Red Hat Archive

For years, Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge that its patent portfolio is a precursor to interoperability discussions. Monday, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. Red Hat has long argued that patent discussions only cloud true interoperability, which is best managed through open source and open standards. Now it has got what it wanted; unlike the Novell-Microsoft agreements, there is no exclusionary patent deals or cross payments.

Adam Williamson, who was let go from Mandriva at the end of last year, has announced that he has been hired by Red Hat as a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer. I'm sure everyone who has benefited from Adam's patient support over the years will wish him success in his new role. A sincere congratulations from the OSNews team, Adam! Update: Adam mentions that Red Hat has also hired Mandriva alum Vincent Danen.

Right after the recent news that Red Hat is offering a new subscription for mission critical deployment that extends the life-cycle for up to 10 years, Red Hat has announced another, that allows the customers to stay in a single point release for up to eighteen months and continue to get updates and support that point release. Matt Asay writes: "Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them."

Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.

Red Hat and AMD have just done the so-called impossible, and demonstrated VM live migration across CPU architectures. Not only that, they have demonstrated it across CPU vendors. "If you look at the video here, you will see that they did it. Live migration while streaming HD video isn't all that bad a trick mind you, but doing it between a Barcelona, Shanghai and Intel box is. 36 more of these, and we will be in great shape." Only a few months ago during VMworld, Intel and VMware claimed that this was impossible. Looking at the initial reaction, VMware is quite irked by this accomplishment by Red Hat using KVM technology and they are pointing to stability concerns. Red Hat has been a heavy contributor to KVM and acquired Qumranet, the original developers of KVM a while back.

Back in July we shared Red Hat's intentions to replace RHGB with Plymouth, a new graphical boot process that is able to benefit from the latest Linux graphics capabilities. Red Hat engineers had primarily designed Plymouth around a forthcoming feature we've talked about quite a bit known as kernel mode-setting, which provides end-users with a cleaner and flicker-free boot experience. In September in The State of Kernel Mode-Setting we then shared more information on Plymouth along with a brief video. Most recently we published another video of Plymouth that shows the tighter integration between the boot process and starting the GNOME Display Manager. Today though we are looking at Plymouth and its different plug-ins along with providing a few more videos.

Linux distributor Red Hat has issued a statement (Ed: via their errata) revealing that its servers were illegally infiltrated by unknown intruders. According to the company, internal audits have confirmed that the integrity of the Red Hat Network software deployment system was not compromised. The community-driven Fedora project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, also fell victim to a similar attack. More news is available around the web.

An article at The Motley Fool lays out good financial news from Red Hat: "In its first quarter of fiscal 2009, Red Hat produced $0.08 of GAAP earnings per share on revenue of $156.6 million. That's a 32% sales increase over last year, while profits held steady. But the numbers don't tell the whole story here. The open-source software veteran released major updates to four of its key products and re-signed every expired contract with its 25 largest subscribers -- for 50% more than the worth of the old deals. It's always cool to see the big boys upgrading their pacts, don't you think? Red Hat continues to invest in its global sales and support infrastructure, funding the growth from organic cash flows.

The Fedora team has clearly spent a lot of time trying to refine some of the smaller, but perhaps more common user interface elements in some thoughtful ways. Take, for instance, the new setting that allows you to manage power settings from the login screen. It's a small tweak but it makes shutting down simple. There's no need to login when you wake from hibernate - just shut down straight from the login screen. Similar attention to these basics can be found throughout the new release.

Back in September 2003, when Red Hat discontinued its home-oriented Red Hat Linux desktop and offloaded that market to the community-driven but Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, many people were left wondering if Red Hat would ever again offer a product aimed at home desktops. We have the answer now.

New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company must be a defining technology company of the 21st century and provide more leadership to companies that are willing to co-develop software with open source projects and with other companies. "Ninety-five percent of software is developed by enterprises each year and is not for resale," involving a lot of re-inventing of the wheel by different firms. "There's hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted software assets each year," he said in an address to the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Tuesday.

Red Hat has open-sourced its identity-management and security system to promote its assertion that open-source software provides the most secure infrastructure. The Linux vendor said Wednesday it has released the entire source code for the Red Hat Certificate System, its security framework for managing user identities and transactions on a network. Red Hat acquired the system from AOL three years ago, but only parts of the system, which uses the Apache Web server and the Red Hat Directory Server, were open source.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said yesterday - his fourth day on the job - that he’s angling for a showdown with two tech titans in what he describes as a struggle to protect information sharing in software development. No longer satisfied just defending a company as he did while working at Delta Air Lines, Whitehurst is ready to go on the offensive against Oracle and Microsoft as he builds Red Hat toward billion-dollar annual revenues.

Matthew Szulik writes: "After almost a decade of leading Red Hat, I have decided to transition my CEO and President role for the personal reasons I have already discussed. It’s my privilege to continue serving this great company in the role of Chairman of the Board. Red Hat will be in the capable hands of a world-class executive team under the leadership of Jim Whitehurst as President and CEO."