Sun expands Linux offerings

Sun Microsystems yesterday announced an array of new products at the LinuxWorld show in New York, not the least of which is the availability of the Sun ONE Application Server 7 and Sun ONE Directory Server 5.1 on Linux.

At the show, Sun added to its software stack, now offering seven products in the Sun ONE family on Linux, including Sun ONE Web Server 6, Sun ONE Active Server Pages, Sun ONE Studio4, Sun ONE Grid Engine and the enterprise edition of the grid engine. Sun also said it would deliver Linux versions of its Sun ONE Portal Server, Sun ONE Identity Server, Sun ONE Calendar Server and Sun ONE Messaging Server within this year.

Sun also announced a contribution to the open source community with the release of its Grid Engine Portal technology to the Grid Engine Project. The technology, which integrates Sun`s grid engine software with Sun`s portal server technology, provides an open source code base to access grid resources via a portal. [eWeek]

The time is right for hosted apps, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the Oracle Appsworld show earlier this week. Particularly, he said, those hosted applications based on his company`s newest E-Business suite 11i.

The hosted applications route makes costs more "predictable", said Ellison. "We want to tell you before we begin how much it will cost. In other words, we want to tell you in advance what the TCO [total cost of ownership] will be."

But he did also admit that outsourcing is not an all-or-nothing business model: "We don`t have to outsource 100%. We can be your graveyard shift. We can do your bug fixes. Let us do this piece. You`ll do that piece. We will tell you what the TCO will be, and we`ll split up the labour." [eWeek]

The SCO Group, previously Caldera, has hired a high-profile attorney to see whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD infringe on Unix intellectual property the company owns, CEO Darl McBride said yesterday.

Although the company has not formally taken action yet, it has said that it couldn`t rule out the possibility that an investigation could have implications for Linux companies, Apple Computer, Microsoft, BSD versions of Unix, and other companies using the various operating systems.

A 1995 lawsuit set up barriers between the version of Unix that stemmed from AT&T and a variant that it spawned at the University of California`s Berkeley campus. That Berkeley variant has spread into several operating systems, including BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Parts of that BSD code have popped up elsewhere, including in the networking software of older versions of Windows and, more recently, as a foundation for Apple`s Mac OS X.

"We`ve been looking at this for months. Every time we turn over a stone, there`s something there," McBride said. "If you pull down [Mac] OS X you`ll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold." [ZDNet]

The Gnome Foundation and Bitstream, a developer of font technology, yesterday announced that 10 serif, sans serif and monospaced fonts will be released under a special open source licence, once they have been adapted to meet the requirements for technical use.

The move will bring advanced font capabilities to developers and users of free and open source software. The Bitstream Vera fonts will be available for free copying and redistribution, and can be modified as long as the font name is changed. The fonts alone cannot be packaged for sale, but can be sold with any software.

The Gnome Foundation, which provides organisational, financial and legal support to the Gnome (GNU Network Object Model Environment) Linux desktop project and helps determine its vision and road map, will incorporate the fonts into future Gnome releases, giving end-users and Gnome developers access to their advanced display capabilities. [eWeek]

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