With PeopleSoft finally in its pocket, reports Maureen O'Gara, Oracle is expected to start firing people wholesale today, January 14. Some 6,000 people, mostly PeopleSoft folk, roughly 11% of the total headcount - perhaps as much as 25%-50% of PeopleSoft's staff - are initially supposed to be cut from the combined companies.

Maureen O'Gara writes: 'IBM, Intel, the Open Source Development Labs, and other industry lights are supposedly planning to announce that a consortium has been created that will rewrite the components in the Linux kernel that, it has been alleged, tread on other people's IP - or at least the 27 Microsoft patents that Linux supposedly infringes.' The aim? To rob Microsoft of the ability to scare customers off of Linux by saying that the operating system is a patent infringer, informed sources say. O'Gara adds that 'Operation Open Gates' as they are calling it is reportedly going to be unveiled on January 25.

IBM said Monday that it's going to open up 500 of its US software patents, valued at $10 million if they were sold, royalty-free to any open source development that uses a license recognized by the Open Source Initiative. IBM said it was doing it in the name of increasing interoperability and expanding the global infrastructure. It said the patents, which cover stuff like dynamic linking processes for operating systems and file-export protocols, could be used in software protocols, file formats and interfaces.

Monday night, less than 24 hours before Intel posted its Q4 earnings, AMD, its little rival, said its fourth-quarter results wouldn't be as good as the market expected.

RLX was born in the midst of the Internet bubble to supply dense, low-power server to the burgeoning Internet data center and originally software was an afterthought. Over the holidays, though, it has canned its hardware to focus on its Control Tower software. The move was made on the theory that OEMs, RLX's new target market, will only buy from a hardware-free ISV.

Red Hat is getting to look more and more like a prime example of the old axiom 'slow and steady wins the race.' Right before Christmas, the company delivered its third-quarter results for the period ending November 30, admitting that things had gone a bit slower than it and some on Wall Street had thought.

Symantec has yet to convince the stock market of the wisdom of its pending $13.5 billion acquisition of Veritas and whenever it talks about it, it only makes the situation worse. Symantec and Veritas did a joint presentation of the merger Wednesday, which explains why Symantec's stock took another hit.

A Mandrake-led consortium consisting of two European research institutions, four universities and four open source ISVs, called EDOS, short for the Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software, won a 2.2 million-euro R&D grant from the European Commission to develop tools to manage and simplify large-scale modular open source software projects such as Linux itself.

Lumen Software has released a new line of Linux terminal services products for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese wireless house, put $3 million in MontaVista Software, the privately held embedded Linux outfit, last week. DoCoMo uses MontaVista in its 3G phones.

The court hearing the SCO vs IBM case gave IBM the extension it wanted so we shall have to wait until January 20 for it to itemize its objections to G2 Computer Intelligence Inc.'s motion to open all the sealed filings. According to the rules, IBM and SCO were supposed to reply to our motion to intervene by December 20.

Opera Software has beta'd its next-generation browser for Linux on the heels of the one for Windows. Neither of them has been christened yet.

There's going to be a LinuxWorld Mexico in February 2006 in Mexico City.

Oracle, which has been counting PeopleSoft revenues as its own since December 29, took control of PeopleSoft two days before the end of 2004 and immediately started cleaning house, beginning with PeopleSoft's top managers. Oracle expects the deal to close by January 18 and is promising to publish a blueprint for the merged companies on January 14.

Zend Technologies Inc, the keeper of PHP, a constituent of LAMP, the multi-headed god of open source, is taking on J2EE, one of the last remaining places where Sun still shines, seeking to replace it. Zend claims to offer greater programmer productivity and to create programs that run faster than J2EE. PHP is also a rival of Microsoft's .NET.

Four Moscow-based security experts with Kaspersky Labs have reported that the number of new entries to its malware database jumped by more than 30 in 2004 - with the two record holders for damage caused being Mydoom.a (February) and Sasser.a (May).

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this new, expanded group begins in February.

In a 91-page ruling, the president of the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg this morning rejected Microsoft's request to stay the European Commission's March 2004 antitrust remedies requiring it to offer European OEMs a version of Windows XP without the Windows Media Player in it and to license certain protocols to its competitors that would let non-Microsoft workgroup servers interoperate with Windows PCs. Microsoft said it will make the stripped-out version of Windows available to European OEMs in January and put it through the channel by February.

SCO will be paying Boies and its other lawyers $31 million from September 1, 2004 through to the end of any appeal should things get that far. In a move potentially complicating things for SCO, the top management of the Canopy Group, the venture capital arm of former Novell CEO Ray Noorda and SCO's largest stockholder, was terminated last Friday by Noorda's son and daughter.

When last seen, IBM was in this sticky little situation of having just sold the PC side of its factory in China - the factory being a joint venture with Great Wall Computing - to Lenovo but not the server side. Needless to say, Great Wall and Lenovo are hereditary rivals and both make PCs and servers. So to extricate itself from this situation, it appears that IBM is buying out Great Wall, turning the whole thing over to Lenovo and creating another joint venture with Great Wall to make x86- and Power-based/Linux-only servers.

