SUSE Linux shops await Novell deal completion, clarity

Suse Linux shops are still anxiously awaiting completion of Attachmate’s buyout of Novell so they can get on with their lives.

The $2.2 billion deal was expected to close by the end of March but was delayed at least in part by regulatory issues over a side deal in which a Microsoft-led consortium was to buy some Novell patents.

The consortium, CPTN Holdings, which also includes EMC Corp., Apple Inc. and Oracle Corp., seeks nearly 900 Novell patents. CPTN re-registered in Germany last month after initial plans to create itself as a German entity were withdrawn in December. Novell has said that all Unix copyrights will stay with it after the deal.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust division postponed the sale until April 12, giving the DOJ time to review the deal. On Tuesday, Novell filed an 8-K with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)  saying that date had arrived "without action from the DOJ to enjoin the sale." But, Novell acknowledged that the sale of the patents could be challenged under Section 7 of the Clayton Act "prior to or after any closing of the patent sale.” The German antitrust investigation waiting period will expire on April 26.

In a twist, the prospect of Oracle and Apple ownership of these patents has set off more alarms among open source proponents than Microsoft’s participation.

Suse Linux FUD lives on until Novell deal is done
“The fact that there’s intellectual property that will go to Microsoft and others is a huge question mark,” said the IT manager of one SUSE Linux shop. “Microsoft did an older [patent] deal with Novell that did a lot of good things and muted some of the old Office suite wars [between Microsoft and Novell] but we don’t know what this new deal will do.”

This SUSE user and others want to know exactly what the consortium will acquire and whether its member companies will be able to assert those patents against their tech rivals. 

“The worst fear is that Microsoft will use this as a backdoor to do another SCO thing and I would bet that IBM and Red Hat are worried about that. These [consortium] guys are bigger than SCO and could cause a much bigger problem,” he noted.

SCO sued Novell claiming it owned Unix copyrights that Linux infringed. SCO, or the Santa Cruz Operation,  lost that battle after many years of litigation. Many viewed SCO as a stalking horse for Microsoft which had its own reasons to wound Linux. IBM and other vendors with an interest in Linux backed Novell.

Nigel Fortlage, vice president of IT for GHY International of Winnipeg, who runs a SUSE Linux shop is mostly unsettled by all the uncertainty.

“There’s been no clear messaging as to why this deal made sense. Why Attachmate?” he asked. Fortlage hopes the deal will be final soon so Attachmate can start talking about its plans. In the meantime, he is evaluating his options deploying different Debian versions with GHY workloads and seeing how they do.

GHY is an IBM Power shop and not a lot of Linux distributions support that architecture.

Gregory Rosenberg, CEO of RICIS, a Tinley Park, IL. IT consultant and reseller with a strong Linux focus, agreed that there is suspicion around the consortium’s motives.

He doesn’t, however, think the deal is necessarily bad for SUSE Linux. “My only concern is there are a lot of Microsoft haters out there and if, Microsoft and SUSE get in bed together, which is clearly happening more each day, there could be a mass exodus [to other Linux flavors.]”  Rosenberg said. About 70% of RICIS’ business is SUSE based, 30% is in the Red Hat camp.

Consortium queasiness
CPTN is slated to pay $450 million for the patents. Initially only Microsoft was identified as a consortium member. When it later became clear that EMC, Oracle and Apple were also involved, many Linux fans were not comforted. In fact, some said Oracle and Apple make Microsoft look like a Linux backer by contrast.

Oracle is suing Google over its use of Android and Apple CEO Steve Jobs has threatened to use software patents to squelch Theora and other open source codecs.

The Open Source Initiative has protested CPTN’s attempt to gain ownership of the Novell patents but OSI president Michael Tiemann this week said some adjustments to the deal defused concerns at least around Microsoft’s participation. Tiemann is also vice president of open source affairs for Red Hat, a direct competitor of Novell SUSE Linux.

The changes, on the other hand actually heighten the OSI’s “fears that Oracle is planning to do precisely what they should not, namely to create or strengthen a dominant position in the market as a result of this transaction,” according to an OSI posting.

The OSI has similar concerns about  Apple, which it said has a dominant position in mobile applications and platforms.

His group remains concerned that the deal will let companies that dominate certain markets will slash competition by asserting patents that “were once held in friendly [Novell] hands.”

OSI is now less concerned about Microsoft as a threat, given changes made to the deal which makes Microsoft’s “participation in this transaction largely unobjectionable.”  Because Microsoft will now take licenses to the patents without taking full ownership, it no longer becomes a greater threat to the open source community, according to OSI.

