'In a move that'll make Red Hat none too pleased,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'Turbolinux says that IBM Japan has added its recently released Turbolinux 10 Server to its list of officially supported operating system for the xSeries models 206, 306 and 346.'

NeTraverse has, by the grace of an asset acquisition, become Win4Lin Inc. The company has also released Win4Lin Pro, which can run Windows 2000 and Windows XP apps on Linux, releasing the company from the Win 98 prison it's been in.

In a don't-miss moment, Maureen O'Gara of Linux Business Week was available on Friday to a worldwide audience to answer all and any questions about technology and the technology industry. The hour-long broadcast made history, being streamed live across the Internet and viewers were able to interact with O'Gara, sending questions live by e-mail.

The latest start-up, Palamida Inc, has managed to combine the commercial launch of its software IP asset manager for large corporations with a $5 million round of funding from marquee investors.

MySQL AB has rolled out a new subscription-based pricing model for its open source database that combines software, support and alerts. It is called MySQL Network and was announced at LinuxWorld last week. The company said the subscription model was designed for large IT departments.

Sybase has launched its Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for Linux on IBM's OpenPower-based servers. Sybase executives are pitching ASE for Linux on OpenPower as suited for transaction-heavy environments such as financial services.

AMD unwrapped its two latest Opterons this week, as expected, positioning them as a major update.

AMD demoed dual-core Opterons at LinuxWorld Expo last week in a Cray XD1 supercomputer, an HP xw9300 workstation, an HP ProLiant DL585 and a Sun Fire V40z.

HP has set up a $3 million open source utility performance center (HPC1) in France for prototyping and deploying complex IT solutions involving its products and services. HP apparently got the University of Oslo to can its Sun-based e-mail system in favor of a Linux/HP system. Not to be outdone, Oracle says it's set up a dedicated Linux Test Lab to test the quality, stability and supportability of Red Hat, SuSE and the Linux kernel with real-world workloads to ensure that the operating system is as finely tuned and dependable as the commercial products. Oracle says it will fix problems as they come up. Oracle estimates that 9,000 Oracle developers are using Linux infrastructure to develop products.

Novell has hired William Hewitt, the group VP who used to be responsible for PeopleSoft's demand generation and field marketing, as its chief marketing officer.

In a footnote in its motion for reconsideration of the latest discovery order that the court imposed on IBM in the SCO case, IBM says that in the last year and a half it has produced documents from the files of 174 people and SCO has produced files from 63 people and complains that now it's being asked to produce the files of 3,000 people in 60 days when it took a year and half to produce the files of only 237.

IBM's lawyers have told the magistrate who wrote the discovery order in the SCO vs IBM case that the company is going to do what it's been told and turn over to SCO all the information in the Configuration Management Version Control (CMVC) system and Revision Control System (RCS) about the versions and changes made to AIX and Dynix code, but it wants out from under the court's instruction telling it to search the files of all 3,000 people.

Novell has tied up with Aurema Inc, which does mainframe-style cross-platform workload management, to create ARMTech for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Aurema's debut on Linux. It's the first workload manager supported by a major Linux distributor, according to Aurema VP of product development John Kremer.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has replaced its executive director. The incumbent, Bradley Kuhn, has shifted over to the newly created $4 million Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) set up by FSF general counsel Eben Moglen and some OSDL member companies to protect FOSS against IP threats from Microsoft and SCO. In his stead FSF has tapped Peter Brown, who currently manages FSF's GPL Compliance Lab.

AMD says it's going to port Xen, the open source virtualization pack, to AMD64 in collaboration with XenSource Inc, the start-up founded to support the technology. The port of Xen, which lets a single machine run multiple operating systems, is supposed to be available this half.

Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) released the first cut of a Desktop Linux (DTL) Capabilities paper this week, roughly a year after it set up a DTL working group. OSDL is focused on the enterprise desktop, figuring to repeat the original path that the PC took that gave Microsoft control of the corporation, the home and the school worldwide.

Two researchers, one of them a professor from the Florida Institute of Technology and a Linux convert, the other the director of security research and training at Security Innovations and a Microsoft follower, turned up at a session at the RSA Conference in California the other day with evidence in hand saying that Windows is more secure, Maureen O'Gara reports. 'This is their finding, kids, we're just the messenger,' adds O'Gara.

Novell has set up an Exchange- and Domino-competitive open source project called Hula meant to create a collaboration server based on code from Novell's NetMail collaboration server, which claims four million users. It says Hula will provide calendar and mail functionality currently lacking in open source.

Sun has been showing off a StarOffice 8 beta, claiming greater interoperability with Office and a better look-and-feel. Sun said it added productivity by increasing wizards and tools and supporting some Lotus and WordPerfect versions. StarOffice 8 also introduces a new database engine and front-end tool, easier multi-language installation and two new scripting languages for developers.

'Showing you how anxious Hewlett-Packard's board was to get rid of Carly,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'its first-quarter numbers, posted after the market closed on Wednesday, were better than people expected. Earnings were flat, but revenues were up 10%.'

Novell says the NetWare+SUSE Open Enterprise Server it sent to open beta in December has been downloaded 7,000 times, the largest number in Novell's history. It's supposed to be available in early March and will be priced the same as NetWare now.

