See also: last week's Commerce page.

Linux and business

A new company called Loki Software put out this press release stating their intent to start porting commercial games to the Linux environment. Details - such as exactly which games - are scarce at the moment, but they say they'll have their first release out in the first quarter of 1999.

Washington University has announced a deal wherein a company called Object Computing, Inc. will commercialize and distribute the software goodies created at the University - all under an open source license. The first thing to go out will be their "ACE" Object Request Broker (ORB). This is another attempt at funding open source software development; let's hope it goes well.

Troll Tech has put out a new version of the QPL (the new license for Qt). The biggest change in the new versionseems to be that people who distribute patches to Qt can distribute them under a license different from the QPL. The wording of the license is a bit ambiguous; one interpretation is that patches which are not released under the QPL themselves need not be available for Troll to incorporate into proprietary products. One could also read it to say that Troll has the right to ignore the license under which a patch is released in incorporate the patch regardless. Presumably the next version will clarify that point. In any case, if Troll does incorporate patches, they must then be released by Troll under the QPL.

Penguin Computing has announced a new associates program. Their press release explains how their program can earn members referral fees. Membership is not restricted in any way, but they hope the program will help fund "Linux User's Groups, Linux websites, and lots of Open Source developers and advocates."

Hitachi plans to start selling Linux-installed systems, according to this Nikkei Net article. These systems would start shipping sometime in 1999. (Thanks to Bruce Harada).

Press Releases:

• VA Research, shipped a couple of machines with 2G RAM.
• IBM, Jikes is open source.
• Avant!, Polaris Verilog simulator available for Linux.
• National Instruments, LabView available for Linux.
• MathSoft, NUOPT analysis software available for Linux.
• Sendmail, Inc., Sendmail Pro released.
• VA Research, support for the Linux beer hike.
• Star Division, Star Office 5.0 available.
• TowerJ, version 3.0 of their Java system.
• Netbeans, DeveloperX2 2.1 is supported on the new Java 2 Platform (JDK 1.2)
• Netbeans, now a Cloudscape Certified Technology Partner

Next: Announcements