asay

Over at CNET, Matt Asay sees opportunities for Linux in the recent news that IBM claimed 35% of the Unix server market for second quarter of 2008.

"For those wondering how big Red Hat and Novell can become on operating-system revenue alone, keep that $61 billion number in mind.

Most of that $61 billion is hardware-related, but it meant approximately $650 million in Linux server sales for Red Hat and Novell over the past year.

As Linux eats into Unix, Red Hat and Novell can expect to grow linearly with it."

You can only hope to contain it. That became clear to me upon reading Matt Asay's description of what Harvard and Stanford are telling students about "how to beat open source." What is described by Haim ...

Mark Shuttleworth is putting his money where his mouth is, funding the development of significant improvements to desktop Linux. Read this blog post by Matt Asay on The Open Road.

Matt Asay covers the Linux Foundation's publication of a guide to Linux kernel development.

"Well, perhaps not anyone, but navigating kernel development just got easier thanks to the Linux Foundation's publication of a guide to Linux kernel development.

I don't think this means that I'm going to become the Linux kernel's top contributor anytime soon (unless, of course, they start accepting blog entries as code submissions), but it hopefully will make Linux kernel development easier to understand."

OStatic: "IBM made a slew of announcements and predictions on open source topics at this week's LinuxWorld conference, but one of the least talked about and written about announcements was this one (Matt Asay did single it out).

IBM released its HPC Open Software Stack as open source, aiming at cheaper-to-deploy, simpler supercomputers."

Matt Asay discusses VMware's joining with the Linux Foundation on C|Net.

"Today the Linux world broke out the champagne to celebrate VMware joining the Linux Foundation. I agree. It's good news.

What it doesn't resolve is the allegation that VMware is in active and conscious violation of the GPL. Some of these allegations appear to be well-founded.

VMware's lack of response to the allegations is not golden, especially in light of its embrace of the Linux Foundation."

OStatic "As Matt Asay notes, this particular sentence from the press release, in conjunction with the "up to 7 million dollars" wording, seems quite quirky: "Zend will use the funds as needed, to take advantage of market expansion opportunities as they arise." As they arise?

Are these millions some kind of window dressing intended to attract a deal?"