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.

Transmeta's processor business continues to hang by the threads of a badly frayed rope. The company, which hasn't turned a profit in the five years it's been in existence, has given itself until March 31 to drum up enough business to support its revolutionary chips.

According to a roadmap Sun posted on its shiny new opensolaris.org web site, in Q2 Sun intends to open source the Solaris kernel, networking, libraries, commands, compilers and read-only CVS repositories. Community members will have access to a bug database and will be able to submit changes to Sun by e-mail. Afterwards it'll make the install available along with OpenSolaris test suites, tools to manage the bug/patch submission process and code.

The Gendarmerie Nationale, France's national police force, is reportedly going to move its 80,000 desktops from Office to OpenOffice to save an estimated $2.6 million.

Since the lead engineer behind the Firefox browser Ben Godger went to work for Google a few days ago, the claims of Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker that Mozilla wasn't working on a browser for Google are ringing a bit hollow. Godger says his role in Firefox won't change.

thawte Consulting, one of the largest global certificate authorities and commercial providers of SSL certification, has introduced SSL Web Server Wildcard Certificates in their reseller channel. An SSL Web Server Wildcard Certificate is fully authenticated, is capable of 128-bit encryption and enables customers to secure multiple hosts for their domains on the same server.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

Security appliance vendor Innominate Security Technologies has raised $5.23 million in second-round funding. Deutsche Venture Capital led the investment, which included participation from existing investor TecVenture Partners.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that the first branded blogging community, www.blog-n-play.com (TM), will go beta on February 15, 2005, to coincide with the opening day of the Web Services Edge 2005 East International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edg e2005east).

Sun Microsystems today announced the largest single release of patent innovations into the open source community by any organization to date, marking a significant shift in the way Sun positions its intellectual property portfolio. By giving open source developers free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), the company is fostering open innovation and establishing a leadership role in the framework of a patent commons that will be recognized across the globe.

In a surprise announcement Sun has said that it is going to give open source developers who get involved in the new open source Solaris project free access to 1,673 active Solaris-related patents that it holds.

Novell has committed their support as a platinum sponsor with a major exhibit presence of 1,940 square feet at LinuxWorld Canada and NetworkWorld Expo running concurrently April 18-20, 2005 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Novell is also participation as a major sponsor at the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East Conference & Expo, February 15-17, in Boston.

In a heavily promoted reminder that it is still critically committed to the Itanium chip, even if Intel has dumped it as Itanium's co-developer and hired its engineers, HP said this week that its Itanium sales exceeded a billion dollars in fiscal '04.

Hewlett-Packard has merged its Imaging and Printing Group, source of most of its profits, and its marginally profitable PC unit to form a new operation called the Imaging and Personal Systems Group (IPSG). HP's Imaging and Printing chief, 24-year company veteran Vyomesh Joshi will lead the combined unit. HP said executive VP Duane Zitzner, the head of its old Personal Systems Group, has retired.

Red Hat has hired VP Lynne Corddry, the general manager of Unisys' Federal Systems and Technology Business Unit, to run its North American sales operation.

Linux, Linus Torvalds in white tie and what looks to be an Emperor Penguin have made the front cover of the latest issue of Businessweek under the tag line 'Linux Inc.'

The OpenIB Alliance, the industry association founded to develop an open software stack for Infiniband architecture on Linux, says that the Linux kernel people have accepted its software stack in the kernel.org repository.

LynuxWorks has rolled out new embedded Linux point-of-sale software targeted at the worldwide retail market.

Gupta Technologies has introduced a rapid application development (RAD) tool for building Linux business applications.

Novell has made its consumer release SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 available for download. Unlike the LiveDVD version, the code is fully installable and is not time-limited.

Sun has gotten the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for its new Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL say 'Cuddle'), the royalty-free license it is reportedly supposed to use in open sourcing Solaris 10.

Maureen O'Gara reports: 'Symantec and Veritas have been telling the press that, in contrast to the thousands who lost their jobs with the Oracle-PeopleSoft takeover, only some 400 out of a combined workforce of 13,000 might be terminated when Symantec sucks up Veritas.' The reason? There's not as much overlap between Symantec and Veritas as between Oracle and PeopleSoft.

