M-Saunders writes "Two days ago Slashdot reported on Oracle's move into the enterprise Linux market, and how it may challenge Red Hat. Red Hat's stock has already dropped, and there's a great deal of talk about the implications of this act. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info and screenshots — including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours."

PCM2 writes "It's not Oracle Linux, but Larry Ellison has announced that Oracle will be providing full enterprise support for Linux. This means not just phone calls but also patches, security fixes, and backports, in addition to indemnification from lawsuits like SCO's. This puts Oracle in direct competition with its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, whose entire business is based on providing similar support for its Linux distro and related software."

Shadowman writes "Fedora Core 6 has been released. Recommended download method is via BitTorrent. For more information, see the release notes or the Fedora homepage. Slashdot interviewed the Fedora Project Leader back in August."

The venture capitalist is, of course, Richard Gorman, of Bay Partners, to whom we sent your questions earlier this week. He prefaces his answers by saying: "Thanks for all of your questions. They were very insightful and I enjoyed answering them. I also want to thank Salil Deshpande of Bay Partners who contributed to these answers and provided some healthy discussion. Salil is a successful two-time entrepreneur and is very knowledgeable."

An anonymous reader writes "MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution." From the article: "So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP."

teslatug writes "Channel9 has an interview with Bill Hilf of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft. Hilf argues that the majority of companies advocate open source solely so that they can drive customers to their core business, which is not open source. He calls this his 'donut theory.' Hilf also sees RedHat in this model, with support being their core. He compares this to dating, where you have to offer your date value in order to entice them. In his view, Microsoft offers developers a platform where they can make money selling their software. The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users are skirted, but he makes an interesting point about big businesses like IBM and Oracle."

Max Spevack writes: "Hi everyone. I'm looking forward to answering all of the questions, but before I start diving into that, I guess it would be useful to give a little bit of perspective about me and my role within Fedora and Red Hat, because it will offer some context around the things I have to say."

daria42 writes "Novell has fired back at Red Hat's claims that the open source Xen virtualization software is not yet ready for enterprise use. 'We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualization hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said "Yes, this technology's ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10."', Novell's chief technology officer said today. 'So I guess the other vendors would not do that if it weren't ready.'"

Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack offered himself up for this interview because, he said, "I look at stories like [your] posting Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise and many of the comments about Red Hat and Fedora seem very rooted in the world of several years ago, when the RHEL/Fedora split took place." This is a chance to clear the air, and get an up-to-date look at what Fedora is up to these days. So ask away; we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Max and (hopefully) publish his answers later this week.

Tony Mobily has written a thought-provoking editorial for Free Software Magazine that makes the bold prediction of Red Hat's eventual demise at the hands of Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Calling on memories of Red Hat alienating their desktop user base to focus on their corporate customers and making money, Mobily states that many of those alienated desktop users are also system administrators who now feel more comfortable with Ubuntu and will make the choice to use Ubuntu Server over Red Hat now and in the future.

rs232 writes to tell us ITP is reporting that Oracle's Larry Ellison recently called Red Hat's ability to honor their support contracts effectively into question. Taking that claim one step further, Ellison claims that Oracle will soon start offering support for Red Hat Linux users. From the article: "The reason for this move, which Oracle executives later declined to provide any real detail on, is that Red Hat isn't doing a good enough job of providing that support itself, Ellison said. 'Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers],' he said."

fmarines writes "Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around JBoss 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestar's patent, and that Firestar 'has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages.' Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestar press release page."

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 1. New items in FC6T1 include Intel Macintosh support (well, mostly), update notification applet, GNOME 2.15, KDE 3.5.3, and the Fedora Core 6 Extras development repository is already available. With FC6T1's availability, Phoronix has published their own preview of this release. The article is focused on an editorial about changes to come for Fedora Core 6, as well as images from Fedora Core 6 Test 1. The next Fedora Core 6 testing release (Test 2) is due out in July, while the final release is due out this September."

Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"

Sam Haine '95 writes to mention a ZDNet article discussing Linux's place in the server market, at least for Dell Computers. Linux now makes up over 25% of the company's server business, and has become such a standard that they only need to confer with Red Hat for some 10% of service calls. From the article: "Linux and open source have been a blessing for Dell as it has struggled to make an impression, other than as a desktop and laptop supplier, in enterprise computing, According to Martin Hingley, vice-president of the European Systems Group at analysts IDC, part of the problem for Dell in the enterprise is that 'people don't like partnering with Dell.'"

Lxy writes "The Fedora Community released re-spins of Fedora Core 5 last Thursday. What's a respin you ask? To put it simply, all the latest updates have been patched into the install CDs, eliminating the need for a long download process after installing. You can read the press release here and of course nab the torrents here."

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has complete coverage of the second annual Red Hat Summit, covering everything from the announcements of Mugshot and 108, Eben Moglen's inspirational and FUD-countering defense of free software and the GPL, to One Laptop Per Child's Nicholas Negroponte asserting that Intel is 'pissing on us.'" From the defense of Free Software: "He spoke primarily about freedom, and the American legacy inherent in free software. He reminded us that there was a day when the word 'yankee' was not automatically preceded by the word 'damn' or followed by the words 'go home.' In fact, he noted, it was once most often followed by the word ingenuity. He also spent a lot of time discussing patents, and explaining why they were added to our legal system so that the world's brightest, most creative people, would move here. Today, however, Moglen says, 'the patent system is an unbridled and unnecessary headache.' He then went on to describe how patents stifle innovation and creativity today. "

Havoc Pennington writes "A small team of us have been working on a new project called Mugshot, we're calling it a "live social experience" and hoping it will bring open source to more people who aren't using it already. The project is public as of this morning. Check out the developer site for more."

twofish writes "According to a Register article Sun Microsystems' new GNU/Linux-friendly Java license does not go far enough for Red Hat. Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO, says Sun should have open-sourced Java instead. The new license does have the support of Canonical (main Ubuntu sponsor), Gentoo and Debian." From the article: "He says the failure to open-source Java means that it can't be used on millions of $100, Linux-powered PCs envisioned under Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project, to bring affordable computing to children in developing nations. Negroponte wants only open source software on the machines, according to Red Hat, which is a member of the project."

SDenmark writes "Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. Asked if any company can become the 'Microsoft of Linux', Greg responds "Well, if we ever woke up one day and said 'Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux' or 'Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux', then the Linux movement would be over." Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities? Greg also discusses the internal Novell migration to Linux."