IBM's stock seems to have found a bottom since its fall from grace last Thursday on the news that its first quarter came a cropper. At roughly $74, it's still down 10 bucks since then, 20 bucks since the first of the year.

On Thursday night at its dual-core Opteron launch party, AMD moved up the schedule on its dual-core desktop chip to challenge the Intel entry that started shipping the weekend before last. The AMD chip, meant to create one-processor desktops and notebooks, wasn't due until some nebulous time in the late second half. Now it's supposed to launch in June. To mark the occasion, AMD came up with a new brand name. It's going to call the thing the Athlon 64 X2.

SCO has emerged from under the threat of Nasdaq delisting and its stock symbol will no longer have to wear the telltale 'e' indicating it was on the market's watch list.

Microsoft is going to launch its so-called x64 operating systems, the stuff that support the Intel and AMD x86 64-bit extensions, on Monday. Figure on both the client and the server, to wit, Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition and XP Professional x64 Edition. Reportedly they were released to manufacturing a couple of weeks ago.

HP has changed the name of its Linux operation to the Open Source & Linux Organization (OSLO) to advertise its open source sympathies, it said. It's supposed to signify HP's focus on open source beyond the Linux operating system. Martin Fink will continue to run the unit.

Although the words 'business intelligence,' 'data warehousing' and 'open source' aren't usually used in the same sentence, a San Mateo, California start-up called Greenplum is trying to make an open source database good enough for enterprise-class business intelligence and data warehousing out of PostgresSQL.

Art Tyde, a co-founder of Linuxcare, the once highly entertaining service start-up rehabilitated as a sober ISV, has popped up at the Free Standards Group (FSG), the keeper of the Linux Standard Base, as CTO. He's supposed to lead all its technical initiatives, improve certification and testing and work with ISVs, the open source community and systems and distribution vendors.

Unisys is moving into software, initially in support of its massive Windows-based 7000 machines, but eventually it wants to be broader-based and support any Intel server.

Red Hat and MySQL say they are expanding their partnership in the name of optimizing scale-out solutions for the enterprise. They're promising 'significant new joint initiative' and pretty much let it go at that.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) wants to sort through the multitude of open source licenses and consign them to one of three new castes: 'preferred, approved or deprecated.' Brahmins will evidently be rare.

Maureen O'Gara writes: 'The federal court in Utah hearing the $5 billion SCO v IBM case has told IBM that it has 75 days to turn over to SCO *ALL* non-public information relating to its Linux contributions, a year-old order IBM has been trying duck. The decision is believed to be a serious setback for IBM - fatal, if you believe SCO - and it will be interesting to see how IBM takes it. Will it now go meekly and do what it's been told?'

Maureen O'Gara reports, referring to The SCO Group: 'The most loathed company in the industry said it had 'successfully implemented efficiency and cost reduction measures that have had a positive impact on operations and contributed to the Unix business operating profitably.' ...Complaining of 'continued competitive pressures' on its Unix line, a thinly veiled reference to Linux...SCO said revenues had slipped to $8.9M, down from $11.4M year-over-year.'

AMD came in Wednesday with a Q1 loss of $17 million, or four cents a share, on sales of $1.2 billion, down 1% year-over-year, and to balance the unhappy tidings said that its loss-making Flash joint venture with Fujitsu, Spansion, was going to be spun off in a $600 million IPO. Spansion will keep the money, but then AMD won't have to keep funding it and will get to lighten its debt load.

Garnett & Helfrich Capital, the venture buyout firm dedicated to finding 'broken and orphaned' businesses neglected by their parents, has bought a controlling stake in Wyse Technology, the flagging $175 million-a-year company, from the Koos Group in Taiwan for $35 million. The deal reportedly closed a week ago Tuesday.

'Five-year-old Infiniband switch start-up Topspin Communications Inc has found the exit ramp,' reports Maureen O'Gara. 'It's gonna get bought by Cisco...A sensible enough solution considering Topspin CEO Krish Ramakrishnan used to run Cisco's Content Networking Business Unit and Infiniband itself suffered a near-death experience.'

In what Red Hat Italy says is 'one of the most important migrations to Linux in the Italian financial sector,' BPU Banca, the parent bank of Banca Populari Unite, Italy's seventh largest bank and the first cooperative credit banking group, is pulling out Solaris to install Red Hat desktops and servers.

Computer Associates, which has been hiring in some new senior folks lately, has named 30-year IBM veteran Donald Friedman as its chief marketing officer. Joan Blackwood, who's been interim head of corporate marketing, will continue as senior VP of corporate marketing, reporting to Friedman.

Terry Garnett, the ex-Oracle, ex-Venrock half of Garnett & Helfrich Capital, is rumoured to want to 'liberate' Ingres, the database that Computer Associates, its current owner, recently open sourced. According to what CA's new management has been saying lately, Ingres is not a core CA technology.

CA has created a new Security Management unit, reports Maureen O'Gara, and considered along with the Storage Management unit it looks like the company's new CEO John Swainson, an IBM import, sees CA as a systems and security management house, she adds. There are also three other strategic business units (SBUs).