However, OSI asserted that Oracle, by virtue of its Sun and BEA Systems acquisitions, now dominates middleware and holds strong positions both in operating systems and virtualization. (Oracle detractors would certainly disagree on the last two points.)

Motorola and Verizon Provide Public Safety Agencies with LTE

Motorola and Verizon have decided to work together in order to provide access to LTE networks for safety agencies, which can be supplemented by Verizon coverage when it is necessary.

Both companies announced that they were going to provide a joint solution where public safety agencies would be able to get LTE infrastructure offered by Motorola so that they could create their own public safety networks. In case their networks are out of range, the agencies would have an opportunity to access the LTE network of Verizon for supplemental coverage.

According to Dominic Demark, director of government strategy at Verizon, LTE networks of public agencies will be able to run the 10MHz of spectrum. The goal of Verizon is to offer more capacity to public safety agencies on their own networks.

The Verizon network also offers the co-location of towers along with site sharing. Moreover, the company is working with other manufacturers as well as vendors in order to make sure that there is a big range of devices that work on the Verizon network.

As for Motorola, it is going to offer the network equipment along with devices that are necessary for the connection with the LTE network. According to Demark, the company will start offering 14 various kinds of dongles. Moreover, the company is going to have a range of LTE-based smartphones that will be available to public safety agencies in future.

Originally the Federal Communications Commission set up a large block of 700MHz spectrum which was reserved for a public safety network. But as a result, plans to build the network led to nowhere as no bidder met the clearing price of FCC.

V. 3 - You Can't Go GNOME Again

Now that Canonical has adopted Unity for its next Ubuntu release, it seems likely that no desktop environment in history has ever launched to as much scrutiny as the new GNOME 3.

Indeed, the GNOME project's latest contender made its long-awaited debut last week, and the reviews have been coming fast and furious ever since.

"The new desktop will likely appeal to users who share GNOME's philosophy of debris-free computing, but there are parts that seem to have been pared down too aggressively," wrote Ars Technica's Ryan Paul, for instance. "The whole environment is significantly less configurable than its predecessor and is missing a handful of important features."

On the other hand, while "even seasoned GNOME users will find many aspects that are very unfamiliar," The H acknowledged, "some aspects of GNOME 3.0 that seemed awkward at first have turned out to be well-crafted on closer inspection." 

'Ubuntu Should Stick with Unity'

The software's pros and cons have been enumerated and detailed at considerable length throughout the blogosphere -- and with widely diverging opinions -- leaving the innocent bystander to simply wonder what all the variable fuss is about.

Is GNOME 3 the best ever? Is it the worst? Should Canonical be rethinking its plans? Linux Girl hit the streets of the Linux blogosphere to find out.

"If I am any indication, Ubuntu should stick with its Unity plans to the end," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza opined. "After what I've heard about GNOME 3, I have little to no desire to go down that road."

While he does see the need to create a more "simplified and streamlined" user experience, "I don't want it," Espinoza added. "Unfortunately for me, I'm not a big KDE fan, either. Unity it is, until something better comes along."

'That Is Why I'm an Xfce User'

More speed was what consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack was yearning for.

"I wish they would quit rearranging things and concentrate on making things faster," Mack told Linux Girl. "But that is exactly why I'm an Xfce user."

Slashdot blogger hairyfeet took a more extreme view.

"Wow! I thought KDE 4 sucked!" hairyfeet exclaimed. "Congrats Gnome, for being even more condescending to users than I thought possible! Did you even ASK the users if they wanted 'minimize' and 'maximize' gone?"

'Our Users Are Dumb As Bricks'

Indeed, "some of the design decisions for GNOME 3 just don't make sense," agreed Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site.

One example, for instance, is not grouping applications by type, Hudson noted.

"This, and a lot of other decisions, look like they were made with the view of a user only using one of any kind of application," she opined.

"The 'we're removing the minimize and maximize buttons' decision also comes off as another 'change because our users are dumb as bricks,'" she added, echoing hairyfeet.

In fact, the ability to toggle different windows between maximized and normal is "needed for efficient workflow in many tasks," Hudson pointed out.

"I can just see the future according to GNOME," she mused. "'GNOME 4: One Desktop to Rule Them All... eliminating multitasking as 'too confusing' and multiple desktops as 'no longer needed since you can only run one application in one window at a time.' What could be simpler?"

