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Linux and business

NEC's support for Linux in Japan was a top news story this week. We have gotten some further information on what NEC is doing with Linux in Japan. According to their Linux page (in Japanese), NEC is doing the following:

Providing "Linux support information" for their servers and workstations. They do not yet guarantee that Linux will work on these systems - "use at your own risk."
Providing Linux installation services as of April 1. They are aiming at large companies only: there is a minimum of 50 systems. Cost is 700,000 Yen (about $6,000).
Offering some Linux installation courses.
They also cite their contributions to open source software; these include Canna (a Japanese input system), a IPv6/IPv4 translator, and work on the Socks proxy system.

They evidently "support" Red Hat and TurboLinux at this time.

Many thanks to Maya Tamiya, Chris Ganje, and Kinichi Kitano.

Rumors of lay-offs at Netscape, first published on March 19th by ZDnet, were confirmed by AOL on Wednesday, March 24th. However, the lay-offs are not restricted to Netscape. Both companies will see between 350 to 500 jobs cut. Many of the people laid off will be picked up by Sun, who acquired many Netscape product lines and operations when Netscape was purchased by AOL, according to this Wired News article. Sun's involvement is specified in more detail in this Wired News article. ZDnet also published a followup.

More information on Dell's plans for Linux came from this InfoWorld article which indicates that workstations with Linux pre-installed became available on Sunday, while factory-installed Linux on servers started Monday, March 22nd. Customers buying Precision 410 or 610 workstations can now order them pre-configured with the Linux 5.2 operating system from Red Hat Software, said Dell spokesman John Weisblatt.

A couple of news stories about Caldera have cropped up this week, including:

Caldera has picked their support partner, announces this press release. Caldera is partnering with Multi-User Solutions, making them an authorized service center for OpenLinux.
MTI purchased a 20% equity investment in Caldera Systems, announced as part of their press release on their Internet RAID systems. "Linux is widely recognised as a powerful alternative to UNIX and Windows NT for application development and IT infrastructure. MTI already provides storage solutions in these latter two enterprise environments," said Doug McLean, Vice President European Sales. "We plan to offer high-performance, highly available, scalable storage solutions to the rapidly growing Linux marketplace just as We do for Windows NT and UNIX. Our goal is to work with Caldera Systems to move Linux into mission-critical IT environments."

The InterNIC website disappeared this weekend, becoming instead a redirect to an updated web page from Network Solutions, Inc., the company that has an exclusive contract for handling InterNIC domain registrations through the year 2000. Several major newssites are covering the changes:

People aren't happy about this, as represented by this quote from the IDG article: "We had no notice," said Becky Burr, acting associate administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Commerce Department, who had received about 250 e-mails about the move over the weekend. "We are looking into it. We are moving very quickly to get some answers here."

Network Solutions response: "The intent was to make it simpler and easier and to consolidate the services we offer," said Christopher Clough, NSI's spokesman.

Red Hat Software and Ganymede Software have come to an agreement under which the endpoints for Ganymede's performance monitoring software will ship with Red Hat Linux.

Magic Software's application development tool, a commercial, closed source package, is available for no-cost for Linux for a limited time.

Aventail Corporation announces availability of Aventail ExtraNet Center for Linux.

Press Releases:

Helios, announces its EtherShare 2.5, EtherShare OPI 2.0, PDF Handshake and Print Preview products for Linux
VAResearch, acquires Electric Lichen L.L.C
OpenMail, planned announcements for next week's EMA'99 conference
WebTrends Corporation, WebTrends Enterprise Reporting Server released
Comdex/Sydney '99, with Linux coverage
CorVu Corporation, announces Linux support for Business Intelligence and Balanced Scorecard
MTI announces Internet-based raid storage for Linux

Section Editor: Jon Corbet.

Guest Editor for the Week: Liz Coolbaugh

March 25, 1999

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