April 10, 2006
by sjvn01
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Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, announced on April 10, 2006 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open-source Java middleware company JBoss.
JBoss has been rumored to be on the acquisition block for months. Earlier this year there was much speculation that Oracle was going to acquire the Atlanta-based JBoss, but JBoss CEO Marc Fleury said he had no immediate plans to sell the company.
March 16, 2006
by sjvn01
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March 16, 2006 has not been a good day for Mandriva or its user community. After being fired by Mandriva, co-founder Gael Duval announced in an interview with NewsForge that he was going to sue his old firm for “abusive layoff.”
In Duval’s latest blog, Duval, a non-native English speaker, confirmed that “I’m just going to sue Mandriva for abusive lay-off, since I doubt that the real reason was economical for me. I have the very bad feeling that my initial project has been wasted and this sentiment is reinforced since I have alerted my president twice in 2005 about the bad trend in the management and business.”
Mandriva also confirmed that Duval had been let go as part of its cost reduction plan.
The French-based Linux distributor made this move, as well as laying off other employees, because of recent poor financial results.
In his blog, Duval wrote, “Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva “thanks me” and I’m leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It’s difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva’s CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.”
The move caught Duval by surprise, although he admitted, “I should have expected to be fired since my recent switch of activity at Mandriva certainly fragilized (sic) [marginalized] my position, so I could be thanked at first opportunity.”
He believes he was fired because “my relationship with the current CEO (and soon President of the Board [Francois Bancilhon]) which hasn’t been excellent, has been a factor.”
Some members of the Mandriva community see Duval’s firing as striking at the heart of the Mandriva Club, a group of users which have supported the company with subscriptions to the distribution over the years. One long-time member sadly remarked, “So with Gael gone. We can conclude that this mission [community support] has been abandoned as unnecessary. What next? Probably further commercialization. Shareholders usually don’t need and don’t care about community and other non-profit things.”
Duval would agree.
“I’ve always supported the idea that Mandriva’s userbase was the heaviest pillar on which Mandriva could rely, and that the best way to do some business was certainly to extend this userbase at the max and then to sell value-added services to a small portion of it. I’ve always been defending this position at Mandriva, which implied the idea to release better quality products and to value our image inside the IT and Open Source community, because the community recommends, or not, Linux products. This approach gained its better results when I wrote myself the webpage contents which encouraged people to subscribe the Mandriva Club: this has generated the biggest cash-flow ever. But it wasn’t the main policy at Mandriva. And the fact that the ‘community department’ has just been canceled is, in my opinion, very meaningful about the current policy.”
So where is Mandriva going?
Duval’s “feeling is that they are focusing more and more on the corporate market. Mandriva is more and more looking like a standard company, which is trying to sell services to fortune 500 companies, abandoning its initial roots. But at the same time, it’s keeping on released geeks products. This sounds like a fuzzy strategy.”
As for Duval, he plans to work more on Ulteo, which is described as “new concept of easy-to-use open-source operating system which should change the way people use computers.”
March 15, 2006
by sjvn01
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After continued financial losses, Mandriva French-based global Linux distributor has fired a number of employees including one of its founders, Gael Duval. While the company has yet to spell out who has been let go, news of the firing rapidly spread on the Mandriva Club forum, an official Mandriva Linux community site.
Duval, who was mentioned by name as one of those who was fired, confirmed on his blog on March 13th that “Since the information has leaked, I will post a message in the next few days on this website (or mirror) about why this is the end of the Mandriva story for me, and what’s next.”
Sources close to the company said that the firings were not confined to any single area of the company. The company foreshadowed this move in its financial report for the first quarter.
In this report, the company declared that “Mandriva’s financial results for the first quarter of 2005-2006 are disappointing.” To deal with this, “a swift reaction was required to address the problems and we have already set up a two-pronged strategy.”
“The first set of measures aims to cut costs. They include redundancies in France and Brazil and the termination of certain expenses judged to be non-essential. These initiatives have already been implemented and the resulting restructuring costs will be booked in the second quarter of the current FY (January to March 2006).”
Mandriva also announced that Jacques Le Marois has stepped down as chairman of the board, and that he has nominated current CEO Francois Bancilhon as chairman. The company expects this change to be approved at its next board meeting on March 31st.
This last move is seen by some of the Mandriva faithful as a move away from Mandriva’s roots as a community-based distribution towards being more of an enterprise-oriented company. The financial report suggests that this might be Mandriva’s best move. The company reported both a “downward slide of sales in the retail market” and “Enterprise services are up sharply to represent 42% of consolidated sales over the quarter, compared to 24% in Q1 2004/05.”
Mandriva has had a difficult financial history. The company went “redressement judiciaire,” the French equivalent of US Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January of 2003 and only emerged from it in March 2004.
It then went on a brief acquisition run. During this time, it acquired Brazilian Linux vendor, Conectiva, and Lycoris, a small U.S. maker of user-friendly desktop Linux distributions, and then changed its name from Mandrakesoft to Mandriva.
The company also started to move away from a community-oriented distribution to servers and desktops for the enterprise. It has had some success in this area, as indicated by both its finances and its partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co. to provide Linux systems in the Latin American market, but these were not enough to stave off the company’s reductions-in-force.
Will these changes be enough?
One analyst, Gordon Haff, senior analyst for research house Illuminata Inc., doesn’t think so.