'Complicating SCO's currently unenviable position,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'it's gotten a notice from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market telling it that it's in danger of being delisted on February 25 because it hasn't filed its 10-K with the SEC yet for the fiscal year ending October 31.' O'Gara adds that 'SCO says it expects to file the 10-K 'soon' though it had no date to offer.'

The days of the seminal Open Source Initiative (OSI) may be numbered unless it can think of something else to do with itself besides recognizing open source licenses. 'It didn't help OSI's cause when its new president Russell Nelson, who just replaced OSI co-founder and open source thinker Eric Raymond, was discovered to be - or sure looked like - a closet racist last week,' reports Maureen O'Gara.

Red Hat has finally trotted out the long-awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4), its commercial version of the Linux 2.6 kernel, calling it 'a defining milestone in the evolution of Linux as the backbone of the enterprise.' It's supposed to put Linux - and Red Hat - on a par with Unix in terms of reliability and ahead of it in terms of value. Red Hat claims its platform is tested (slap in the face to Novell) and includes productivity improvements for the desktop.

Unisys' ES7000 system has become one of the rare boxes to be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-certified for both 32- and 64-bit servers with up to 32 processors. RHEL 4 is the first commercial Red Hat distribution to be based on the 2.6 Linux kernel.

Embedded software house Wind River Systems put out a reference design release of its Platform for Network Equipment Linux Edition the other day. It is said to be the first Wind River platform to include a complete Linux reference file system with a set of networking middleware and applications.

IBM says it's going to invest $100 million over three year to up the Linux support and technology in its Workplace software portfolio. It says it was inspired by the high double-digit growth last year in the number of people deploying IBM collaboration software on Linux - stuff like WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes and Domino and IBM Workplace.

HP's board has hired Russell Reynolds Associates to search for a new CEO to replace Carly Fiorina. HP's new non-executive chairman Patricia Dunn remarked that 'As we expect this search to be managed with the highest level of confidentiality, we will not comment further until we are ready to announce our new CEO.'

Sun president Jonathan Schwartz apparently feels vindicated. According to his blog posting last Friday, 420,895 Solaris 10 licenses were downloaded in the first 10 days or so since the operating system started to ship commercially on January 31.

Voltaire has contributed its iSER protocol sources to the Linux community. iSER is a new IETF standard extension to iSCSI that supports multiple RDMA-based transports like Infiniband and Ethernet RDMA. Besides boosting iSCSI performance, the protocol is supposed to leverage its management capabilities, enabling heterogeneous storage environments to utilize a single protocol and management infrastructure.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

'It looks like there's chance the $5 billion SCO vs IBM case might get heard after all despite IBM's attempts to get it squelched,' reports Maureen O'Gara. 'The federal court judge responsible for the case has thrown out all three of IBM's motions for partial summary judgment, including a couple that hadn't been briefed or argued yet, telling IBM not to darken his door with any more such things - they call them dispositive motions in legal circles - until after discovery is over,' she adds.

HP is about to expand its commitment to the Opteron, adding its very first Opteron workstation - to go up against Sun and IBM - an Opteron version of its two-year-old Xeon-based DL380 two-way - that's gonna irk the dickens out of Intel - and two 2p Opteron blades - also a first for the company. HP says it's got demand.

Intel has also changed its tune on 64-bits. Its reorganized new Digital Enterprise Group, again sounding a bit like AMD, says that everything from the Celeron through the Xeon will be 64-bit, including the upcoming dual-cores. Intel's doubtful the world is ready for this, but the move streamlines manufacturing and the company can peddle the widgetry as 'headroom' in case 64-bit applications start appearing on the desktop.

Chris Stone, late vice-chairman of Novell responsible for its acquisition of SUSE and Ximian, has surfaced on the shiny new advisory board of Virtual Iron Software Inc, a start-up virtual computing platform outfit in Acton, Massachusetts that has also joined OSDL intending to participate in its Data Center Linux working group. Virtual Iron says it's going to deliver an enterprise-class virtual computing platform that enables what it calls a Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI) for rapid resource deployment, lower TCO and freedom from proprietary lock-in.

Sun has started what it calls the Solar Edge Elite program to drive reseller Solaris-on-Opteron sales to its largest customers.

The Open Source Development Labs has delivered its Data Center Capabilities 1.1 (DCL 1.1) specification, an expansion on its initial cut last February, and has also put out its Carrier Grade Linux Requirements Definition 3.0 (CGL 3.0) for evaluation by developers.

Dell earnings dropped 11% to $667 million, or 26 cents a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter ended January 28 because of a $280 million tax charge that worked out to 11 cents a share. Dell has $14.1 billion in the bank.

MontaVista Software has rolled out a program called Mobilinux to boost the adoption of Linux in the mobile phone business. Mobilinux brings together semiconductor vendors, ISVs and integrators to create reference architectures and provide application-consulting services for handset vendors, original design manufacturers and mobile operators looking to develop Linux phones.

Prudential thinks it could be at least six months before HP finds a replacement for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina and at least nine months before 'a new CEO takes the reins and a concrete strategy is articulated,' notes Maureen O'Gara. 'It warns that business could drift between now and then and that when a new guy finally takes over it could mean more restructuring,' she adds.