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Linux and business


Informix has announced a partnership with Red Hat and SuSE wherein the distribution vendors will distribute evaluation copies of Informix's database as well. SuSE has bundled it into their 6.0 release; Red Hat makes it available for download via their web site. See Informix's press release (helpfully titled Santa Exhausted After Delivering Informix Products on Linux, Easter Bunny Worried) for more information.

Applix has announced the availability of ApplixWare for LinuxPPC, thus providing one of the first commercial applications for Linux on the PowerPC platform. Their deal with LinuxPPC includes a bundled product with both the distribution and Applixware in a single box, with a price of $129. See Applix's press release for more.

IDC has put out a couple of studies on operating system shipments, both of which remark on the progress made by Linux. This one about servers is the most enthusiastic. "The worldwide market for server operating systems, which IDC defines as server operating environments (SOEs), grew by 25.2 percent in 1998, compared to 15.3 percent growth for 1997.... Linux shipments for such server tasks as Web-serving grew rapidly, although the revenues from those shipments were just $33 million worldwide. If Linux SOE sales were not included, shipments of all other SOEs would have grown at a rate of just 11.3%."

The other one, about client OS's, also mentions Linux. "...for 1999, IDC sees continued interest and growth for the entire Linux market."

Another free software system goes commercial. Tripwire Security Systems has announced a commercial version of the venerable "tripwire" program. Tripwire, of course, monitors file systems for modifications and sounds the alarm when it sees something that could be a sign of a breakin. This would appear to be a commercial, binary-only release. The press release indicates that "exclusive rights" to Tripwire have been transferred to TSS. So the only way to get Tripwire 2.0 is to buy it.

A company called Akamai is putting together a distributed WWW server architecture, which seeks to increase download speeds and decrease network traffic. They have built a network of web servers, each of which is dynamically loaded with the pages that people nearby are asking to see. It looks like an interesting architecture. Oh yes, and their servers are running linux, of course. See this Network World Fusion article (registration required) for more. (Thanks to Rajesh Bhandari).

A commercial real-time Linux page has been set up at www.rtlinux.com. It seems to be intended to be a clearinghouse for companies and individuals working in the rtlinux arena. They are putting together the listings now; if you work in the real time area you may want to check the page out and perhaps get added to it. (The long-time rtlinux page remains dedicated to the rtlinux project, and is separate from the commercial page).

A quick followup to last week's report about Creative Labs and the saga of getting Linux support for their "SB Live" card: Creative has received about 15 resumes for their Linux device driver position, and has begun interviewing. Interesting, according to Jacob Hawley, "...the most qualified folks I have met are not looking to work here and are more interested in helping." It is indeed an interesting world when you can't hire the best people because they want to do the work for free. (See also this brief article in the Fairfax IT News (Australian) about Creative and Linux).

OpenLink Software has announced that the iODBC Driver Manager has been released under the LGPL. For those who are wondering: "iODBC enables the development and deployment of database centric applications compatible with the Microsoft ODBC 2.x & X/Open SQL CLI data access standards."

Press Releases:

  • American Management Solutions, selling Bluestone's Sapphire/Web product (which runs on Linux).
  • PE Logic Corp., fast SCSI controller cards with Linux support.
  • RuleSpace, Inc., employee web usage monitor.
  • Rubicad, LADEE electronic design tool.
  • BASCOM, "Internet Communications Server," a Caldera-based gateway system aimed at schools.
  • Cobalt Networks, Inc., Qube 2 network server.
  • Samba team, Samba 2.0 release.
  • Xplain Corp. LinuxWorld Conference "Greenhouse", just in case they didn't spam it to you directly.
  • Split Pea Software, "Solana Remote Framework" web development framework. "Linux will ship within 60 days."
  • Corel, announcing a return to profitability. Lists WordPerfect for Linux ("surpassed 400,000 download attempts") as a 1998 achievement.

January 21, 1999

 

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