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Linux and businessNumerous corporations announced open source software releases this week. Corporate source releases are now simply a part of the landscape - it is part of how business is done. Releases this week include:
Red Hat has bought Hell's Kitchen Software, the makers of the widely-used CCVS credit card processing system for Linux. Evidently the HKS software will now be bundled with the "professional" version of Red Hat's distribution. The current CCVS license is far from open source - binary only, no reverse engineering, etc. Presumably some changes will come once Red Hat takes over, though evidently some of the code needs to remain closed-source due to its use of proprietary financial protocols. This move helps to position Red Hat for sales into e-commerce settings. It may be cause for some concern for others, in that CCVS has been, for a long time, the only commercially-available credit card processing system for Linux. About the only alternative appears to be the open-source YAMS system; it can do credit card processing, but only through one clearinghouse. The OpenMerchant system provides a lot of interesting functionality, but says nothing about credit cards. Thus, to a great extent, Red Hat is now the only source for this capability. HKS is being purchased for about $90 million in Red Hat stock. The final deal is contingent on approval from HKS's stockholders. More information in Red Hat's press release. Red Hat will be carrying Salon's content on Wide Open News, thus helping to fill out the content on that site. Salon's stock price took off on this news, of course... See Salon's press release for more. VA Linux Systems announces SourceForge. VA Linux Systems has put out this press release announcing SourceForge to the world. The Linux community has known about SourceForge for a bit - it seems like a dozen development projects move over there every day. But this announcement is the first much of the wider world has heard about this resource, and it has drawn some significant attention. XFree86 wins IDG/Linus Torvalds Award. IDG World Expo announced that The XFree86 Project, Inc. is the recipient of the February 2000 IDG/Linus Torvalds Community Award. More announcements from LinuxOne. LinuxOne may not be all that strong on revenue, but they have the press release game down. Recently, it has announced the opening of a Taiwan office, staffed by six people. LinuxOne has also put out a somewhat suspicious press release claiming to have a $500,000 order from Power Source. A good counter to this release can be found on Technocrat.net, where Bruce Perens points out that Power Source, a tiny company, is not in much of a position to spend $500,000 on anything. White Paper: Open Source and Microsoft. The Aurora Development Group has put up a white paper on open source software and Microsoft. They side strongly with Microsoft. "While Linux is reliable, free, and scalable, you should really consider sticking to NT. Love it or hate it, we all know how NT will behave in just about every situation. Since each person who uses it can modify Linux, it makes the OS harder to master. On a typical day, I visit three different client sites in New York City. Each of them are running Windows, so I know what to expect. What if they were each running a customized version of Linux? My support burden would dramatically increase." OS X released. Apple has put out a press release announcing the rollout of OS X. "At the core of Mac OS X is Darwin, Apple's advanced operating system kernel. Darwin is Linux-like, featuring the same Free BSD Unix support and open-source model." Section Editor: Jon Corbet.
Press Releases:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
January 6, 2000
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