions, large end
users and Linux kernel developers.

The paper defines 300 prioritized capabilities organized into seven
categories: scalability, performance, reliability, RAS (reliability,
availability and scalability), manageability, clusters, standards,
security and usability.

The idea is to ensure that Linux can support demanding enterprise-
class application such as high-end OLTP and decision support,
according to Steve Geary, HP's director of Linux engineering and
chair of the DCL working group.

See
http://www.osdl.org/lab_activities/data_center_linux/DCL_ExecSumm_Te
chCapabilities_1_0.pdf.


CSN 534-35 Groklaw Editor Takes Day Job

Pamela Jones, aka PJ, the editor of nine-month-old Groklaw.net, a
scourge of the SCO Group, although SCO's litigation against open
source and Linux gave birth to the site, is going to be director of
litigation risk research for Open Source Risk Management LLC (OSRM)
as well.

OSRM, which, as its name suggests, provides risk management to
corporate users of free and open source software, has kicked off an
Open Source Insurance Initiative that Jones' appointment is part of.
OSRM founder Daniel Egger thinks that by fostering a collaborative,
community-based model for identifying and mitigating relevant
litigation risks will allow it to offer its comprehensive insurance
at the lowest possible cost.

Jones will still manage the Groklaw site and she's supposed to have
editorial independence, but as she herself points out there's
obviously synergy between the two endeavors. She hopes the research
will "result in building a bulwark of legal protection for GNU/Linux
software."

She said that she sees "a need for low-cost vendor-neutral
protection that will at the same time make it possible to allow
continued free modification of the code. No one else has
successfully done so. I believe OSRM has come up with the right
answer."

OSRM was started last year and says it provides code-scanning and
copyright infringement detection technologies, risk assessment, risk
mitigation consulting, best practices training and certification,
vendor-neutral indemnification and custom insurance to the Global
1000.


CSN 534-36 LSB 2.0 Made Public

The Free Standards Group has put its rev of the Linux Standard Base,
LSB 2.0, up for public review. Comments will be collected until the
very beginning of March.

Critics contend that the LSB, for all the time that's gone into it,
still fails at its essential purpose, which is to make sure that any
Linux application program can run on any Linux distribution without
the ISV having to tinker with it and basically create distribution-
specific programs.

The new specification is supposed to revise the core spec to support
modules that are built on the core LSB, introduce an ABI for C++ and
support new architectures like PPC64 and AMD64. LSB 2.0 also updates
basic specifications and implementations underlying LSB such as the
Single Unix Spec.

Besides the written specification, LSB 2.0 includes test suites, a
development environment, a sample implementation and developer
documentation. See http://www.linuxbase .org/.


CSN 534-37 Now There's a Thought - Free Linux

Lindows.com is going to try to harness the power of the peer-to-peer
networks that have ripped off music and movies on a massive scale on
behalf of its Linux desktop operating system.

It proposes to give away its LinuxLive! "demo" software, the stuff
that currently runs off a CD, costs $29.95 and doesn't require an
install that messes up a Windows system, for free on some of the
popular P2P networks like Gnutella.

Call the company crazy but LindowsLive supposedly does almost
everything that LindowsOS does. It surfs the net, sends and receives
e-mail and instant messages and includes a copy of OpenOffice.

Lindows CEO Michael Robertson acknowledges the move is potentially
self-destructive but he's gambling that the exposure to millions of
people expands his customer base at a minimal cost. Or so he says.
He claims he's hoping the P2P people buy other products and services
from Lindows.

Robertson says Lindows will spend upwards of $100,000 this year on
bandwidth charges to deliver CD images of its software that people
can use to construct an installation CD for LindowsOS. He figures
the P2Ps will save him money.


CSN 534-38 Opteron Gets Real-Time Linux

Concurrent's Integrated Solutions Division has moved its very, very
serious real-time Linux operating system, some Red Hat-derived
widgetry, to the AMD Opteron taking advantage of the chip's floating
point, 64-bit processing and throughput.

