See also: last week's Linux in the news page.

Linux in the news

The Internet Stock Report ran this look at the Andover.net IPO, due to happen any day now. "As has been the case with the recent spikes in RedHat and other Linux companies, it would not be surprising if the Andover.net IPO also undergoes similar volatility -- especially as the press heats up regarding the IPO. So, Andover.net could be a great way to get a quick profit from the Linux craze."

Here's a brief Reuters article stating that Andover.net is raising its IPO price to $15-18 per share (from $12-15). That, of course, suggests that they are seeing some demand.

This New York Times article looks at this week's IPOs. "The renegade Linux operating system will be in the spotlight again this week when two related companies, the much-anticipated VA Linux Systems Inc. and Andover.Net., go public." Note that the New York Times is a registration-required site; this article may also be read without registration via Newsalert. (Thanks to Paul Hewitt).

Here's a News.com article about the VA Linux and Andover.net IPOs, both of which are expected to happen this week. "VA Linux, which markets servers, and Andover, an operator of Web sites, are Linux-related offerings, but investors will likely treat them differently, according to IPO analysts. Andover.net may face mixed reviews because of the unconventional approach it took with its offering."

Also in News.com: this article about VA's community offering. "The firm sent a letter to Linux developers inviting them to participate in the company's imminent initial public offering. Although there are altruistic motives for the offer, there are pragmatic reasons as well, some say. A Linux company would be ill-advised to alienate the programming community it depends upon. In addition, the participation offer stands to increase the word-of-mouth buzz that often precedes a successful IPO."

Yet another News.com article reports on the VA Linux IPO price increase. "Such increases in the price range generally indicates high demand for the stock. It's not a surprise, given the successes of Linux-related IPOs such as Red Hat and Cobalt Networks, both of which increased their offering prices."

The LA Times reports on the upcoming VA Linux IPO. "Other analysts, however, say VA Linux is no Red Hat. They are skeptical of the rush of fledgling 'me-too' companies joining the Linux IPO bandwagon, pointing to deals expected from TurboLinux Inc. and several others next year."

CBS Marketwatch looks at the VA Linux Systems IPO. "Revenues have been growing briskly: $2.7 million in 1997, $5.6 million in 1998 and $17.7 million in 1999. The growth has been due in large part to a surge in the customer base, which was 300 in 1997, 550 in 1998 and 1,100 in 1999. There was also an increase in the average level of business for each customer: $9,000 in 1997, $10,000 in 1998 and $15,000 in 1999. In fact, the company has very strong backers, such as Sequoia Capital and Intel. What's more, with the surge in RedHat and other Linux companies, VA Linux should do extremely well this week with its IPO debut."

Here's Business Week's take on the VA Linux IPO. "Sometime later this week, another Linux-related company, called VA Linux Systems, will go public under the ticker symbol LNUX. It will probably double or triple in price while market pundits criticize it for being another overhyped IPO. This time, they'll be wrong. That's because VA Linux could be poised to cash in on the best source of business that Linux will present: VA sells computers, not software."

The Red Herring looks at this week's IPOs. "Possibly the hottest of all is VA Linux Systems (proposed Nasdaq symbol: LNUX). Located in Sunnyvale, California, the company is a provider of Linux-based systems, software, and services. The magic word here is 'Linux,' bringing to mind several other Linux IPOs, such as Cobalt Networks (Nasdaq: COBT) and Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT)."

The Register chimes in on Linux IPOs. "So far as developers are concerned, it is now possible to see the open software movement moving towards the mainstream, just as the PC market was in the late 1980s. It would make little sense to resist the new ethos: after all, wasn't success part of the original objective?"

ZDNet reprints this MSNBC article about Linux IPOs. "There's nothing like a 1,500-percent-plus stock-value jump to catch the attention of investors."

ZDNet's Inter@ctive Investor has yet another IPO article. "The Andover.net deal will be huge for W.R. Hambrecht, but also illustrates that Andover.net may not have been able to land a big traditional underwriter such as Goldman Sachs. The good news is that demand is strong as W.R. Hambrecht raised the price range."

