– by Tina Gasperson –
Yes, they’re bragging a lot; and using phrases like “defining technology,” “most productive,” and “development platform of choice.” But let them gloat a bit. Red Hat has earned its stint in the spotlight by doing what no other Open Source company has been able to do: turn a profit.The announcement came shortly after the markets closed on Tuesday, June 19. “Red Hat enters the world of profitability today with its Q1 earnings announcement.” With this milestone, the company that most of the world most closely identifies with Linux is saying in no uncertain terms that it is “possible to make money as an Open Source company.”

At least that’s what Red Hat CEO Matthew Zulich believes, and it looks like he may be right. Red Hat is claiming $600K of adjusted net income for the first fiscal quarter of 2002, and revenues of $25.6 million, which is an 18% increase over last year at the same time. “We are in an extremely healthy financial position, in an uncertain economic environment,” said Kevin Thompson, chief financial officer for Red Hat.

Red Hat stressed that it is rescinding income projections that it made at the Q4 conference call, and will not offer any new projections until it can familiarize itself with a new longer sales cycle created by the surge to profitability. This move frustrated analysts waiting for information to feed to the market about future prospects, but makes Red Hat look good in an era when market investors are feeling “once bitten, twice shy” about rosy income forecasts in the tech sector. Previously, analysts were predicting profits of one cent per share at the end of Q2 and two cents per share at the end of Q3.

Tim Buckley, the chief operating officer, cited successes in enterprise, embedded, Open Source services, and international markets as key to current and future growth for Red Hat. “Companies are moving past the proof of concept phase,” and into serious migration. He stressed the importance of corporate partnerships in creating “joint sales efforts” with companies like Dell, IBM, Compaq, and Intel.

Nobody said anything about Microsoft, but everyone knew what Buckley was thinking when he said, “Proprietary vendors are failing to keep pace with the rate of innovation” coming out of Open Source companies like Red Hat.

“Wolfram Kleff reported that fetchmail would segfault when
receiving emails with large “To:” headers. This was due to a buffer
overflow in the header parser and it could be exploited remotely.” Details at LinuxSecurity.com.

ZDNet UK: “SuSE Linux announced on Monday that its operating system has been validated for Oracle’s new 9i
database software, which was officially launched late last week after several delays. SuSE hopes
moving onto 9i will broaden its reach into enterprises, since Oracle has the leading database market
share and 9i is its flagship product.”

ZDNet News: “While he has no objection to open-source development efforts, Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates is concerned about the “Pac-Man-like nature” of the license that
governs the distribution of such software.”

ASL, the leading provider of high performance Linux systems, announced the release of its Marquis C460 dual Intel® Xeon Linux workstation.

Continuing ASL’s tradition in redefining Linux performance, the Marquis C460 features two Intel® Xeon 1.7 GHz processors running at a 400 MHz system bus. Based on the Intel® NetBurst micro-architecture utilizing hyper-pipelined technology and a rapid execution engine, the Marquis C460 provides superior performance in floating-point and multimedia applications.

Using the Intel® 860 chipset, the Marquis C460 delivers a mind-blowing bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s through its support of dual RDRAM memory channels. In addition, the Marquis C460 comes standard with eight RIMM slots allowing flexible memory configuration up to 4 GB.

Other standard features on the Marquis C460 include dual PCI busses, AGP Pro 50 slot, integrated Intel® 82550 Fast Ethernet, Matrox Millennium G450 Dual Head display, and Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI128 audio. All Marquis C460 are preinstalled and pre-configured with Red Hat Linux 7.1.

About Intel

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.

About ASL

ASL Inc. is the leading provider of high performance Linux systems. Its philosophy is to redefine Linux performance by providing leading-edge technology and extensive systems customization at competitive prices. As part of ASL Inc.?s commitment to execute this philosophy, it partners with key industry leaders to provide the Linux world with the latest features on high quality products. Every system comes pre-installed and configured with an optimized Linux operating system. In addition to its leading-edge product line, ASL Inc. also provides world-class customer support and service at no cost to its customers. For more information, visit ASL Inc. at www.aslab.com or call (408)
941-2070.

Contact: Vincent Hwang, ASL Inc., (408) 941-2070 x119 or vhwang@aslab.com

Anonymous Reader writesm “As quoted from F***dcompany.com:
Rumor has it VA Linux is about to layoff a lot of people.”

It’s on the front page of the f***edcompany.com site. A reminder that it’s only a rumor.

Wired.com has a story on a meeting of human genome researchers and one’s use of Linux. “Thanks to Jim Kent, a UC-Santa Cruz student now hailed as a genome hero, a partial
assembly was completed with no time to spare before the human genome data was published
in the scientific journal Nature in February.

Kent devised a computer algorithm to put much of the genome back together using a 100
CPU Linux cluster. His database is freely available online.”

From InternetWire: Visualware
Inc. announced today that it has
introduced the latest additions to its
VisualProfile suite of Internet and
network monitoring tools to provide easy performance management of business applications,
networking services and servers. The VisualProfile Windows 2000 Internet Information Server
(IIS) Edition and VisualProfile Apache Edition (www.visualware.com/visualprofile/index.html) are
new advanced Java client/server products that enable enterprise-wide real-time and historical
reports for the popular Web server applications IIS and Apache, and network device availability.

ZDNet has a column asking why BSD licenses are considered more business-friendly than the GPL, and asking if the BSD license can build more momentum.

ZDNet reports that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an “important patent case that could make it easier
to develop knockoff products without running afoul of patent laws.

On Monday, the court said it will consider whether to overturn a lower court ruling that limits a
patent’s scope.”