As far as anyone knows, the so-called RedHawk 2.0 is the first RTOS
for Opteron, at least from a major RTOS player. Concurrent's stuff
on Xeon platforms shows up in places like FA-18 simulation systems
and THAAD missiles.

The company is expecting the thing to open doors to new markets like
medical imaging, video encoding/decoding and the financial world.

The port uses the very latest 2.6 Linux kernel.


CSN 534-39 Opera Puts Internet Demigod on its Board

John Patrick, IBM's influential former VP of Internet technology and
now president of Attitude LLC, has been named to Opera Software's
board. Patrick, an acknowledged Internet visionary, is credited with
bringing the Internet to IBM. Business 2.0 has called him "one of
the industry's most intriguing mind." He's supposed to be one of the
top 30 people in the world to drive innovation. Patrick was a
founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium and is now chairman
of the Global Internet Project.


CSN 534-40 OSDL Snags NTT

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is picking up new members at
a clip these days. Its latest recruit is none other than the great
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), which is supposed
to taking part in the lab's Data Center Linux and Carrier Grade
Linux projects. NTT, which is composed of 430 companies and 200,000
employers, will have its R&D arm NTT Research Labs take the point on
this one.


CSN 534-41 Voltaire Hires Ex-Brocade Guy

Voltaire, the hopeful Infiniband house, has hired ex-Brocade VP of
global OEM sales Mark Favreau, making him executive VP and general
manager of North America operations. He will be responsible for
Voltaire's sales and support including OEMs and resellers. Before
Brocade, Favreau was director of channel sales at SGI.


CSN 534-42 Trolltech Adds .NET Support

Trolltech has put .NET Framework and 64-bit processing support in
the latest release of Qt, its multi-platform toolkit. Qt 3.3 also
support the GNU C++ compiler on Windows (MinGW gcc), which makes
building multi-platform programs easier since developers can use the
same API - Qt - and the same compiler - gcc - on Unix, Linux, Mac
and Windows.

Qt-based applications can now live inside or co-exist with the .NET
Framework. Qt apps can either interoperate with .NET via ActiveX or
manually through Microsoft's managed C++ extensions.

Qt 3.3 also supports Internet Protocols v4 and v6 so applications
will be Internet-aware.


CSN 534-43 TimeSys Offers Linux 2.6 IDE for the PowerPC

TimeSys, the embedded folk, has sent its TimeStorm Linux Development
Kits for the PowerPC to a public beta.

The stuff bundles an Eclipse-based TimeStorm IDE with a beta of what
is thought to be the first commercial port of Linux 2.6 to the
PowerPC chip. The company anticipates a full release by the end of
the month at a royalty-free price starting at $995 per developer
seat.

See http://www.timesys.com/2.6.

Timesys has the first Eclipse embedded development tools for Linux
2.6. The IDE is its flagship tool and now sells for $795 per seat.


CSN 534-44 Desktop Linux Summit Redux

The Desktop Linux Summit that exhibitors and even the organizer
dropped out of last year because it was nothing more than a
Lindows.com commercial, is back for a second time. According to
Lindows, Red Hat, Seagate and Sun are going to sponsor the thing.
It's set for April 22-23 in San Diego, California, Lindows'
hometown. See www.desktoplinuxsummit.org.


Mail Bag


CSN 534-45 Inflatable Dolls Called Mommy

Hope this article ("Huge MyDoom Zombie Army Wipes Out SCO") isn't
your last word on the MyDoom virus. Hope we can expect an editorial
in CNS and Linuxgram STRONGLY condeming it.

You could point out that it's a proven fact that guys who write
viruses suffer from a medical condition - microphallus - and
probably own an inflatable doll they call Mommy.

Interfering with SCO's free speech is bad enough, but to use
zillions of innocent people to do it, and bog down the whole net in
the process is just plain vicious.

