Free Software Linux

Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded. I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-) I saw the press release here:

Wow, some great quotes are included in this BusinessWeek article on Red Hat and open source software. It’s great to see Jim taking control at the helm. Certainly I agree with much of his views, however, I also see Red Hat in a business that needs to continue contributing to community efforts. While I know he’s guiding that as well, it does not really come out in these comments.

I was going to write a bit about this MAJOR announcement myself today; but there’s not much point. Glyn Moody has covered most of the bases in his usual eloquent style.

This was another interesting podcast. I’m obviously a fan of Mr. Vance (has anyone ever called him “Mr.”?) - maybe I’m the first. I also need to meet Matt Asay at some point… have much to discuss.

At his opening keynote at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Whitehurst said the company needs to start preaching to its customers to share their internally developed code with others.

Microsoft's national technology officer had an interesting comment during the Red Hat Summit in Boston about who "won" the ODF and OOXML battle. And the reason why is equally interesting.

Red Hat has settled patent suits with Firestar Software, Inc., Amphion, and Datatern related to the jBoss Hibernate package on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model which Red Hat contested was not in Red Hat Linux. The settlement is said to protect upstream developers and derivative works of the upstream software, thus protecting the overall Open Source community.

RMS: «The GNU system (often called "Linux") has been developed, since 1984, for the sake of computer users' freedom. Ironically it is now the basis for a system designed to smother the freedom of the people of London, through online payments to Oyster cards. [...]»

Independent tests show that Red Hat Linux pulls as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware

The Russian Post has started testing the free software to be used in ordinary post offices. Cutting costs for software is one of the main reasons to migrate to Linux. No details are reported. However, according to some sources, the Russian Post might prefer Red Hat.

Australia may have missed an opportunity to promote open technology by abstaining from the recent OOXML vote, according to Linux distribution vendor Red Hat.

Novell plays tricky games to prevent Red Hat and other free GNU/Linux distributions from entering the mainframe

Red Hat is on top of the business Linux world and it has no intentions of coming down. Its newest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 5.2, is designed to make sure that it stays on top.

If you're looking to take part in some big open source fun, the fourth annual Red Hat Summit is happening in Boston June 18-20 at the Hynes Convention Center. And from the looks of it, there are good geeking times to be had.

Techtarget.com may be delivering this news a little too late, but it incorporates some quotes which the publisher sought from Red Hat, Xandros, Novell and some so-called ‘analyst’. read more