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Linux and business

Red Hat has put out a press release on their participation in the United Nations Sustainable Development Networking Program (SDNP). They are donating copies of their operating system to the program, of course; certainly a good deed even if not entirely without a bit of self interest. Evidently SDNP is supplying the system to the Mexican ScholarNet program, among others. Interestingly, the SDNP claims to have been a user and supporter of Linux since 1992.

Spectralogic has announced support for their "Alexandria" backup and archival librarian software on Linux. See their press release for more. This is "enterprise class" stuff, with the ability to back up large networks, Oracle databases (while Oracle is running), etc. It's another important component in the corporate Linux toolbox.

Alexandria is downloadable from the net, and can be run for free in a demo mode (or if you buy one of Spectralogic's tape libraries). Other uses involve money. See the Alexandria page, or go directly to the Linux download page.

The Linux Mall has had a true Tux, the Penguin stuff toy penguins custom-made to really resemble the true Tux penguin. Check out the announcement to find out how you can get one of your own.

Linux happenings in Japan. AsiaBizTech put out a series of articles with some interesting developments with Japanese Linux:

A Japanese version of the Red Hat distribution will be released in February, according to this article. It will include Japanese language support, and seems intended to compete with Pacific HiTech's offering there. The actual work on this distribution is being done by Itsutsubashi Research Co., under a license from Red Hat.
Here is a report on the proposed creation of the "Japan Linux Users Group" to deal with "intellectual property" problems associated with Linux. This evidently stems out of an attempt by Pacific HiTech to register "Linux" as a trademark in Japan.
A company called "10art-ni" has put out a sales management package for Linux, according to this short column.
Finally, they also have an article about Hitachi's possible plans to support Linux as part of its business systems integration offerings.

IBM has released "Secure Mailer" under an open source license. Secure Mailer, a.k.a. "Postfix," a.k.a. VMailer was written by Wietse Venema as a secure replacement for sendmail. It can be thought of as a direct competitor with qmail. More information can be found in IBM's Secure Mailer page, the Postfix page, or in this Star-Telegram article about the release.

At least one person is raising red flags about IBM's recent open source announcements. Greg Aharonian of the "Internet Patent News Service" points out that, while IBM has made Secure Mailer available, it has made no promises that people actually using Secure Mailer will not be subject to legal action for patent infringement. Software patents in the U.S. are a big problem, and the issue is worth some thought. See Greg's message to see why he thinks we should be concerned. (Interested readers may also want to check out this introduction to the Internet Patent News Service).

Compaq has released a Linux driver for their PCI RAID controllers. Even better, they released it under the GPL. See their press release for more. (Thanks to Neal Richter).

Press Releases:

Scriptics, TclPro product supported on Linux.
Torrent Systems, Orchestrate demonstrated by Intel on a Linux / Xeon / Oracle system in Japan.
Softway Systems, Interex personal edition - run Linux applications on Windows NT.
Chrysalis-ITS, IPSec card with "planned" Linux support.
Right Now Technologies, Right Now Web 2.1, publish customer support databases on the web.
TriTeal, TED 4.2 for Linux.
BATM Advanced Communications, 100baseFX card with a Linux driver.

December 17, 1998

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