The Open Source Development Labs has hired Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, naming him an OSDL Fellow like it did with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The move, reportedly in negotiation for quite some time, will give Tridgell, who's been working for IBM, the chance to focus exclusively on Samba

'In a 17-page order issued late Wednesday,' reports Maureen O'Gara, 'IBM has been ordered to turn over most of the discovery that SCO has asked for in several motions to compel over the last year and a half.' O'Gara continues: 'The most provocative aspect...is the fact that the court buys SCO's claim that it could own rights in derivative code that IBM wrote based on SCO IP and methodology and put in Linux, an important victory for SCO.'

Oracle said it is firing 5,000 people, roughly 9% of the newly combined Oracle-PeopleSoft workforce. It expects it will take into next week to make all the terminations, which started last Friday. European cuts are more complicated than American ones.

Sun co-founder Bill Joy, the company's resident, if aging, whiz kid until he finally left the company in September of '03, has turned up as a partner at famed VC operation Kleiner Perkins, the outfit that originally backed Sun.

AMD, which braced the market for the bad news last week, lost $30 million, eight cents a share, in the fourth quarter on record sales of $1.26 billion.

The Open Source Development Labs says that that Operation Open Gates we wrote about last week was the result of PR run amuck and that it's merely the OSDL's long-hatching initiative to try to incubate an open source industry in its own backyard in Oregon with the city of Beaverton kicking in $1.2 million and OSDL having some trouble getting its member companies to support it.

'Forbes magazine and CNET Networks have joined the motion to intervene in the SCO v IBM case,' reports Maureen O'Gara. The motion asks the court to open all the filings that the companies have made that are sealed.

Computer Associates kicked off a move to bring the industry together to write a commercial open source license that the big companies like HP, IBM and Sun could all agree on and adopt, saving them the cost of maintaining their own. CA thinks it will take nine months to bring the unnamed license into being.

Kleiner Perkins and Sevin Rosen, two star-studded VCs, have put $6 million in Series A money in Palo Alto, California-based XenSource, the outfit started by the founders of the open source Xen hypervisor virtualization software to commercialize the stuff. Xen is available free under the GPL. XenSource is hoping to make money by selling support and subscription services to Xen users.

Pervasive Software, the old-line database house, is going to chase the corporate market with a branded version of the PostgreSQL open source database, figuring that its backing will break down the barriers to enterprise adoption. The 20-year-old public company has historically derived the bulk of its revenues from Windows-based products. Besides the core PostgreSQL database engine, the new Pervasive Postgres includes Pervasive-designed installation and administrative tools.

Microsoft is trying to get the antitrust suit that Novell filed against it a few days after Microsoft paid Novell $536 million to head off another antitrust suit thrown out of court on its ear.

Oracle has come up with a thing it's calling Oracle Database Lite 10g, a derivative of its 10g grid technology and an update of its eight-year-old Data Lite mojo, meant for the mobile and embedded crowd on the theory that mobile deployments have emerged as critical business systems that deserve enterprise-class functionality and centralized management.

What may have finally driven Intel to copy AMD's 64-bit x86 extensions was a secret little prototype Opteron-based server that HP, Intel's erstwhile Itanium partner, ran up in late 2002 under the code name Project X.

Despite all the talk of an imminent slowdown in PCs, Intel managed to bust through its elevated mid-quarter projection and come in with record fourth-quarter revenues of $9.6 billion, up 13% sequentially and up 10% year-over-year. It had figured the best it could do was $9.5 billion. The market figured it would do $9.42 billion.

Norwegian browser house Opera Software says it will offer free site licenses to higher education institutions

Sun managed a small profit of $19 million, or a penny a share in its second quarter ended December 26 compared to a loss of $125 million, or four cents a share, in the same period the previous year.

The Open Source Development Labs continues on its merry roll signing up members. It latest score is four-and-a-half-year-old Red Flag Software Company, the major Chinese player, which says it will participate in all three of OSDL's initiatives: the desktop, carrier-grade Linux and data center Linux.

Is the Oracle/Peoplesoft battle stressing people out? Well, it's not helping, says a Bay Area stress management expert. 'People are having to live with the uncertainty of 'will I have a job tomorrow,' or on a larger scale, 'will the company be here tomorrow?',' says Lucy Yaldezian, who treats a variety of panic and anxiety disorders at an office not far from PeopleSoft's Pleasanton, Calif. headquarters. Yaldezian explains how all too often in Silicon Valley 'We're living in the emergency room,' instead of fear being an occasional response, it's a permanent state of mind.