Open Source Resources:

Upside looks at Cosource.com. "'Our mission, our evangelism to the open source community, is that money is good,' [Cosource CEO] Thompson says. 'The fact that open source can move forward without money being involved is great, but money can make it better.'"

Here's a News.com article about Cosource.com. "The payments to the programmers have ranged from $10 to $1,100, but within two years Cosource wants to increase the usual price tag to about $10,000."

IT-Director.com seems to think that Application Server Provider (ASP) systems are the way to get open source software into the application level. "The industry is now conditioned to accept the ASP hosting model, is ready to trust open source software, and recognises the need to build new applications very rapidly and more cost-effectively in order to exploit the Web." (Thanks to Paulo Francisco Sedrez).

Reviews:

Bill Henning, distribution reviewer extraordinaire, takes a look at Corel Linux in this AboutLinux article. "You should realize that this is the first 'release' of a Linux distribution from Corel; and as such it is not surprising that it has some rough edges, and some of the new tools introduced by Corel Linux (that are Open Source) go far in making up for the problems that I (and others) have found."

This AboutLinux.com review is about TurboLinux 4.0 Workstation Lite. "None of the problems I encountered were unsolvable; indeed I did not have any difficulty resolving the problems I ran into; however someone new to Linux would have thrown up their hands and gone right back to Windows."

CNET has put up an article evaluating seven different Linux distributions. "To help you choose the best Linux version for you, CNET examined the seven most popular distributions available. We installed them, picked through their documentation, and evaluated their strengths as desktop OSs and as enterprise-level servers." In fact, they appear to have rated the distributions primarily on installation and documentation. Corel and Red Hat came out high; Debian and Mandrake low.

Red Hat:

ComputerWorld ran this article about the new agreement between Dell and Red Hat. "Previously, 90-day support for Dell's Linux workstations and servers was delivered by Linuxcare Inc. in San Francisco. Linuxcare Chief Technology Officer David Sifry said Linuxcare will continue to deliver the support for Dell's desktops running Linux and Dell server buyers can still elect to have their 90-day support delivered by Linuxcare."

News.com reports briefly on the new Red Hat/Dell agreement. "Dell had been relying on LinuxCare for service and support. It is still uncertain how today's deal with Red Hat will affect that agreement, if at all."

ZDNet's Inter@ctive Investor reports on the Red Hat/Dell agreement, and gives it credit for the latest jump in Red Hat's stock price. "Red Hat has been the primary Linux stock for Wall Street and the Dell deal will gives it a nice head start on the competition. Two of Red Hat's competitors go public this week. Andover.net (Proposed ticker: ANDN) and VA Linux (Proposed ticker: LNUX) will launch IPOs."

Red Hat's Wide Open News interviews Michael Tiemann. "He spoke with us at length and in depth about the Red Hat-Cygnus merger, forking Linux, post-PC computing, why Red Hat!=Microsoft, and where he was when the deal was announced - and revealed that a delegation of open-source gurus (Tiemann included) is meeting with a group from Sun Microsystems to discuss Sun's position on open source and open standards." (Thanks to Paul Hewitt).

osOpinion has another shopping suggestion for Red Hat. "Redhat should buy Troll Tech and place QT under the LGPL or BSD licenses."

Also in Inter@ctive Investor: this article raising concerns after Red Hat's quarterly analyst conference call. "This morning's Red Hat discussion made it easy to understand why the Linux grassroots folks are becoming leery of Red Hat. Not once did the Red Hat get tipped in the direction of the larger developer community, although Young did mention them in passing at the very end of the conference call; if you had never heard of Linux until listening to Red Hat executives today, you would have come away with the impression that Red Hat owns Linux."

Business:

Here's an HP World article about the forthcoming Merced port. "The Linux/IA-64 project at HP Labs represents a significant contribution to the Open Source movement. But there was more to the decision than meets the eye. According to David Mosberger, member of the technical staff at HP Research Labs, it came about for 'lots of reasons.'" (Thanks to Robert K. Nelson).