The Minimalism Trend

Chris Travers, a GNOME user and Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, likes GNOME 3's new notifications structure, he said, but isn't impressed by the software's minimalism, either.

"There is a trend right now in the web browser market to make menus minimalistic," Travers explained. "Microsoft is going this way in all their software, and from the screenshots, GMOME 3 seems to be going this way too."

Whether that minimalism works well for a desktop environment, however, isn't so clear.

Traditionally, "one thing I think that GNOME does better than Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows or Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) is the fact that instead of a single menu, you have three well-partitioned menus to choose from," Travers explained. "This leads to less user confusion than Windows or Mac does, where everything is jumbled together under one menu."

GNOME may be sufficiently customizable to make this happen again on individual computers, but "if the screenshots are any indication, this will not be a default choice," he pointed out.

'The UI Treadmill'

It's possible that, just as Windows users face "the wintel treadmill and 'the ribbon,' perhaps we in the FLOSS community have the UI treadmill," blogger Robert Pogson suggested. "It just never stops that new ways of accessing IT come along."

The fact is, however, "I don't need or want ever-newer user-interfaces," Pogson added.

"I have several display managers and several window managers in Debian," he said. "I don't need more, just as I am satisfied with one head. One of something is pretty useful; a bunch just get in the way."

'It's a Good Thing We Have Options'

In short, it's no wonder Canonical has adopted Unity, hairyfeet said.
"Unity may not be great, but at least Shuttleworth might be able to have a little control over it and keep the thing from getting torched by the developers every time stability sets in," he opined.
On the other hand, "how appealing is a Unity desktop shell after 'removing screen elements that are rarely used in mobile and netbook computing,' but that desktop and regular laptop users are accustomed to?" Hudson asked, quoting the project's description.
"Some people like to complain about there being too many distros and too many desktop environments, but Unity shows that it's a good thing we have options," she concluded. "The sad part is that people will continue to try Ubuntu, see it doesn't work for them, and conclude that 'linux sucks!'"
Maybe what's needed instead for Linux newcomers is "what the EU mandated for browsers: an install window that offered five choices, randomly shuffled," Hudson suggested. "Maybe we could call it 'Project Canterbury'?"

Oracle buys Sun, becomes hardware company

 

Oracle announced Wednesday it completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in a deal valued at more than $7 billion, a move that transforms the database and business-software giant into a hardware company as well.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle has acquired several large companies in its drive to out-consolidate rivals in the business computing technology market, sometimes launching hostile takeovers and sometimes prevailing over regulatory objections. This time, the difficulty was persuading European antitrust regulators who were concerned about the fate under Oracle of the open-source MySQL database software business that was part of Sun. 

But that barrier fell as the European Commission approved Oracle's Sun acquisition plan on January 21. Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison and other executives from Sun and Oracle are set to detail plans for Sun on Wednesday during a Webcast event starting at 9 a.m. PST. 

"My hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison," Sun Chairman Scott McNealy said in a bittersweet memo Tuesday, bidding adieu to the company he helped found 28 years earlier. "To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company."

By giving it a place in the server, storage, and processor domains, the Sun acquisition means Oracle is a direct competitor to more companies, a complication given that it sells its database and other software for use on servers sold by those competitors. IBM already was Oracle's biggest foe, but others that have survived the consolidation wave include Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and EMC.

Since announcing the Sun acquisition plan in April, Oracle's sales pitch has been one of integrated products--hardware and software built to work together so customers don't have to do the integration work themselves or pay a third party to do it.

On the Oracle-Sun Web site, the company describes its new breadth this way:

With the addition of servers, storage, Sparc processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle's portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications, we plan to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems--from applications to disk--where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box. Each layer of the stack will be architected to improve performance, leverage innovation and centralize management so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. Customers will benefit as their system performance, reliability and security goes up and their system integration and management costs go down.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000019-264.html#ixzz1Ifw38iDL

Acer releases new server and storage lines

Acer, the No. 4 PC maker in the US, has released a line of servers and storage products for this market.

The launch marks the company's return, or reinvestment, in the US as a server vendor. Acer sells consumer PCs and related devices under its own name, as well under Gateway, eMachines and Packard Bell brands.

It had previously sold servers in the US, but it let that business diminish over the past few years. The company said it has made a major investment in this market. It said it has expanded its support and service capabilities, and will manufacturer its server products in the US through third party makers.

"I want to make sure that we can we build very, very quickly and deliver much faster than everyone else," said Todd Mottershead, senior manager for servers and storage at Acer.

