The Fedora Project is going to host its first annual Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDcon) on February 18 at Boston University.

Maureen O'Gara reports: The HP board has finally ousted CEO Carly Fiorina. The board asked her to step down yesterday after weeks of soul-searching, according to Carly's replacement as chairman Patricia Dunn, an HP director since 1998. The move, however, is believed to have been years in the making, accelerating last year with the company's poor showing: HP's stock is down 55% since Carly took over in 1999. Her severance package is reportedly worth $21 million.

On Wednesday, an inauspicious day for CEOs everywhere considering that was the day HP CEO Carly Fiorina met the headsman's axe, CA officially made John Swainson its CEO.

JOnAS is the first non-commercial open source app server to be certified J2EE-compatible. It took months just to get a legal framework in place.

Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced the immediate availability of Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7, previously code-named 'Blackstone,' the fastest, easiest way to build and deploy powerful Internet applications. Developers are already embracing the latest version of the ColdFusion application server, and are now solving development challenges with new printable web content, rich forms, more flexible deployment options, and integrated, structured business reporting. ColdFusion MX 7 also provides new cost-effective and powerful innovations to interact with mobile phones using short message service (SMS) text messaging, which allows developers to create a new class of Internet applications for the mobile world.

Novell is expected to introduce its Open Enterprise Server (OES), the combination of NetWare and SUSE, at LinuxWorld in Boston the week of February 14. It will let people use either the new NetWare 7.0 release or SUSE Linux Enterprise System 9.2.

Two-month-old open source start-up ActiveGrid Inc, which is being financed by such as Hummer Winblad partner Mitchell Ketzman, the erstwhile CEO of Sybase, and Allegis Capital partner Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple's one-time product chief and founder of Be Inc, has joined the Open Source Development Labs and will participate in the consortium's Data Center Linux working group.

Infinicon, the Infiniband house, says it's adapting its architectural approach to the new network reality and modularizing its software so the stuff can accommodate either the classically positioned Host Channel Adapter (HCA) or the HCAs increasingly found embedded on next-generation motherboards and blades.

Ahead of the next release of its distribution, which implements Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), Red Hat has started a government business unit, appointing Paul Smith to lead it as VP, government sales operation. Smith used to run Veritas' government unit, the company's fastest-growing vertical.

Hitachi is going to use Topspin's Infiniband server switches, gateways and host channel adapters in its BladeSymphony blade server line, which is a little bit odd considering that Hitachi has money in Topspin rival Voltaire.

Black Duck, which peddles a software license compliance system, and CollabNet, which sells a collaborative software development environment, have teamed in a technology and marketing alliance to help reduce the intellectual property risks associated with software development.

Egenera has lined up with AMD and the Opteron chip, betraying its long-standing single-source alliance with Intel. It's the five-year-old blade start-up's second recent break with tradition, the other being its decision to sell Solaris 10 into the Sun accounts it has been poaching. It says it has arranged to add two-way and four-way Opteron blades to its Intel flotilla.

To deprive Microsoft of the opportunity to spread any 'fear, uncertainty and doubt' by ensuring that the its clients are clean to begin with, unidentified members of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) have contributed upwards of $4 million to a new purpose-built IP fund to seed a New York-based legal center called the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to provide pro bono legal services to non-profit open source software products and developers worldwide.

'Things have turned ugly in Utah,' reports Maureen O'Gara. 'Ray Noorda, the former CEO of Novell and acknowledged father of network computing, one of the industry's golden boys, is now 80-years-old and by all reports in his dotage. His daughter Val Noorda Kreidel, who wants to get her hands on the Canopy Group, daddy's VC operation, the firm that owns 32% of SCO, the company suing IBM for $5 billion, claims that the old man was snookered by the three guys he let run the joint and that they bilked him of upwards of $20 million. She wants the money back - with damages.'

'IBM, as expected,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'wants to break the legs of Magistrate Brooke Wells' now-famous court order telling it to turn over almost all the discovery that SCO has been after. So it filed a motion with Judge Dale Kimball, who has ultimate oversight in the case, asking to be allowed to file a motion with Magistrate Wells asking her to reconsider and clarify her January 18 order.' O'Gara adds: 'Gee, just what every judge wants to hear - that's she's wrong.'

'Microsoft is circulating an e-mail over Bill Gates' signature,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'embracing interoperability and pulling the nose of middleware (read IBM) as a solution around heterogeneity.' It has also set up a web site devoted to interoperability. ('Quick, pass the smelling salts,' remarks O'Gara.)

Open Source Initiative co-founder and president Eric Raymond is out. So is OSI general counsel Larry Rosen. Raymond, who wrote 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar,' the seminal open source-as-commercial vehicle manifesto, started OSI with Bruce Perens, who left the board in 1999. OSI says it's reorganizing to move beyond its current charter.

The secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) capitulated to congressional pressure and has gone ahead with that extended investigation of the IBM's sale of its loss-ridden PC unit to the Chinese-backed Lenovo from the point-of-view of national security, according to the Wall Street Journal, which got it from 'a person familiar with the matter,' it said. The paper calls it a 'relatively rare step.'

Unisys is going to offer its enterprise customers production support for the JBoss open source application server under a multi-year agreement cut by the two companies. Unisys, one of the original members of the JBoss Founder's Consortium, has been working with JBoss to integrate the software across its server line. That consortium, created in late 2003, helped JBoss get J2EE certification.

eBay, The World's Online Marketplace, has more than 114 million registered users, 10,000 developers, and over 700 live, third-party applications.

