– By Dan Berkes –
The markets came out swinging this week, as investors regained their confidence and adpoted a longer-term view. Several Linux and Open Source-related companies announced earnings, Eazel called it quits, and IBM hinted at its next CEO.The Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq both gained more than 4 percent for the week by the sound of the bell on Friday. The Dow closed at 11,301.74, up 480 points. The last time the Dow closed over 11,000 was in September of last year. Nasdaq ended the week at 2,198, up 91 points from last Friday.

Analysts said investors seem to be taking a longer-term approach, and ignoring most second-quarter results. James Philburn, a Chicago-based independent market analyst says that the real market test will come in the last quarter of 2001: “If investors haven’t seen [an improvement] from business by then, the markets could go back to where they were at the beginning of the year.”

Not hurting the situation this week was the U.S. Federal Reserve’s half-percent interest rate cut. This is the fifth reduction in as many months, and the Fed left open the possibility that further rate cuts could happen.

Running the numbers

Caldera International disclosed the terms of its SCO purchase in an 8-K filing with the SEC: $23 million in cash, 16 million shares of Caldera stock, and an $8 million IOU to be paid in yearly installments of $2 million.

Server manufacturer and Linux reseller EBIZ Enterprises, Inc. released its earnings statement on Wednesday. Revenues increased by $2.2 million to $8.4 million; net loss rose from $2.2 million to $9.9 million, mostly due to the company’s recent acquisitions of Houston-based JBSi and LinuxMall.com.

IBM says that its share of the U.S. server market rose 6.7 points in the first quarter of this year, to 21.3 percent of the total market. According to the almighty press release, the extra market share is thanks to IBM’s new eServer product line.

Merlin Software Technologies International filed its 10Q earnings statement this week. Total sales figures for the three-month period ending March 31, 2001 were $13,497; the company incurred a net loss of $770,276 for the same period. Merlin’s product line includes a cross-platform faxing program known as CommunicadoFAX, and system utility PerfectBackUP.

Announcements

On Monday, Caldera International announced its purchase of Acrylis’ WhatifLinux technology. According to a press release at Yahoo, the company plans to use WhatifLinux in a new software management product, named Volution Online.

Who’s the next person to sit in the captain’s chair on IBM’s bridge? In an interview this week on CNN, Big Blue CEO Louis Gerstner hinted that Sam Palmisano, currently the company’s COO and president, may be next in line. Gerstner didn’t say if or when he would step aside’ however, his contract with IBM ends in March 2002.

Items of interest

ZDNet has a story about the ever-elusive quest for profits in the Linux market. That profit may be in partnership: Because Linux is so easily adapted to all manner of platforms, Linux solution providers may be able to help the bottom line with — what else — a little cooperation from others.

Eazel, we hardly knew ye. After a short but spirited existence, the company that gave Nautilus to the Linux community officially closed its doors this week.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this week:

Company Name	Symbol	5/18 Close	5/11 Close
Apple	AAPL	23.53	22.85
Caldera International	CALD	1.89	2.18
EBIZ Enterprises	EBIZ.OB	0.82	0.85
Hewlett Packard	HWP	29.85	26.19
IBM	IBM	117.44	111.81
Merlin Softwatre Tech.	MLSW.OB	0.30	0.33
Red Hat	RHAT	5.82	5.80
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	19.97	18.85
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	4.20	4.57
Wind River Systems	WIND	22.52	22.54

Project UDI – May 9, 2001 – Members of Project UDI today announced the
open source release of the UDI (Uniform Driver Interface) reference
implementation at http://projectudi.sourceforge.net. This first public
release of UDI code is the product of a multi-company development
effort designed to provide device driver portability for existing and
future system configurations. Based on the Version 1.0.1 UDI
specification, the code base reflects the culmination of approximately
three years of development and testing to validate the specification on
a variety of operating systems and using a variety of device drivers.
The latest UDI specification as well as other information about Project
UDI is available from http://www.project-udi.org.
Released under a BSD-style open source license, the UDI reference
implementation is available for all interested parties to download,
examine, use, or modify for their purposes. Project UDI is also
interested in promoting the participation of OS vendors, independent
hardware vendors (IHVs), driver developers, or other parties interested
in the development or porting of UDI to new platforms or adding
additional driver support. Information on joining the Project UDI open
source effort can be found at http://projectudi.sourceforge.net or at
the Project UDI web site at http://www.project-udi.org. Current efforts
are underway in the areas of network protocol support, USB, Infiniband,
and others.

With the open sourcing of this reference code, Project UDI is providing
a functional and portable base upon which both system and I/O vendors
may reliably implement high performance, portable device drivers and
device driver support. The code release includes functioning UDI
reference environment implementations for the SCO UnixWare, SCO
OpenServer, Linux, and Sun Solaris operating systems; functioning UDI
driver implementations for NIC and HBA drivers; and various tools and
test fixtures to assist UDI developers.

