See also: last week's Commerce page.

Linux and business

• IBM has announced that their "DB2 Universal Database" will be made available for Linux "later this year." More details are not yet available. See IBM's press release for the official word.

• Sybase has released its "Adaptive Server Enterprise" for Linux. Sybase's product will initially be distributed by a number of the commercial distribution. See Caldera's press release and Sybase's announcement for the hype. Unlike IBM's product, Sybase is available now, and it can be downloaded for free (but you have to really want it - it's 40mb of stuff). Interested folks may want to have a look at the Sybase technical overview on Caldera's site, Caldera's Sybase download page, or Red Hat's Sybase download page. S.u.S.E. is also said to be distributing Sybase, but it does not yet show up on their web pages.

Many people have been wondering: where is the Oracle8 trial CD that was supposed to be shipped after the 15th?. While some people have received it, many have not. For those who are still waiting, here is a message posted to the Oracle discussion list by the Oracle folks:

We realize many of you haven't received your CDs yet, and we wanted to let you know that we're working to deliver the remaining shipments ASAP. Sorry for the delay.

Also, many of you have asked why we don't make the software downloadable. Simply put, Oracle has some legal restrictions that prevent us from making the software downloadable until we release a trial version. We'll notify you as soon as the trial is available for download. Unfortunately, this also means that we can't authorize any of you to post your copies for download.

Red Hat has announced that they will be releasing the source for their NeoMagic X server to XFree86. Until now, this source has been restrained by NeoMagic's hardware nondisclosure policy, meaning that the NeoMagic server was available in binary format only. It seems that NeoMagic has seen the light and allowed this disclosure to happen. It is probable that NeoMagic came to this decision after seeing how much interest was generated by Red Hat's binary server release; Red Hat has demonstrated here that this sort of engagement with hardware manufacturers can yield positive results. See Red Hat's announcement for more.

The Open Group has decided to revert X11 back to the old license. This should end an exercise where it looked as if they were trying to turn the X window system into a proprietary product. The license for X11R6.4 is short and clear.

According to a message (in French) sent to the NNL mailing list, Compaq has announced that they will support the installation of Linux on their hardware. The actual installation work will be done somehow by Compaq VARs.

Press Releases:

• Netbeans is now bundling Cloudscape's embeddable Java-based object relational database
• The Better Counter CGI script now ported to Linux
• webMethods, "B2B for SAP R/3, an XML-based solution that facilitates inter-enterprise application integration between SAP R/3 and other ERP systems over the Internet."
• Eolian, Content-tracking for their Linux-based web cache.
• AVS, AVS5.4(R), a scientific visualization package.
• PowerQuest. Partition Magic 4.0, which now understands (and can resize) ext2 file systems.
• GuestTrack, Web personalization software.

Next: Announcements