Stories by Robert McMillan

SCO: GPL threatens $229B software market

The SCO Group's Chief Executive Officer, Darl McBride, enlisted the help of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to bolster his arguments against the open source GPL (GNU General Public License) and Linux during a keynote address at the CD Expo conference in Las Vegas.

SCO CEO: Novell-SuSE breaks SCO contract

Novell's US$210 million planned acquisition of SuSE Linux will put it in violation of a non-compete agreement the networking vendor has with The SCO Group, and could possibly lead to legal action, SCO CEO Darl McBride said Monday in an interview.

McNealy: Sun to ship Opteron servers in 2004

Sun Microsystems plans to begin shipping in 2004 two new servers based on Advanced Micro Devices's Opteron processors, Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy said during a Comdex keynote address in Las Vegas on Monday. McNealy also announced the vendor had struck a deal with a consortium of Chinese companies to provide them with up to one million Linux-based desktop computers next year.

Intel creates new division, HPC program

Hoping to nudge high-performance computing into the enterprise, Intel has created a US$36 million program to research new ways of simplifying supercomputers. The company has also formed a new Parallel & Distributed Solutions Division to develop and market software for users of high performance computing (HPC).

IBM's builds TV-sized supercomputer

IBM has built a 512-node prototype of its Blue Gene L supercomputer that has been ranked as the 73rd most powerful computer in the world. The machine, which is capable of a peak performance of 2 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops), is about the size of a 30-inch TV.

IBM's first 64-bit blades to use G5 chip

IBM on Tuesday will unveil a new line of low-power blade servers based on the same 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor that Apple Computer uses in its Power Mac G5 computers.

Itanium 2 Montecito to be multithreaded

Intel plans to introduce multithreading and 24M-byte on-chip caches to its Itanium 2 processor family, a company executive said in an interview last week.

Analysts puzzled over SCO, IBM subpoenas

Industry analysts were left scratching their heads as they tried to understand the reasoning behind ten subpoenas sent out by IBM and The SCO Group recently as part of their ongoing legal dispute.

Palmisano: No more "gizmos and guessing" for IT

IBM has talked about the technology behind its on-demand software initiative for more than a year now, but this week the computer giant turned its attention to the customer at an event held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Red Hat users balk at Enterprise Linux licensing

Linux may be a free operating system, but the days of free copying may be numbered for Red Hat customers who, as of this spring, will no longer be able to receive support from Red Hat without purchasing a support license for every version of Red Hat's server software that they run.

AMD plans new plant, sees 2004 rebound

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is optimistic enough about its future that the company is planning to break ground on a major new processor manufacturing facility by the end of 2003, company executives revealed Thursday at an analyst conference held at AMD's headquarters.

IBM adds midrange server to Itanium line

IBM on Monday will add a second Itanium 2 server to its xSeries product line, a system it is billing as the first Itanium server from a major vendor to scale from 4 to 16 processors.

Red Hat goes live with Fedora

Red Hat has posted the first release of a new Linux distribution it hopes will become a community-driven test bed for software that may one day make it into its commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux software. Called Fedora Core 1, the software was posted to the fedora.redhat.com Web site on Wednesday.

Veritas rolls client support into NetBackup

Veritas Software Corp. on Tuesday announced a variety of updates to its data management product lines, including new management software and an updated version of NetBackup with an option for backing up laptops and personal computers automatically.

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