“This is an important milestone in regards to Project UDI. While the
specifications have been openly published, this is the first time the
source code to working UDI implementations has been made available for
anyone to examine, use, or port to other platforms,” said Kurt
Gollhardt, chairman of Project UDI. “Driver developers can use the
released code to develop portable drivers, and OS vendors can freely
take the UDI environments already released in source form and port them
to their OSes to add UDI support.”

According to Chris Herzog, president of Software Technologies Group,
Inc., the developers of the UDI Linux implementation, “This is a major
UDI milestone in that it demonstrates the key point of openness that
has been part of Project UDI from the beginning. It provides OS
vendors, IHVs, and driver developers a portable, functional base to
develop on and start to reap the benefits of UDI. UDI is open to all
interested parties and this is just one way the contributors to Project
UDI are backing up that statement of openness of both the specification
and the functional code that implements it.”

Michael Orlovsky, Manager, Systems Architecture for Lockheed Martin
Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems, Syracuse, said, “Device
driver portability preserves the software investment and facilitates
the continued commercial technology refreshment of our advanced
tactical systems.”

By developing to a single device driver interface, companies can
realize significant savings in device driver development and testing
costs. Time-to-market of new devices is also improved, and
manufacturers can allocate development resources to improving device
performance, features, functionality, and quality.

Project UDI is a multi-company open development group dedicated to
developing standardized device driver interfaces for the computer I/O
technologies of today and tomorrow. More information on Project UDI may
be found at http://www.project-udi.org or by contacting one of the
member companies listed below.

Lockheed Martin Corporation

http://www.lockheedmartin.com

Software Technologies Group, Inc.

http://www.stg.com

Posted at LWN.net: zenith parsec found numerous format string bugs in the version
of minicom that is included in all versions of Immunix OS. See
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/181922 for more information on
the exploit. FormatGuard does not stop these bugs because minicom
writes directly to the log files using vsprintf calls.

From The Associated Press: “Princeton professor Edward Felten told a spillover crowd at Stanford
University Thursday as much as he could about successfully hacking
the music industry’s latest anti-piracy technology, but stopped short on
some details for fear of being sued.

What Felten couldn’t share with the students was how he and his
colleagues bested the technology.”

Apache Week is again released. Among the items: “The main topic of discussion this week has been the design of the scoreboard in Apache 2.0. The scoreboard in Apache stores the
state of all processes in the server and allows the mod_status module to present an overview of the server status to the server
administrator. In Apache 2.0, having the MPM abstraction means that the scoreboard needs to keep track of not only processes, but
for threaded MPM’s, the threads within each process as well. Paul Reder has proposed a redesign of the scoreboard to cope better
with this new model.”

Joe Barr tells us about his article at ITworld: “I promise. This is not going to be another long tirade about Microsoft’s latest FUD assault on free software and the GNU General Public License (GPL). There may be a short screech or two, but by the time this column appears, most of us will have gotten past Craig Mundie’s May 3 speech in New York and moved on to the next RAT (Really
Annoying Thing). The significance of Mundie’s remarks is not so much in what he said — most of that has been completely rebuked in any event — but in how it was received. FUD, after all, is an attempt to alter reality by changing your perception. Sometimes the FUD she
flies, and sometimes she no fly. Mundie’s effort was a belly flop.”

From The Register: “Intel has made its strongest commitment to developing Linux for the telecoms market to
date, outlining what it sees as priorities for the development of the open source
operating system.

Howard Bubb, general manager of Intel’s converged communications division, told
delegates at Intel’s Developers Forum in Amsterdam this week that developing Linux to
become a robust operating system for telcos would be a key priority for the chip giant.”

From BusinessWire: IDG World Expo announced today that the upcoming LinuxWorld
Conference & Expo, taking place August 26 – 30 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, will host the first Worldwide Developer Conference
for developers of Linux and Open Source technologies. The Worldwide Developer Conference will focus specifically on the needs of application
and technical developers. Created in conjunction with the Open Source Development Network (OSDN), the Worldwide Developer Conference is ideal for developers of
Open Source technologies looking to sharpen their skills. (NewsForge is part of OSDN.)

PR Newswire has a press release on Wells Fargo giving a buy rating to the casino game company. What’s interesting is the Linux connection. “We believe that Shuffle Master’s LINUX-based game
platform (currently in test), which is intended to standardize the operating
software functionality of slot games, could contribute to future growth.”

Interative Week has a postmortem. Some developers raised concerns about Hewlett-Packard and Sun continuing to move forward with plans to use Gnome with their Unix products if Eazel’s not around.