'Fujitsu plans to eat into IBM mainframes and high-end IBM and HP Unix machines as well as cannibalize its own Sparc business,' reports Maureen O'Gara. Its alliance with Intel bore fruit Tuesday when it unveiled a so-called 'mainframe-class open system' based on the slow-moving 64-bit Itanium chip.

Quest Software, though it isn't much of a one for Linux, is rumored to be on the verge of buying Vintela Inc, the Utah outfit financed by the Canopy Group and Microsoft. Vintela's sale, should it come off, begs the question whether Canopy is imploding and liquidating its portfolio, as some people think it is, in the wake of its management being ousted.

Eben Moglen's Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) still not having finished GPL 3, CA has taken its own Trusted Open Source License and turned it into what it calls a 'Template License' with the aim of coming up with open source license that the industry can get behind. The idea has reportedly inspired the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to write its own Template License.

Computer Associates is buying network service management software vendor Concord Communications in a cash deal valued at $330 million. CA, which has about $3.3 billion in the bank, is funding the deal out of its cash hoard.

A start-up by the name of Greenplum that's been flying under the radar since 2003 is pioneering the use of open source databases for enterprise-class business intelligence and data warehousing with a line of products called DeepGreen that reportedly spans a small departmental data mart to a multi-terabyte data warehouse.

Last Friday SCO finally managed to file its 10-K covering the year ended last October 31, a step on its path to rehabilitating itself with the Nasdaq, which has the company on its delisting watch list. Now it's got to post its first-quarter results, which it's expecting to do on Wednesday April 13.

Virtual Iron Software Inc, the virtual computing platform start-up in Acton, Massachusetts, finds itself shy one of its anticipated board of advisors. Ex-Novell vice-chairman, the guy credited with Novell's purchase of SuSE and Ximian, was reportedly forced off to protect his severance package from Novell.

AMD figures its dual-cores will perform at least 20% better than Intel's dual-cores because they're better integrated. See, like most married people, Intel's Smithfield-style dual-cores, which are more like two processors inhabiting the same package, don't really communicate with one another, at least not directly.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has named Frank Fanzilli, the former global CIO of Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and an ex-IBMer, to its board. He retired in 2002 after pioneering the use of Linux at CSFB, which deployed one of first Linux systems on Wall Street, and was on the board of PeopleSoft before Oracle acquired it.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is going to take over the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign to prevent the spread of American-style patents to Europe from its founder Florian Mueller so he can get back to work developing a games project after a year spent lobbying.

IBM's new Chinese partner, the Lenovo Group, has sold off pieces of itself worth $350 million to three US equity firm the Texas Pacific Group (TPG), General Atlantic LLC (GA) and Newbridge Capital LLC.

Well, out little chip groupie Nathan Brookwood was right about Pacifica. The AMD virtualization widgetry, basically hardware support for the technology, is close enough to Intel's Vanderpool stuff that virtual machine suppliers like VMware, Microsoft and XenSource will barely notice the difference. Anyway, AMD now has alliances with those companies.

IBM is going to bundle six-month evaluation copies of VMware ESX Server, Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter with VMotion with its BladeCenter shipments worldwide.

Sun has distributed 'more than one million' registered licenses for Solaris 10 since January 31, when the code went up on Sun's web site. The company described the 'interest' in Solaris 10 as exceeding its 'highest expectations' and called it a 'significant milestone.'

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, says that Lockheed Martin is going to use Zend Studio 4 to develop an object-oriented code-generation framework for NASA space exploration.

Black Duck Software has gone into the on-demand business, crossing what it calls an 'important line of demarcation.' Its new offering, called protexIP/OnDemand, will let Black Duck expand its available market and sell its services to SMEs, ISVs, outsourcers and folks doing due diligence for a merger or acquisition or funding purposes, it says.

Intel has expanded its 64-bit x86 portfolio with five new sixth-generation Xeon MP processors for four-way or better servers. It's now 'x64' from the desktop to the data center.

Hewlett-Packard has launched two new servers, the ProLiant DL580 G3 and ProLiant ML570 G3, based on the new 64-bit Xeon MP Truland platform. Meanwhile, HP has reportedly decided to phase out its eight-way Xeon server believing it'll be marginalized by next-generation four-way platforms.

Intel is taking the course of least resistance about the antitrust charges that the Japanese regulators made against it a few weeks ago. It's simply conceding and, without admitting anything or even agreeing with the facts behind the allegations, says it will stop offering Japanese vendors rebates or discounts in exchange for exclusive Intel-only product lines or 90%-100% of their business.

Former IBM Fellow and former Newisys CTO Rich Oehler has joined AMD's Office of Strategy and Technology reporting to CTO Fred Weber. He's there to align AMD's multi-core enterprise-class strategies with the needs of the Fortune 1000.

In a few days' time, reports Maureen O'Gara, SCO may get itself out of the doghouse with the Nasdaq, which has been threatening to delist it for its delinquency.