Next time, maybe the Linux hacker who did this will hijack and
airliner and fly it into the SCO buildings (oh, I forget, hackers
are cowards).

Somebody in the Linux community knows who did this, and they should
turn that person over to the FBI. If they don't, then the denials of
the Linux bigwigs will sound as hollow as the PLO's.

Rather than focusing on the legal issues, many of these same Linux
bigwigs found it expedient to demonize SCO - admittedly an easy
target because nobody likes the company - and whip their followers
up into a frenzy. SCO has become a scapegoat for every IP law that
the Linux community doesn't like, and for their nagging collective
doubts about the originality of Linux. The present act of terrorism
was an entirely foreseeable consequence of this strategy.

The Linux leadership needs to act responsibly and immediately tone
down its anti-SCO rhetoric.

Mark Ryan


CSN 534-46 Practicing Law Without a License

The letter from Daniel Wallace, a retired physicist we misidentified
as working for Insight Communications, that we ran last week created
a little firestorm judging from the calls and e-mail we got. The
following letter, which came in at press time, is indicative of the
reaction.

To the Editor:

I am an Adjunct Professor at Duquesne University School of Law
teaching upper-level intellectual property law, former director of
legal affairs for TimeSys Corporation (an embedded Linux developer),
and former vice-president of technology asset management for PNC
Bank. In addition to teaching, I currently advise a number of
corporate clients regarding information technology matters with
related intellectual property issues, and, in particular, risk
management issues related to Linux and other open source programs.

I was disturbed to read your recent posting of a letter to the
editor authored by Daniel Wallace. I was equally disturbed by the
lack of legal expertise reflected in most of the posted comments. I
feel strongly that a proper legal response is required, and needs
and deserves equal exposure in your paper - not a buried posted
response.

So - I am requesting that you publish the following response to Mr
Wallace's letter in the next available issue.

Most sincerely,

Celia Santander Esq


Mr Wallace correctly describes a number of different legal
principles, including a fair description of the rights involved in
derivative works. However, his key assumption - the foundation of
his entire argument - has absolutely no basis in case law, statutory
law or even reasonable legal analogy. His argument is based on one
key principle: That in order to grant a unilateral license, the
licensor may only impose conditions to the license that involve the
licensor's exclusive rights, and that the licensor may not impose
any conditions that involve any of the licensee's rights.

He cites a Supreme Court case (General Talking Pictures Corp v
Western Electric Co Inc) for this principle. There are a number of
problems with this case and Mr. Wallace's interpretation.

Firstly, as a threshold issue, you cannot analogize patent law to
copyright law. It is like comparing apples to zebras. As just a
couple of the many examples of why this is true, consider some
fundamental differences between the two bodies of law: patents allow
each co-inventor to exercise her exclusive rights without any
accounting to the other(s) while copyright law requires co-authors
to report to and compensate as appropriate their fellow co-authors
for any exercise of rights that results in revenue generation;
patents cover ideas while copyrights cover expressions of ideas;
copyrights arise naturally - they exist without the author taking
any formal action at all, while patents involve formal processes of
application and prosecution via the US Patent and Trademark Office
to have a patent granted. These are just a few of the many, many
differences that make patent case law wholly inapplicable to
copyright law.

We could stop right here on solid ground that Mr Wallace's arguments
are without merit, having been based entirely on patent case law.
However, just for the sake of argument, let's analogize anyway, and
see if we can follow Mr Wallace's train of thought.

So let's look at the patent case that Mr. Wallace relies on -
General Talking Pictures Corp v Western Electric Co, Inc., 305 US
124. This case does not discuss in any detail whatsoever the scope
or nature of permissible conditions to unilateral license. The case
merely cites another case (United States v General Electric Co) to
affirm that a patent license may be require, as a condition of the
license, certain performance of the licensee provided that such
performance reasonably relates to the benefits that the patent
holder can expect to receive from his patent. The case cited (United
States v General Electric Co) has since been called into question by
the Supreme Court and its holdings are no longer good law.

