April 3, 2012
by sjvn01
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Who helps make Linux? Microsoft.

Every uear, The Linux Foundation compiles an analysis of who actually contributes the most to Linux’s code (PDF Link). In the last year, 2011, besides the usual suspects, which includes Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Samsung, Oracle and Google, you’ll also find some you didn’t expect to see such from such as Nokia and, drum-roll please, Microsoft.

Microsoft has significantly contributed before to Linux. In the past though its main contributions have been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. It’s Microsoft’s answer to VMware and Linux’s own native Kernel-based Virtualization Manager (KVM).

Microsoft wants both Linux to run Server 2008 R2 instances and for Windows 2008 R2 to run Linux instances using its own virtualization tools. Microsoft has been working on this for some time with Novell, now SUSE. The results, according to Microsoft sources, have been outstanding.

Who helps make Linux? Microsoft. More >

April 2, 2012
by sjvn01
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Australian government patent troll collects from Wi-Fi vendors

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CISRO) has snatched picked up $229-million from technology companies for their Wi-Fi patent. This time around, CISRO hit up Lenovo, Acer, Sony, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. These companies settled with CISRO rather than face in the infamously pro-patent Eastern District Court of Texas, United States.

This isn’t the first time CISRO has cashed in big with its overly-broad patent. The research arm of the Australian government hit up 14 companies in 2009, including HP, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Netgear, Toshiba, 3Com, Nintendo, D-Link, and Buffalo Technologies, for over $200-million.

Australian government patent troll collects from Wi-Fi vendors. More >

April 2, 2012
by sjvn01
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OS/2 turns 25

Who, like me, once used OS/2? What, you don’t know OS/2? On April 2, 1987, IBM and Microsoft announced a then revolutionary, 32-bit server and desktop operating system that was going to change the world: OS/2. Well that’s what they said anyway. In reality, Bill Gates quickly decided that he’d do better by going it on his own with some operating system called Windows. You may have heard of it.

Before Linux showed up in 1991, OS/2 was Windows’ main rival. It was a fun and remarkably stable and secure operating system that was a real challenger to Windows.

In its early days, OS/2 was great. Back in 1993, for example, when I was a contributing editor at Computer Shopper, we decided that OS/2 2.1 was the best operating system around over such competition as UnixWare, Windows NT, Solaris, and NeXTStep. So what happened?

On Google Plus, Esther Schindler, aka the OS/2 Goddess,, thinks “of OS/2 less as an operating system than as ‘A Technology in Three Acts.’”

OS/2 turns 25. More >

April 1, 2012
by sjvn01
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2012’s top ten tech. April Fools’ Day stories

Here at ZDNet, we love April Fools’ Day stories as much as anyone but we don’t write them ourselves. Why? Well, because no matter how sure you are that no one will take your story seriously, some one will. This year’s example that proves the point was a political blog in Forbes that claimed that Mitt Romney had dropped out the Presidential race! The tale promptly shot to the top of Google News. Sometimes trusting an algorithm to pick the top “news” story can blow up on you.

The story, which claimed that “Mitt Romney [had] announced today that he is ending his presidential campaign and throwing his support behind Rick Santorum.” was a fake. On a completely non-funny note for the author, blogger Len Burman, promptly posted a “retraction” to his tale, writing, that “Forbes [had] pulled down because of an unannounced ban on April Fools’ Day humor.” Forbes’ editors have since pulled both of Burman’s pieces. I strongly suspect that this is one April Fools’ story, where the ending won’t be funny at all for the writer.

Meanwhile over in pure technology, here are my top April Fools’ stories for 2012.

2012’s top ten tech. April Fools’ Day stories. More >

March 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived

Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just pulled this feat off.

Red Hat didn’t just creak the billion dollar mark though. It smashed its way through it. For the full fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $1.13 billion, an increase of 25% over the prior year. Subscription revenue from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was $965.6 million, up 25% year-over-year.

In the earnings call, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s President and CEO said. “Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone. The open-source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement.”

Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived. More >

March 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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What Ubuntu users think about Ubuntu 2012

Once upon a time Ubuntu was the popular Debian-based desktop Linux distribution that everyone-well not Debian’s hardcore fans-loved. That was then. This is now. Today, Ubuntu has gotten into servers, the cloud and Canonical the company behind it, wants it to play in TVs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s all well and good, but what does Ubuntu’s faithful think of all this? Well Canonical asked them and this is what they had to say.

Over 17,000 Ubuntu users responded to Canonical’s survey. According to Gerry Carr, Canonical’s director of communications, the average Ubuntu user’s age is between 25-35. Carr also found the Ubuntu’s users “Overwhelmingly male. The average number of women responding is <4%. Here I do wonder how much the bias of the sampling methodology has affected the response rate – i.e. is that for whatever reason the way we reached resulted in fewer women responding than is actually reflective of the user base. We can’t extrapolate from this data, but certainly such a hugely weighted response means we have to look at how we make the product, the community and probably both, more appealing to both genders.”

What Ubuntu users think about Ubuntu 2012. More >

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