In the News Archive

Reporting from CeBIT

In the News 15 Comments
On Friday the 11th of March I went to CeBIT 2005, the world's largest hi-tech fair held annually in Hannover, Germany. The fair covers everything from the Digital World and is expected to receive around half a million visitors this year. After an overview this report mainly highlights yellowTAB's presence and their new Zeta operating system.
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An analysis of HP’s future strategy, post Carly Fiorina

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Carly Fiorina's undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP's board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.
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Cross-platform packaging facility OpenPKG 2.3 released

  Submitted by Ralf S. Engelschall In the News 4 Comments
The OpenPKG project released version 2.3 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform multi-instance Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 2.3 consists of 545 selected (from a pool of over 850) packages. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on the porting of all packages to the now officially supported Unix platform Sun Solaris 10 on both Intel and SPARC architectures.
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Group to Divide Linux Standards Base

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The Free Standards Group has decided to move away from a single, core LSB (Linux Standards Base) specification, and is instead going to break this down into different modules that can be combined to give a server or desktop LSB standard. Elsewhere, Bill Gates has sent an email to all Microsoft's corporate customers warning that those in search of technological interoperability shouldn't look towards open source software.
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An interview with Jaluna execs Michel Gien and Michel Genard

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This interesting interview with two top executives of Jaluna -- a company that has developed a sort of "VMware for embedded systems" that enables Linux to run alongside a real-time-control OS on gadgets like smartphones and set-top boxes -- delves into the French venture-funded startup's history, technology, market perspective, and vision of how Linux will dominate the embedded devices space.
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SBC To Offer Set-top Computer

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#2 US Telecom company SBC has a new set-top box with Tivo-like DVR and music and photo access capabilities. "Owners will be able to control the box remotely over an Internet connection, which will also provide access to streaming music and video downloads through SBC's deal with Yahoo. SBC said future enhancements will allow the box to be controlled through a Cingular wireless phone, and allow SBC's local phone customers to see caller ID and call logs on their TV sets." With TVs acting more like computers, and computers acting more like TVs, what will it look like when they meet in the middle?
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eBay Throws the Baby Out with the Bathwater

  Submitted by John Kim In the News 85 Comments
A reader reports: I was trying to raise some money to start a Linux technical support website by selling Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora Core CD's on eBay and suddently after a month all my items were pulled and my account suspended. I received this message from ebay as reason: "As a matter of eBay policy, recordings on CD-R (including CD-RW and DVD-R) may not be listed on eBay, unless the seller is the copyright owner and states this in the item description. This policy also means that even lawful reproductions on CD-R are not permitted on eBay." This link was also provided.
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Clearing the Way for Open Source

  Submitted by Rahul Sundaram In the News 8 Comments
Interview with David Lee, CEO of Cambridge (Mass.)-based Advent Consulting, "A recent Jupiter Research survey shows a growing number of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) using open-source alternatives to Microsoft (MSFT ) products. About 9% of SMBs are using Red Hat (RHAT ) Linux on the desktop, and 7% are using the OpenOffice productivity suite, which contains word processing and spreadsheet programs."
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