MySQL, the company, has rolled out a set of graphical and administration tools for MySQL database developers, and consulting services for IT departments.

Absoft has rolled out a high-performance computing SDK for Linux on IBM's Power-based clusters and servers.

Open Source Development Labs has added a timely software licensing/legal track to its upcoming Enterprise Linux Summit starting January 31 in Burlingame, California. It's bringing in a bunch of lawyers and SCO has been given its very own session.

It seems we are standing by waiting for a 90nm dual-core Xeon chip from Intel that's based on projects code named Paxville and Dempsey, presumably a reworking on the current Nocona. There are some suspicions, though, that Paxville has been cancelled. Then, skipping lightly over whatever the 65nm dual-core happens to be, we reportedly arrive at a prospective 65nm quad-core Xeon code named Whitefield.

Red Hat and IBM have launched a joint Linux ISV Certification Support Program in Europe to accelerate the migration of applications to Linux.

The Open Source Development Labs has gone into the soothsayer business and - based on research that it had IDC run up - says that the global Linux market will be worth $35.7 billion in 2008. It's the first time a major market researchers has taken Linux' auspices and the number includes desktops, servers and packaged software. That means a compound annual growth rate of 25.9% worldwide.

HP, whose contributions - reports Maureen O'Gara - 'made the Itanium so confoundedly complicated,' has dropped out of the 10-year-old partnership with Intel that saw them develop the 64-bit chip. 'It was Intel's idea and the two of them reportedly kicked it around for a long time,' O'Gara adds.

Five ex-Stanford computer researchers now with a start-up called Coverity Inc chartered to develop a better way to build software have analyzed 5.7 million lines of Linux source code over the last four years and say the 2.6.9 production kernel contains only 985 bugs, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software.

The folks behind the open source Globus Toolkit used for building grids have set up a company called Univa Corporation to commercialize the thing and provide enhancements, services and support.

Mountain View Data Inc, the company started by Turbolinux founder Cliff Miller after he left Turbo, is beta testing an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) module for its PowerCockpit software, the cluster provisioning and management widgetry it salvaged from the Turbo wreck.

Credit Suisse say its best intelligence suggests AMD is progressing down Dell's qualification path and that Dell could field an Opteron server in the first half of next year and follow with an AMD desktop in 2006. The broker says a Dell win in servers and 20% penetration at that account could provide about $120 million incremental revenue per year and seven cents EPS.

When the pending IBM-Lenovo deal was leaked to the New York Times last Friday, there was supposedly another interested party in the wings. The Wall Street Journal then said there were two. BusinessWeek identifies them as Gateway and Toshiba.

The PeopleSoft board, reports Maureen O'Gara, has agreed that the company be sold to Oracle for $10.3 billion $1.5 billion more than Oracle's now-famous 'best and final' offer. 'They came to a definite agreement last night,' she writes, 'hours before PeopleSoft was supposed to show up in Delaware Chancery Court Monday to explain what was wrong with Oracle's previous $24-a-share bid.'

AMD brags that 25% of the Fortune Global 100, including Microsoft, BNP Paribas and Bell Helicopter, are now using Opteron systems. There's only one thing: AMD vowed it would have 10% of the server market this year. Depending on whose market research you look at, it's only got something like 4%-5% or maybe 6% at best.

Computer Associates has hired itself a chief compliance officer like it pledged it would when it settled with the government to keep from getting branded a rogue company in court.

'If Lenovo succeeds,' writes Raga Rao, 'it could upset the entire computer landscape, giving China an important landfall in the West.' By selling its loss-ridden PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker partly owned by the communist Chinese government, in a complex $1.75 billion deal, Rao views the sale to Lenovo by IBM of its PC Unit as 'a tacit admission of failure by IBM, the archetypal capitalist that pioneered the personal computer two decades ago.' He adds a taboo question: 'None of the commentariat has bothered to ask whether the sale is inherently dangerous to Western interests.'

BEA has unveiled Diablo, its next-generation WebLogic Server 9.0, the cornerstone of its upcoming WebLogic Platform 9.0 designed to connect disparate systems and run the applications that large companies use to run their business.

The Open Source Development Labs has integrated into the library of tests that run against new Linux kernel builds the Open Posix Test Suite (OPTS) - an open source project designed to make it easier to port applications from other Posix platforms - Posix being the IEEE portability standard associated mostly with the Unix operating system - to Linux.

Walmart.com, which pioneered Linux PCs, is now selling cheap Microtel boxes with the Xandros brand of desktop Linux that Xandros bought off Corel. There are four new Xandros-based desktops, ranging in price from $200-$600. Customers can pick from either 1.5GHz Sempron boxes or ones that are built on a 2.8GHz Celeron chip or a 3GHz Pentium 4.

Cassatt Corporation, the glitterati startup headed by BEA co-founder and ex-CEO Bill Coleman, is a bit sheepish about phrasing it quite like this, but the company thinks it's about to unleash the 'next wave of computing.' Its problem is giving this next wave of computing a name. For lack of a better expression 'agile enterprise' probably best describes what Cassatt is trying to do.