News.com has gotten around to covering Intel's investment in SuSE. "While Intel's investments help the companies fund expansion efforts, they also can be a financial boon. Intel's purchase of 3,005,058 shares of Red Hat at a price of $3.141 cost Intel $9.44 million. With Red Hat's stock at 221.5 in morning trading, that investment now is worth more than $646 million."

Multimedium reports (in French) on Linux-Mandrake. "Thanks to a partnership with American book publisher Macmillan, the French company MandrakeSoft is one of only two profitable Linux distributors." English text available via Babelfish. (Found in NNL).

Nicholas Petreley looks at disaster predictions in this InfoWorld column; he expects trouble for Microsoft stock. "Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 2000. Windows 2000 Advanced Server is $3,999 for 25 users. Add $5,397 for 75 additional user licenses and 100 client copies of Windows 2000 Professional at $319 each, and that brings your total to $41,296 for one server and 100 users. Contrast that to Linux or FreeBSD, both of which cost about $50 for unlimited users. Let's see: $41,296 for 100 users or $50 for unlimited users -- which shall I choose?"

ENT Magazine ran this article on Bristol Technologies' Wind/U product. "Wind/U for Linux enables developers to compile Microsoft Win32 API and Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) source code directly on Linux and create native desktop and server-based Linux applications." (Thanks to Charles Bermingham).

Here's an opinion piece in The Nation about the Microsoft "findings of fact." The suggested solution is to require full documentation of the Windows API. "Microsoft would then be competing on a level playing field with an organization of volunteers and commercial distributors who would have a higher-quality, completely compatible product everyone could get free. That's the kind of competition that would really benefit consumers. The end of the Microsoft Era can be the beginning of the Age of Open Software, in which programs will work better, cost less and develop in innovative new ways faster than ever before." (Thanks to Jean-Christophe Helary).

This osOpinion piece suggests that Linux may be in trouble because there is no way to insure that Linux users will remain captive to the ads presented with "free" Internet services. "Can we still hope to establish Linux as a desktop alternative when Windows 2000 machines may include *free* unlimited 56k Internet?"

ZDNet's Inter@ctive Investor raises some concern about current Linux stock prices. "Maybe you're a believer. Maybe you think Linux will revolutionize the information technology universe. But when it comes to your investments, make sure you're not paying an Internet-stock premium for what amounts to an unproven services company."

Reuters takes this look at Corel's stock price. "Despite investor enthusiasm, analysts are taking a more cautious approach to Corel's Linux opportunity."

The Ottawa Citizen reports on Corel, its high stock price, and plans for the future. "As small plastic penguins rained down from balconies inside the Carling Avenue headquarters, Mr. Cowpland called Ottawa 'the new Linux capital of the world.'"

Finally:

The LA Times interviews Linus Torvalds. "It's very clear that when I look at how it was before the commercial people got involved, Linux was much more unbalanced. It was great technology, but at the same time it was too much of being just technology. With the vendors coming in, suddenly it becomes much more of a whole product."

Evan Leibovitch has put together a Christmas shopping list for your favorite Linux geek. "For the older geek, or one who just wants to play with the rich, buy a copy of Oracle 8i for Linux for $89, a pittance compared to the several thousand dollar price tags on traditional Oracle."

SiliconValley.com reports on the GOP presidential debate, which included Steve Forbes talking about the Microsoft trial. "``The fact is that technology is going to send that lawsuit to the equivalent of Jurassic Park,'' Forbes said.... Forbes cited the rise of competitors such as Sun Microsystems as proof, but made a noticeable gaffe when he referred to the rival Linux open-source operating system as ``Loonix.''" (Thanks to John Franks).

The Sydney Morning Herald ran this introductory article. It is not one of the more accurate ones we have seen... "Caldera's version of Linux is also extremely popular, since it is based on Red Hat Linux but adds a range of other features. "

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

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