novels

EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source

It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.

Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?

In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed … Read more

Oracle and Novell Linux: Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.

There's just one problem with this marketing spin: the "low-cost alternative" to Red Hat isn't Novell. It's CentOS. And CentOS is free as in $0.00.

It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. … Read more

Novel writing helper

yWriter4 provides novelists with a tool to not only create their new story, but keep it tightly organized. This no-frills layout and inventive categorization may help bring that story from daydreams to the page.

The program's cluttered interface, full of buttons with no onscreen direction, practically begged us to visit the Help file. Luckily, while there, we discovered a wizard that walked us through the process and made everything much less confusing. The program required us to do a lot of prep work before we even wrote a word. However, we quickly learned that setting up databases of characters, … Read more

MonoTouch lets .Net coders build iPhone apps

Novell on Monday introduced MonoTouch 1.0, a development framework for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch that uses Microsoft's .Net with C# and other programming languages.

The MonoTouch framework, available on paid-subscription only, requires Apple's own software development kit and runs solely on Macintosh hardware.

"The vast majority of Windows-centric developers, ISVs, and IT organizations have chosen the C# language and .Net for development," said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Developer Platform vice president at Novell, in a statement.

"As such, we have seen tremendous demand for tools to build .Net-based iPhone … Read more

Red Hat talks tough on competitors

Red Hat announced a range of cool new products and technologies last week at Red Hat Summit, but the most potent message emerging from the conference may well have been 'Diplomacy be damned!' Red Hat has generally opted to publicly ignore competitors, but not anymore. The company singled out Microsoft and Oracle, in particular. Is this a new, combative Red Hat?

Red Hat's DeltaCloud was the big technical news, offering a "common API to blend public and private clouds." It also announced a new Catalyst program to corral a partner ecosystem around its infrastructure products.

But for … Read more

Basic ball game

Bouncing Balls is a basic game in which users eliminate groups of balls by shooting balls of the same color at them. It's a fun game, although we've seen similar games that are a little more interesting.

The program's interface is basic. A wall of different colored balls moves toward the bottom of the screen, while a shooter provides users with a supply of balls to fire at it. Shoot a red ball at a group of two or more red balls, for example, and they fall, taking with them any balls that are attached. The object … Read more

Novell's Linux revenue soars 22 percent, while everything else tanks

Novell reported on Thursday a 22 percent year-over-year increase in its Linux revenue, topping $40 million. That's the good news. The bad news is that overall, net revenue slumped to $216 million from $245 million for the third fiscal quarter of 2008, with every product besides Linux dropping considerably. From identity and security management (down 16 percent) to systems and resource management (down 15 percent) to workgroup (down 12 percent), Novell is in serious trouble, with at least two potential options:

Turn to the open-source community or Microsoft to fix its failing businesses.

Novell's Open Platform business, of … Read more

The big guns of Linux kernel development

The Linux Foundation recently released an updated study of Linux development statistics that reveals interesting statistics relating to who actually writes the kernel that allows others to build on top.

More than 70 percent of total kernel contributions come from developers working at large companies including obvious participants like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and Intel as well as other less obvious small companies such as Parallels.

Red Hat: 12.3% IBM: 7.6% Novell: 7.6% Intel: 5.3% Independent consultant: 2.5% Oracle: 2.4% Linux Foundation: 1.6% SGI 1.6% Parallels 1.3% Renesas Technology: 1.3% Academia: 1.2% Fujitsu: 1.1% MontaVista: 1.1% MIPS Technologies: 1.1% Analog Devices: 1.0% HP: 1.0%

Another interesting fact is the rate of development and constant refactoring of the kernel code. An average of 10,923 lines of code are added with an average of 5,547 lines removed every day, ensuring that the code is high quality and relevant for the most important implementations of the kernel. … Read more

Linux is booming, but unpaid adoption may hurt vendors

Even as the recession continues to cool CIO appetites for software purchases, Linux is bucking the trend, according to a new IDC report.

IDC is projecting Linux revenue to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 16.9 percent from 2008 to 2013, topping $1.2 billion in 2013.

As IDC notes, this growth will comprise just 4 percent of total software market revenue by 2013, up from 2.2 percent in 2008. However, for the second time, IDC has also examined nonpaid deployments of Linux, revealing some troubling data.

I've always assumed Red Hat's primary Linux … Read more