See also: last week's Commerce page.

Linux and business

It is also becoming increasingly clear that Red Hat is taking its web portal plans seriously. They have hired some 20 people from Atomic Vision - the company that did their current site. Their plans seemingly include setting up their own Linux news service - along with tutorials and other Linux information. Their ambitions seem to go far beyond what is available on the site currently.

Oracle has released Oracle8i for Linux, and is proclaiming the success of their Linux strategy in general. From their press release: "Outside the development community, Oracle has also seen overwhelming customer adoption with an excess of 800 paying customers today-over half of these orders from enterprise accounts and the remainder from small to mid-sized businesses and organizations." All of the database vendors seem to be reporting the same thing: they are getting surprising amounts of interest from large corporate accounts.

TurboLinux announced the promotion of John Terpstra, formerly managing director for Australia and New Zealand operations at the company, to vice president-development and has named SGI veteran Dave McAllister director of strategic technologies. These changes are part of TurboLinux' aggressive plans for ramping up U.S. based operations.

Sair Inc., provider of Linux and GNU Certification, hosted a week-long "train-the-trainer" session to assist in the international launch of its Sair Linux and GNU Certification program. The Sair Linux and GNU Certification tests have been available through Sylvan Prometric testing facilities since June.

This ZD Net story provides a few extra details on Red Hat's IPO filing. "Many Linux users are raring to buy stock. Some are voicing concern as they discover how unlikely it is that small investors will be able to get onboard at the IPO price. Regular market players have yet to venture much in the way of an opinion."

Red Hat plans to create a full-fledged Linux news service as part of its effort to increase market appeal and potential profitability.

Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Europe. Two new offices in the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany will deliver the company's Red Hat Linux software and support to enterprise users in Europe and the surrounding regions.

Austin's BridgePoint Technical Manufacturing Inc. was launched into the unexpected realm of e-commerce using Red Hat Linux on the older computers stored in warehouse.

Ziatech joins the free software community with this announcement that they will be releasing its multiprocessing CompactPCI source code drivers for the Linux operating system under the GPL. "Our customers have asked us to provide open-source code and we are doing so. We anticipate this trend toward open source software to swell, and we want to be on the forefront". They are especially to be congratulated for choosing to use the GPL, rather than building yet another open source license.

Caldera Thin Clients will become Lineo. Lineo is working on an embedded version of Linux called Embedix, based on OpenLinux, a version of the software sold by Lineo's independent sister company, Caldera Systems.

Giganet will offer a standards-based, commercial-strength clustering technology for Linux with a new version of its cLAN clustering software.

The Software Group Limited announced two Linux Wide-Area Network connectivity products. Based on the Wanware line of Unix products, Wanware/Linux connects computers directly to wide-area networks using the X.25, Frame Relay, ISDN Basic Rate (BRI) or PPP protocols.

Linux Games on the PowerPC will be here faster and more frequently as a result of this alliance between Loki Entertainment Software and Terra Soft Solutions. Loki is probably best known for Civilization: A Call to Power for Linux, while Terra Soft is also the producer of the Yellow Dog Linux distribution for the PowerPC platform.

Linux Mall's Top 40 list is out, so you can now check out what Linux products are selling the best. For volume by number of units, Red Hat made number one with Mandrake as a surprise number 2.

This overview of SuSE showcases their recent partnerships and some of their plans for the future.

Computer Associates and Caldera have teamed up to promote Linux within corporations. "The CA move is the latest by a large IT vendor to offer Linux based products as the open source code operating system continues to gain users among normally conservative corporations."
(Thanks to Jimmy Aitken)

Linuxcare, Inc. announced that it had formed a strategic partnership with Densa Techno Tokyo K.K., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Electronics Services Co., Ltd., to provide Linux service and support in the Japanese market.

Dataquest did a study and predicts that Linux will account for about a quarter of worldwide server appliance sales by 2003. See also this press release.

Press Releases:

• DataMirror Corporation announced the availability of a new version of its Transformation Server enterprise data integration software for Oracle databases on Linux.

• Hewlett-Packard Company announced that the SureStore E Disk Array XP256 now supports Linux.

• IndyBox Systems announced they would be introducing the option of Debian GNU/Linux in all of their systems.

• Jones Business Systems Inc., a national Value Add Distributor and White Box OEM announced a distribution alliance with Red Hat Inc., a leading developer and provider of open source operating system solutions.

• Kaspersky Lab reports the release of beta-version of world's first memory resident virus interceptor for Linux - AVP Monitor.

• Linux Consultants' Support and Resource Center is reorganizing. They announced that they will seek official non-profit status from the State of Texas and register the Center under Section 501-C3 of the Internal Revenue Code. The Center also has a new domain: lcsrc.org.

• Penguin Computing announced that it will offer a full line of servers, the Adelie Penguin series, running on AMD processors.

• Prima Tech announced that its new Red Hat Linux book is now available in bookstores nationwide.

• The Software Group Limited announced two Linux Wide-Area Network connectivity products. Wanware/Linux, which connects computers directly to wide-area networks, and Wanware/ISDN for Linux.

• Visionics Corporation, developer of face recognition technology, announced that it is making available versions of its FaceIt engine for a range of new operating platforms. These include the Visionics Face Recognition Datablade for Informix databases on SGI UNIX and C++ libraries for LINUX operating systems.

• Wick Hill is shipping WRQ's latest NT and UNIX integration package with support for Linux systems.

• Xi Graphics, Inc. is packaging their GUI, or graphical user interface with Linux. The GUI includes Motif and CDE built on the Accelerated-X Display Server.

• Ziatech will showcase the new CompactPCI Linux Development Platform at LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet.

Next: Announcements