See also: last week's Commerce page.

Linux and business

New Linux administration course offered Eklektix, Inc., producer of the Linux Weekly News, is proud to announce a new addition to its line of Linux professional training courses. Linux System Administration for Unix Administrators is intended for students who already know how to work with Unix systems. By assuming familiarity with the basic material, this course is able to delve deeply into the issues which are truly Linux-specific in just two days. This course will be taught in Boulder, CO in September; it is also available on site.

Userland Frontier moves to Linux - sort of. For the time being, Frontier will continue to run only on proprietary systems, but it is now possible to host Frontier-managed sites on Linux. Their Linux-side code is being released in source form, and the underlying platform will be Zope. See Linux.userland.com for the official story of the beginning of Frontier's move to Linux, and their adoption of Zope. "And Zope is open source, which made it easier to invest. After all, we own it just as much as anyone else does. So we asked the Zope people if they would include our code in the standard Zope distribution and they said yes. Excellent! This is more proof that collaboration is possible, not only across operating systems, but across economic systems."

VA supports Linux Demo Day. VA Linux Systems announced a corporate sponsorship of Linux Demo Day, a volunteer oriented project in collaboration with local Linux user groups (LUGs) and corporate sponsors. The goal of the project is to hold an international demonstration of Linux which coincides with the anniversary of Linux, from September 12-18, 1999.

Training materials released. Something that slipped through the cracks and didn't get into this week's newsletter: the folks at GBdirect in the UK have announced that they have released some of their Linux training materials under an open license. The materials released thus far make up the first part of a "how to use Linux" course.

800Linux.com announces Linux training. 800Linux has announced a pair of Linux training classes which are aimed at Windows users. Details on the courses may be found on their training page.

Open source XML application server released. Planet7 Technologies has announced the release of its XML application server under an open source license. They present the server as a valuable tool in the creation of e-commerce (and other) sites using XML technology.

Steve Ballmer on Linux Here's a transcript of Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's speech delivered to the Washington Software Assocition a couple of weeks ago. "I mean, it sounds dumb, but, you know, guys like Sun always missed the boat. They can?t beat us if they don?t ride on the PC platform, because the volume economics are on the side of the PC platform. And I don't know why nobody figured that out, but Linux is -- and SCO did a little bit, but Linux is the first sort of unit that always thought about itself as PC-based and as trying to be kind of -- and has gotten to a critical -- some kind of critical mass of share." (Toward the bottom, in the Q&A). There are also some scary comments about security and other things - an illuminating, if rambling and incoherent, read. (Thanks to Alexander Voinov).

PLOC announced its existence this week. PLOC (per-line-of-code) is another attempt to arrange payment for developers of free software. The twist here is that they have set up a scheme (evidently intresting enough to have a patent applied for) wherein each contributor to an open source project will be paid according to how many lines of code they write. There are currently no active projects listed on the PLOC web page.

It will be interesting to see if this works at all. The link between lines of code written and the true value of a programming effort is tenuous at best. It is very often the case that higher-quality code is more compact. Creating an incentive for programmers to inflate their line counts does not seem like the way to create quality software. And how should a patch which removes code - and improves the program - be compensated?

Press Releases:

• 32bitsonline announced a merger with Bleeding Edge magazine.
• Acute Technologies, Inc. announced it will manufacture, market and sell worldwide the new ThinCast(TM) product family, a new class of low-cost computing solutions referred to as Lite PCs. Lite PCs will come with a choice of operating systems, including Linux.
• Alpha Processor, Inc. announced the UP2000, a high performance solution for scientific computing and Linux applications as a clustered server or workstation.
• Atipa has become a supporter of the ZD Open Source Forum, to be held next week.
• Compaq received nine awards at AIM Technology's Summer '99 Hot Iron Awards Ceremony for Linux based workstations and servers.
• Cygnus Solutions unveiled Cygnus Code Fusion(TM) for Linux, a complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Linux developers. Code Fusion IDE makes it possible for developers familiar with programming on Windows platforms to quickly become productive in developing for Linux.
• Ecrix announced a partnership with Penguin Computing; Penguin will be featuring Exrix's drives on their systmes.
• eSoft Inc. announced it has entered into a software licensing agreement with Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), paring eSoft's Linux software with HP's Linux systems.
• Franklin Telecom announced the development of the Linux based Typhoon(R) Data Voice Gateway.
• Hewlett-Packard Company announced the porting of its WebQoS product to Windows NT(R) and Linux.
• IBM Classes for Unicode is open source code that enables applications to work in different languages and countries. Linux is among the supported platforms.
• The board of directors of LinuxForce Inc. named Charles B. (Buck) Fleming of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania as president of the recently organized company, which develops Linux operating system solutions for complex commercial and industrial computing requirements.
• Macmillan Computer Publishing USA announced the release of a family of Linux(TM) products. The core product is "The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0" and features Linux-Mandrake.
• MontaVista Software, Inc. announced it is working with Force Computers to provide a "Hard Hat Linux" in embedded and real-time computer applications.
• National Computing Centre's IT User survey 1999 highlighted widespread acceptance of Linux when it was evaluated, but a reluctance on the part of many companies to evaluate it at all.
• Open Market, Inc. announced ShopSite(TM) TX for the Linux platform. This is the third release of ShopSite for Linux and this release has new features not included in previous versions.
• PROLIFIC, Inc. announced the release of its ProGenesis tool suite for design automation. It is currently available for most Unix and Linux platforms.
• RSDi.com announced that it is providing consulting for all Open Source Java E-Commerce web sites.
• Tech Data Corporation signed an agreement with Red Hat Inc. to distribute the Red Hat's full line of Linux-based solutions.
• TurboLinux announced a global software partnership with Sendmail, Inc., the dominant provider of standards-based messaging solutions.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet.

Next: Announcements