IDC ranked Acer No. 3 worldwide PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2010, following Hewlett Packard and Dell. In the US, Acer is the fourth largest vendor; HP has 28.6% of the US market, Dell about 22%, Toshiba about 10% and Acer 9%.

Acer has been selling servers outside the US. For its US reintroduction, Acer has released a tower rack, blade system, and systems especially designed for cloud computing, all with a number of configurations, as well as network attached storage products. Prices range from $721 for a tower to $10,499, for storage. Acer will be selling through channel partners.

"These are not cheap servers, and they won't be priced cheaply, but they will be very competitive with the offering from others," Mottershead said.

But one area Acer believes it will be especially competitive will be in "option kits," or additional hard drives, memory, and other components. Mottershead claims that its option pricing will be very aggressive, at 40% below what competitors are charging.

VMWare shows mobile virtualisation for Android Separate instances of Android run concurrently on same phone.

VMWare is showing off a mobile virtualisation platform that will let people run a personal profile and a seperate, secure profile for work applications on the same Android phone.

VMWare CTO Stephen Herrod showed off the software on an LG Optimus Black. The company is now testing the software internally and with partners.

The idea is that enterprises can let their employees buy an Android phone but isolate the personal applications from the corporate apps in order to reduce potential security issues.

Hackers exploit Flash zero-day, Adobe confirms

Accoring to computer world, - Adobe today confirmed that attackers are exploiting an unpatched bug in Flash Player using Microsoft Excel documents.

The company will patch Flash next week and will also update Adobe Reader, which includes code that renders Flash content inserted in PDF files.

"They have exploits out in the wild, so they're moving pretty quickly," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys. "That's commendable."

According to a security advisory issued Monday, attackers are exploiting the vulnerability by embedding malicious Flash files within a Microsoft Excel document sent as an e-mail attachment.

Adobe said it wasn't aware of any attacks directed at Reader or Acrobat, the popular PDF viewer and commercial PDF creator, respectively.

"This vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," Adobe acknowledged in its advisory.

Brad Arkin, the company's director of product security and privacy, offered up more information in a Monday blog post. "Reports...thus far indicate the attack is targeted at a very small number of organizations and limited in scope," said Arkin.

After exploiting the Flash vulnerability, hackers are infecting systems with additional malware.

The Excel file is simply the delivery mechanism for the malicious Flash code that's exploiting the vulnerability, an Adobe spokeswoman confirmed.

"Hackers use whatever mechanism makes sense, and Excel files are generally trusted documents," said Kandek. "So [the Excel document] is just part of the social engineering element here."

Adobe will patch Flash, Reader and Acrobat next week -- the company did not specify which day, but it often releases security fixes on Tuesday -- but will not update Reader X, the newest version of the viewer that includes an anti-exploit "sandbox" designed to stymie most attacks.

Reader X's sandbox blocks the current attacks, Arkin said, and would also prevent malware from being installed if hackers switch to delivering the exploit in malicious PDFs, a frequently-used tactic with Flash exploits.

Adobe decided not to update Reader X next week because building a fix would delay the release of the Flash, Reader and Acrobat updates by a week. "Given the mitigation provided by the Adobe Reader X sandbox and the absence of attacks via PDF, we determined that an out-of-cycle update would incur unnecessary churn and patch management overhead on our users not justified by the associated risk," said Arkin.

Reader X will get a patch at the next regularly-scheduled update on June 14, Arkin added.

Users should take use the opportunity to update to Reader X, urged Kandek. "This is good example of how sandboxing provides additional hardening," he said. "At [Pwn2Own] last week, no one attempted to exploit [Google's] Chrome, for example. I think that had to do with the additional sandboxing in Chrome."

Reader X can be downloaded from Adobe's site; only the Windows version includes the sandbox technology, however.

Adobe last patched Flash and Reader Feb. 8 when it shipped fixes for 42 flaws in the two programs.

Scientists work toward 'forever' storage

Today, long-term data storage requires constant oversight. But researchers hope cool new technologies will change that soon.

Migrate every five years." That might sound like a guideline for dysfunctional birds, but it's actually a software setting that the National Film Board of Canada uses in its digital archiving system.

"The data has to be kept for infinity, so there has to be a migration process," says Julie Dutrisac, head of research and development for the film board in Montreal, which preserves 13,000 Canadian films. "When you get into the digital domain, you are stuck migrating."
Migration, of course, means moving the material to new storage hardware, because the old hardware can't be expected to last much more than five years, or because of expected obsolescence.