“The ‘Man’ part of the operation has always been sketchy as a commercial enterprise. And its community support as a favorite for desktop Linux has long since passed to other distributions like Gentoo. Indeed, whatever advantages Mandrake once had for the desktop have been erased by the mainstream distros,” said Haff.
Haff continued, “while there’s clearly a place within the broad open-source communities for many different distros serving many different needs and styles, the opportunities for profitable Linux distro ‘companies’ are far more limited. At this point in the Linux adoption and maturation cycle, it’s hard to see what compelling advantages Mandriva delivers that make it a good alternative for enterprises, [compared] to Red Hat and Novell SUSE.”
A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux (http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6477797669.html).
March 8, 2006
by sjvn01
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Michael Dell, chairman of Dell, says he believes in offering Linux on the desktop, server and workstation. What he doesn’t believe in, for now, is giving Linux full support on the desktop.
In an exclusive interview, Dell explained his company’s Linux desktop strategy to DesktopLinux.com’s Steven J. Vaughan Nichols.
“People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is, ‘Which Linux are you talking about?’” Dell asked.
“If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat and Xandros, then someone would ask us, ‘Why don’t you support Mandriva?’
“The challenge we have with picking one is that we think we’d disenchant the other distributions’ supporters.”
“It’s not that there are too many Linux desktop distributions,” Dell said, “it’s that they’re all different, they all have supporters and none of them can claim a majority of the market.
“If you look at DistroWatch, you’ll see zillions of these distributions. Which one should we do? And, everyone keeps telling us that they want different distributions. So, our conclusion is to do them all and let the customer decide.”
So it is, Dell continued, that “on the desktop we have the nSeries, so that the user can pick the Linux he wants.”
This story was first published on Desktop Linux.
March 6, 2006
by sjvn01
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In an interview with Australian online technology newspaper IT Wire, Alan Yates, general manager of business strategy for Microsoft’s information worker group, said that OpenOffice.org is about where MS-Office was 10 years ago. That is to say, Microsoft seems to think OpenOffice.org is only good for single-desktop users.
And, that’s a problem because…?
I don’t get it.
I use OO.o (OpenOffice.org) 2 every day. It works. It has all the features I need. It’s fast. It’s reliable. I can send files from it via email directly from my application. It’s also secure, unlike Office. And, its file format can also be read now and forever-after by any program that uses the ODF (Open Document Format).
Oh, and did I mention that OO.o doesn’t cost a penny, while Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 lists for $499?
OK, I give up, what’s the problem with OO.o again?
March 6, 2006
by sjvn01
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NTP’s victory means more—many more—bad software patent lawsuits are going to be coming down the pike.
In the short run, business executives are breathing a little easier today because they know that their Research In Motion BlackBerry service is going to stay on. In the long run, enterprise customers are in for a world of hurt.
When RIM agreed to make a one-time payment of $612.5 million to patent troll NTP for a permanent license that covers all of NTPs wireless e-mail patents, it also gave the green light to every other louse with a patent, a lawyer and a need to cash in without the hard work of developing and marketing a product.
As this case has shown, you dont even need a good patent. All, I repeat, all of NTPs five patents had been given non-final rejections by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Two of them had been given final rejections.
So why did RIM pay more than half-a-billion dollars for garbage?
It did so because Judge James Spencer made it clear to court-watchers that he was inclined to give NTP an injunction, which would have lead to BlackBerry services being turned off in the United States. For the company that makes its money from providing that service, the danger was just too high that it would quickly lose its customers to would-be competitors like Funambol,, Microsoft Microsoft and Palm.
RIM kept saying it had a workaround, but the customers werent buying this story. So, even though Jim Balsillie, chairman and co-CEO of RIM, was saying as late as February 24 that “settlement has never been an option to date,” a settlement was still possible.
Indeed, it always had been. While companies talk tough and see just how close they can come to striking the other sides hitters with high, hard fastballs, at the end of the game the vast majority of these kinds of cases are settled out of court.
As John Tredennick, CEO of CaseShare Systems and former litigation partner at the law firm Holland & Hart LLP, said as the case was heating up, “I believe RIM will blink and enter into a settlement that will allow it to continue its services. Litigation is about brinkmanship and eventually somebody blinks.”
What RIM did want though, and NTP had refused all along to give it, was a permanent license for the bogus patents. Without a permanent license, NTP could continue to stick RIM for years to come.
NTP, on the other hand, realized that if it did have the court stop the BlackBerry service, RIM would be less able to pay it big bucks in the future. Once it became clear that RIM wasnt going to pay NTP off without a license agreement, NTP finally gave them one—for an additional $162.5 million.
Not bad money for junk patents, dont you think?
Of course, this is not an ending. BlackBerrys are safe, but NTP can get back to its plans to shake down other companies. Hmm. I wonder if Microsoft has a deal in place with NTP for Microsoft Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, which includes push e-mail support?
As Ive said before, this is all quite legal with our hopelessly awful software patent system. And, as NTP and the courts have just shown, its a great way to make money.
With this “victory,” we can only expect to see an even greater flood of patent trolls. In turn, this will mean higher costs for business technology users and less innovation.
After all, who wants to actually create something new and get sued for your profits when you can simply collect patents and wait for someone else to make something of them?
This may be a gold-letter day for BlackBerry users, but its a black-letter day for all technology users.