Info World follows up on an earlier press release: “Looking to boost Linux development productivity among small businesses, IBM on Monday will formally announce its server-based Small Business Suite for Linux. The suite is packaged with a variety of applications and tools intended to make it easier for users, developers, and integrators to host and create messaging and collaboration solutions, to develop Web sites and manage data.” ZDNet also has the news.

From Business Wire press release: Caldera Systems Inc.
Friday announced the appointment of Robert Bench to the position of chief financial officer.

Business Wire: Quintalinux Limited and the China Hightech Fund Investment Company today announced a memorandum of understanding to jointly form a new investment partnership. The new venture will make strategic investments in high-tech companies in China, focusing on the city of Shenzen, regarded as a technology powerhouse in southern China.

Maximum Linux has a tutorial about booting into maintenance mode: “Maintenance mode is rather simple, yet extremely effective. Its sole mission is to
provide you, the home or corporate Administrator, the opportunity to boot into your
Linux box to make modifications to your operating system, without the annoyance of
other users logging in at the same time. Hence, this is why people often refer to
Maintenance mode as Single-User mode.”

According to a Reuters story on News.com, crackers infiltrated an American based pro-Israel Web site, making off with member records that included credit card numbers. At least 700 members of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee were affected by the break-in.

News.com reports that “AT&T acknowledged Thursday that it had violated its own spam policy by providing Web-hosting services to a purported sender of unsolicited commercial email. The admission came after an English anti-spam organization publicly posted what it termed a “pink contract” between AT&T and the alleged spammer, Nevada Hosting.”

By Tina Gasperson
News Editor
Sun is a computer hardware company whose software products, in the past, have seemed a means to an end — that end being more hardware sales. Network file sharing (NFS) and PC-NFS, a SAMBA predecessor, are tightly integrated with systems. So is Solaris, a UNIX that was developed to run only on Sun’s scalable processor architecture (SPARC) workstations, but now works on other vendors’ systems.Sun’s software outlook changed direction, when in November of 1998, Sun and Star Division joined to release the StarOffice suite, a collection of applications similar to Microsoft’s popular Office.

Sun, known for embracing Open Source with one hand and maintaining strong control with the other, originally set out to license StarOffice under its Community Source License (CSL). The CSL allows free use of source code for research and development, but in order to use a CSL project commercially, the licensee must pay royalties to Sun.

Then, much to the delight of the Open Source community, Sun changed its plans and announced that the office suite would be released under the GPL (General Public License) as of October 2000. To accommodate development and house the source code, Sun teamed up with Collab.net and created OpenOffice.org. Sun also set up the OpenOffice Foundation as a governance for the huge project, which encompasses around 9 million lines of code.

Sun doesn’t appear to be concerned about the possibility of fragmentation of the StarOffice project. “StarOffice already has a strong external ‘standard’ for a file format, because it’s supposed to be compatible with files from Microsoft Office. Everyone has an incentive to comply with that standard or they won’t be able to exchange files with Office users,” says Bruce Perens, president of Linux Capital Group, chairman of Progeny Linux Systems, and one of the originators of the Open Source initiative.

So, why did Sun leap into the Open Source market with such abandon, tossing this fully functional, highly developed office suite into the ring? The consensus among Open Source pundits is that Sun was trying to cut in to Microsoft’s chokehold on the office applications market.

In his editorial, Sun’s StarOffice Release: Is It Really What You Think? Perens says, “Sun has assisted Linux and other operating systems on the principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ because those systems cut into Microsoft’s operating-systems revenue and intrude upon their monopoly in the systems software market.”

But Sun hasn’t fully converted to the religion of Open Source. It is still holding on to control of its cross-platform Java technology, so far only willing to release it under the CSL. Why?

In an article at InfoWorld.com, Sun’s vice president of technologies advocacy and community development George Paolini said the company is averse to code forking in Java, since the platform is so new.

Danese Cooper, manager of Sun Open Source, says it’s all a matter of cycles. “We talk about the life cycles of software when it comes to licensing issues. Even Open Source developers … tend to hold new software proprietary at first,” until the software matures to a certain stability.

“In the case of Java, a couple of years ago, it was in a state where most of the people using it felt it needed support to maintain compatibility,” says Cooper.

Lou Grinzo, the editor of LinuxProgramming.com, says “if they GPL’ed Java and it forked into two or more incompatible versions, it would all but kill Sun’s ability to make money from it.”

But Perens says that Sun has hampered widespread acceptance of Java by being too protective of their so-called intellectual property. “I think it’s about time for them to release the JDK (Java Developer’s Kit) under an Open Source license,” he says.

“They are afraid of someone running away with their product. My contention is that they don’t have to be.”

Perens maintains that there are two conditions that must be met before Sun could reasonably be expected to release Java under a true Open Source license — and he says that those conditions have already been fulfilled. They are:

1. “A good standards program coupled to trademarks, where you would be able to call it ‘Java,’ or ‘Enterprise JavaBeans,’ etc., only if it passed Sun’s validation suites. This is mostly in place.”
2. “A licensing scheme that gives Sun access to other people’s changes, so that nobody can ‘run away’ with their product. Either the GPL/LGPL or the Sun Industry Standards License would work for this, or both.”

But Grinzo believes Sun still isn’t ready to let go of the fragmentation issue. “Sun won’t GPL Java until they’re convinced that they can avoid forking, and there’s nothing anyone can do to convince them that won’t happen; that’s a decision [they have] to come to on their own terms, if ever.”

Cooper says that if and when Java goes Open Source, it won’t necessarily be placed under the GPL. “Use of the GPL is seen as an experiment at Sun.”

Not only are they observing the StarOffice project to see how it goes, but, Cooper says, “a lot of our more traditional customers are not comfortable with the GPL, and we have to conduct business.”

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page

ZDNet’s Charles Cooper opines: “If the Penguistas entertain serious hopes of carrying out their revolution, they’ll most certainly need the embrace of the most establishment computer maker of them all.”

A CanadaComputes.com column (say that three times fast) offers a conspiracy theory on the Microsoft code cracking case: “The larger ramifications to this story is, in particular, its
possible effect on the WINE project. WINE is an
alternative implementation of the Windows programming
interface which allows you to run some Windows software under Linux. I have
reviewed it before and, while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. Around the
time this hack was announced, it was also announced that WINE had got
Word 2000 and Excel 2000 to run under it. Probably coincidence, but people
who love conspiracies find the timing quite intriguing.”

Looking for a cheap Linux server? LWN.net has posted the latest press release from IBM, touting what that company calls “the industry’s first Linux-based integrated software solution for small businesses.” The server package includes IBM’s DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application server, and Lotus Domino, sporting a suggested retail price of $499.