Moving right along -

The other lines of patent cases that Mr Wallace refers to (aside
from being patent cases and therefore not applicable to copyright
law) merely reinforce that licenses can be conditioned on the
performance of the licensee; still other lines of cases discuss the
principle that once a tangible commodity is produced from a patent,
the patent holder's ability to control what happens with that
tangible commodity is greatly diminished and eventually disappears.
The only thread of reason from all of these cases is that a
condition imposed on a patent license by the licensor must have some
relationship to the rights of the patent holder. For example, if I
license my patent to ABC Manufacturing, I can make the license
conditional upon ABC using only top-grade materials, conforming to
ISO standards, selling only to Australia, etc, but I cannot make the
license conditional upon the president of ABC standing on his head
for one hour every Tuesday morning at 9:00 am. Why? That condition
has no relationship to the benefits I can expect to gain from my
status as a patent holder. I suspect this is the principle that Mr
Wallace grossly misconstrued as "the conditions he places must
involve only his exclusive rights and not the exclusive [rights] of
parties involved..."

If we take this principle and apply it to the GPL, the original
licensor is conditioning his license to the world at large on one
simple condition - "If you want to copy and make derivative works of
my code, you have to license those derivatives under a license like
this one...." If Mr. Wallace insists on analogizing to patent law,
there is nothing wrong with this condition. It relates directly to
the benefits the copyright holder can expect to obtain. A copyright
holder benefits by having sole control of his copyrighted work, to
do with as he sees fit, including, if he so desires, to donate the
copyright to the public domain, a common practice of universities
and government entities. The copyright holder in this case is merely
conditioning his license to create derivative works on the condition
that such derivatives be licensed under similar terms, to prevent
the licensee (for example) from copying his code and incorporating
it into a proprietary product for which she can then charge money,
competing with the original copyright holder, and denigrating the
benefits the copyright holder derives from his copyright. This is a
direct correlation to the rights of the copyright holder - a perfect
example of exactly the type of condition that is appropriate for a
licensor to impose on a licensee. This is no different from a patent
licensor conditioning manufacture of his surgical device being
restricted for sale in the US and/or manufactured only from surgical
stainless steel.

Now let's look at the common sense definitional view. Mr Wallace
states that for a licensor to place conditions on a licensee that
involve the licensee's "exclusive rights" falls "outside the
definition of a unilateral permission." However, nowhere does Mr
Wallace attempt to define a "unilateral permission" nor does he cite
any support whatsoever for this statement. So let's take a look. A
unilateral permission is a permission granted by one person that a
second person can choose to accept or not accept. I realize that
"unilateral" signifies one person only, but simply because I give
you my unilateral permission to swim in my swimming pool does not
mean that you have to or that you will. You can choose to do so or
not, and your actions do not make my permission any less
"unilateral."

Unlike a contract, a unilateral permission does not require the
second person (accepting the permission) to do anything to signify
acceptance. In a contract, the second person would have to sign his
name on a document, click a web site icon, begin performance, send a
check, or any other number of acts that signify acceptance. It is
this performance of an act signifying acceptance, and the first
person (offeror's) awareness of this act (acceptance) that concludes
formation of the contract. What makes a unilateral permission
different is that the second person does not need to do anything to
accept the permission - he does not need to perform any act
signifying acceptance, and the first person (offeror) does not need
to ever know if the second person accepted the permission or not.
That is the difference.

When a unilateral permission is conditioned upon something, however,
the condition must be fulfilled in order for the license to be
valid. This means the licensee must do something to fulfill the
condition. However, the licensor does not ever need to know about
it, and doesn't care. Either the condition is fulfilled and the
permission (license) is valid, or the condition is not fulfilled and
the permission is not valid.