Jim Bole, Infravio vice president of products and services, will present at the Web Services Edge International Web Services Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts. Bole's presentation will examine 'Best Practices in Web Services Security, Service-Oriented Architecture Policy and Governance.' The conference will be held at the John B. Hynes Convention Center from February 15-17, 2005.

On February 16th at Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston, Mass., Mr. Farquharson will present the topic: 'B2B Policy Enforcement: The Third Rail of SOA Implementation.' In this presentation he will discuss XML Virtual Private Networks (XML VPNs) and their potential to mitigate security policy enforcement issues in B2B SOA.

Sonic Software is the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB). Sonic enterprise integration and messaging products deliver flexibility, scalability, and continuous availability through patent-pending innovations. Sonic Software enables over 700 customers to integrate their organizations from the department to the extended enterprise with a standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA).

During its quarterly Network Computing '05 (NC05Q1) launch today, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Archipelago Holdings Inc. (PCX: AX), operator of the Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx), the first totally open, all-electronic stock exchange in the United States, announced the companies plan to build the world's first online compute exchange.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

Linspire, the old Lindows, has got a Web-based application called IRMA, short for the International Resource Management Application, that's supposed to let volunteers translate Linspire's Linux distribution into 80 different languages. Linspire says checks will be put in place to control the quality of the translations

'One of the dumbest things SCO's lawyers ever did,' writes Maureen O'Gara, 'was to sue DaimlerChrysler, one of SCO's Unix licensees, for not certifying - like it was contractually bound - that it wasn't running Linux binaries anywhere in its establishment or, if it was, that it had built a Chinese wall between its Unix and Linux developers.' O'Gara adds: 'SCO would have been better off suing the car company for violating its Unix copyrights by running Linux, like it did with AutoZone.'

Symbio Technologies, the start-up that wants to tear the guts out of your PC, turn it into a diskless thin client and move the compute power to a server, has released its Symbiont Management Suite 4, software that is supposed to make it easier than ever to set up, configure and manage a server-centric network of little widgets.

Members of the Treasury Department's oversight Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, have reportedly raised an eyebrow over IBM's $1.75 billion sale of its loss-ridden PC unit to China's government-controlled Lenovo Group.

SGI is going into the ready-to-install cluster business with a mid-range HPC-oriented cluster design that's supposed to make use of fewer and faster CPUs, packing more processors into each node. It's also supposed to have a hybrid cluster that sounds like it might combine IA-64 and IA-32. Anyway, the idea is to upset the white box cluster market. SGI claims that supposedly cheap white box implementations harbor a host of hidden expenses that increase the cost and reduce overall productivity.

Zend Technologies Inc., the creator and commercializer of PHP, the 'P' in LAMP, the multi-headed god of open source, and a rival of J2EE and .NET, has picked up an undisclosed amount of investment money from Intel and SAP, a couple of pretty heady backers.

'A start-up with an advisory board that includes Sun veteran Larry Hambly and HP veteran Rajiv Gupta,' writes Maureen O'Gara, 'says it's got core patent-pending technology that will improve the security and performance of network communications - so much so that newfangled Itanium-based edge computers could become virus attack dogs.'

A California outfit by the name of PatentCafe has set up a database of the 500 patents that IBM has pledged to open up to open source developers claiming its natural language-based search engine will accelerate developers' use of the patents.

'Going into Sun's next big quarterly launch announcement Tuesday,' writes Maureen O'Gara, 'HP would like us to remember that Sun's x86 server volumes suck; that 70% of Sun's x86 servers ship with Linux not Solaris; that Java Enterprise Server (JES) shipments growth rates have flattened; and that Sun's open source plans for Solaris are 'too little, too late to stem the momentum of Linux.''

Maureen O'Gara writes: 'Scott McNealy, who did not quantify the total value of the IP, though God knows Sun has always been vain about its R&D budget, called the patents a 'safe harbor' for developers in an IP environment that is 'arbitrary,' 'confused' and 'random.''

The HP board wants to carve off some of Carly Fiorina's day-to-day responsibilities and spread them around three of the company's top executives, printer chief Vyomesh 'VJ' Joshi, CEO-might-have-been Ann Livermore and chief technology and strategy officer Shane Robison. The HP board is also reportedly bringing back Thomas Perkins, the Perkins in the famed Kleiner Perkins VC shop, who resigned from the board last year

IBM announced a low-end 64-bit Linux-on-Power5 server the other day. IBM calls it the OpenPower 710 and an alternative to entry-level HP and Sun Unix and Linux boxes. Sun, frustrated that it can't get IBM to support its new Solaris 10 OS, calls it a 'proprietary trap.'

Novell's motion to dismiss SCO's two-year-old slander-of-title suit for disparaging SCO's ownership of Unix, which was supposed to be heard by Judge Dale Kimball on February 1, has been rescheduled for 3 in the afternoon of March 8. When a decision, which should say whether or not the case will be tried, could be expected is anybody's guess.

Thin client purveyor Neoware Systems has acquired French-based Mangrove Systems to bolster its Linux software and expand its European support and service.

Black Duck Software, the start-up begun by an ex-Microsoft guy to create IP risk management and mitigation solutions, has joined Open Source Development Labs.