Now here is the key point and a basic fact of law - Anytime a person
does something that they are not legally obligated to do, or
voluntarily refrains from doing something that they have a legal
right to do, they are acting in a manner that affects their personal
and exclusive "rights" - they are giving up one of their "rights."
Therefore, anytime a person voluntarily fulfills a condition in
order to obtain a unilateral permission (license), they necessarily
are performing acts that involve their own personal exclusive
rights. After all, they don't have to fulfill the condition - there
is no legal obligation to do so - but they choose to give up a right
that they have in order to receive the benefit of the unilateral
permission that was so conditioned. It matters not one whit that the
exclusive rights we are talking about here are copyrights.

So - Mr Wallace's basic premise - that the GPL is unsound because it
requires the licensee as a condition of the unilateral permission of
the licensor to do something affecting the licensee's "exclusive
rights" is an impossible assertion. He concedes that unilateral
permissions can be conditional, but ignores the fact that you cannot
fulfill a condition without affecting your rights (copyright or
otherwise)(your right to free speech, your right to seek employment,
you right to go or not go to the supermarket, your right move to
Alaska, etc). We all have innumerable rights and have to exercise at
least one of them to fulfill any condition.

Perhaps what is confusing Mr Wallace is this: It is true that you
cannot interfere with the rights of a copyright holder without
his/her permission. Mr Wallace, I believe, views the GPL as
interference by one party (the licensor) with the copyrights of
another party (the licensee) because the license is conditioned upon
the licensee taking certain actions regarding his copyrights. He
presents the following alleged conundrum: Either the second party
(licensee) is agreeing to this interference, in which case the GPL
cannot be a unilateral permission since now we have two parties
agreeing with each other (sounds like a contract); or, the second
party (licensee) is not agreeing to this interference in which case
the GPL is not valid because it is a violation of copyright law. (Mr
Wallace ignores the issue of whether or not a valid contract has
been formed under the first scenario.) The answer to Mr Wallace's
purported conundrum is this: The second party is  consenting to the
interference by fulfilling the condition of the unilateral
permission, but merely fulfilling such a condition does not change
the nature of the unilateral permission as unilateral.

Re: Mr Wallace's quotations from IBM's amended counterclaims, IBM's
reference to the GPL as a "public agreement" cast in a "binding
legal form," has nothing to do with the characterization of the GPL
as a unilateral permission. It has been a common and unchallenged
legal practice for countless years for copyright holders who wish to
donate their copyrights to the public to do so by unilateral
permission, generally in the form of a notice contained in the
copyrighted work to that effect. Members of the public can "agree"
or not "agree" to accept the permission by copying or not copying
the proffered work. This is what IBM is talking about when it refers
to a "public agreement" cast in a "binding legal form" and, yes,
they are talking about copyright permissions. That is the subject,
is it not?

Finally, Mr Wallace's discussion of federal preemption is not
applicable. Certainly, federal law preempts state law if there is a
conflict.  However, there is no conflict here, and the FSF's use of
a euphemism "copyleft" does not somehow create a conflict in laws
where one does not otherwise exist. The GPL is founded and can only
exist on the basis of copyright law and the rights of authors to do
what they want with their own work and to condition licenses to
others as they see fit. There is no conflict, merely the fear of the
uniformed when encountering a new exercise of freedom and rights
granted by the same laws that have governed us for almost a century.

As an aside to Mr Wallace's comments, I believe that the GPL
functions as either a unilateral permission or a contract, depending
upon how it is being implemented by any given party. So, for
example, if a company offers you an online download of Linux and
asks you to click an "I agree" button acknowledging that the
download of Linux you are about to receive is subject to the GPL
(and you have been given an opportunity to read the GPL before
clicking), and you click, seems to me you've just entered a binding
agreement called the GPL no different from a Microsoft EULA effected
in the same way. By contrast, simply placing the GPL in a tarball
with the code in my mind falls squarely into the category of
"unilateral permission." I see no conflict here - merely a
difference in administration, both equally effective.


BillyGrams


CSN 534-47 Darl's Phone 'Slashdotted'

On Sunday while MyDoom was overwhelming the SCO Group's web site,
the home phone of SCO CEO Darl McBride was being overwhelmed during
the Super Bowl by prank calls, most of them rude and insulting, put
in train by the Linux-leaning Slashdot site, which posted his
unlisted number and thought it would amuse itself. "I know this is
cruel," a ringleader who calls himself "boy afraid" wrote, "but it's
fun."


CSN 534-48 School Daze

The University of California at Berkeley has a stake in whatever
Eolas Technologies can get out of Microsoft for patent infringement,
and it appears that the University of Rochester has a similar
interest in the Blue Noise Mask infringement claims that Research
Corporation Technologies (RCT) appears to be successfully pressing
against Microsoft. RCT is the one that got a summary judgment
against Microsoft last week and like the Eolas case hundred of
millions of dollars of Microsoft's money is at stake. Also like
Eolas, Microsoft claims the RCT patents are invalid. The University
of Rochester earned $42 million in royalties in fiscal 2002 and,
while it doesn't value the technology exactly, it indicated that the
Blue Noise Mask patents were among the most lucrative in its
portfolio. RCT, to which Rochester assigned the patents in 1991, has
previously sued HP, Lexmark and Seiko Epson and they all agreed to
pay royalties to settle.


CSN 534-49 Microsoft Loses China Chief

The president of Microsoft China Tang Jun has been poached by
China's biggest online game house Shanda Networking to be its
president in its run-up to going public on the Nasdaq, an IPO
expected to raise maybe $1 billion. Reuters says Tang was expected
to leave since a reorganization left him reporting to Microsoft
China CEO Tim Chen.


CSN 534-50 India in Line for Microsoft Code

India is reportedly negotiating to become one of the countries that
get source code from Microsoft under its year-old Government
Security Program.


CSN 534-51 AMD Tries To Avoid Getting Clipped

AMD has gone to court to get a declaratory judgment saying that it
doesn't infringe on the Intergraph Clipper patents that Intel had to
pay Intergraph a tidy packet over. Intergraph also picked up $18
million from Texas Instruments and is still suing Dell, HP and
Gateway.


CSN 534-52 Novell Gets Equal Time

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride got to lay out his legal cases and his
views on intellectual property, the GPL and the profit motive for
the benefit of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard Journal of Law
and Technology on Monday. We gather Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone
demanded equal time because he's going to speak at the same venue on
Monday, February 23 at 6:30 pm. He'll probably get a friendlier
reception from the fashionably PC audience. One thing Darl said that
we hadn't heard before was that Novell's rights shrink because it's
gone into the direct competition with SCO by buying SuSE. See
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu for the webcast.


CSN 534-53 Finger Pointing at CA

Computer Associates hosted an analyst day the other day and wouldn't
say whether it's responded to the Wells Notice the SEC slapped it
with last month. BusinessWeek has picked up on the feuding Wang-
Kumar factions at CA where one side is blaming the other for cooking
the books from 1998 to 2000. The magazine says it might be hard to
pin the shenanigans on founder Charles Wang, who was clearly
omnipotent when he was there, because he never used e-mail or left a
voice message. Wang's supporters say CEO Sanjay Kumar was
responsible for sales and accounting.


CSN 534-54 First Legal Bill: $1.6m

RealNetworks posted a fourth-quarter loss of $5.3 million, on three
cents a share, on improved sales of $54.1 million. It said
attributed $1.6 million of its losses, or a penny a share, to the
private antitrust suit that it lodged against Microsoft right before
Christmas.


CSN 534-55 SAP Looking To Buy

SAP has been talking about making a small acquisition.


CSN 534-56 Here, Amuse Yourself

http://www.linuxstolescocode.com/.
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