Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Xandros acquired Linspire's Linux assets after Linspire changed its name to Digital Cornerstone. With the acquisition Xandros CEO Andy Typaldos has been telling the press, 'Xandros is already the third-largest Linux company in the world, and ... we may already be the largest private Linux company in the world.'

Red Hat announced advancements that extend the Company's Linux Automation strategy by providing expanded capabilities and incorporating broadened community involvement for secure management of both users and systems across virtual and physical enterprise infrastructures.

Novell announced Invitrogen has selected SUSE Linux Enterprise as the core operating platform to standardize and virtualize the company's servers. A global provider of essential life science technologies for research, production and diagnostics, Invitrogen conducts business in more than 70 countries and offers 35,000 products and services. With the flexibility of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, the company will reduce server licensing costs, virtualize with support on the VMware platform and simplify migration from Windows and UNIX servers to Linux.

On Monday, nine days ahead of his sentencing on July 9 for the murder of his wife, William DuBois, the lawyer for ace Linux programmer Hans Reiser, filed a brief with the court saying - for the very first time since this case began - that under penalty of perjury that he think Reiser 'may be mentally incompetent as a result of mental disorder or developmental disability' - not simply socially inept or perhaps mildly autistic, as he's suggested before - and that Reiser can't - and these are supposed to be magic words to a court - 'understand the nature of the criminal proceedings or assist counsel in the conduct of the defense in a rational manner.'

Not that long ago Linux barely had two drivers to rub together. Now it claims to support 'more hardware devices than any other operating system in the history of the world' and, figuring it's time to push IHVs to open their code, 150 Linux kernel developers, including Alan Cox, signed a 'Position Statement' decrying the use of any closed source kernel module or drivers in Linux.

GPLv3, the great General Public License rewrite, is now a year-old and used by 2,345 open source projects including Ubuntu, SugarCRM and Samba. Adoption has reportedly been growing at about 20% a month over the past six months. According to some figures sent around by Black Duck, approximately 58% of all open source projects today are covered by GPLv2 and 11% by LGPLv2.

Novell announced it is collaborating with VMware to improve Linux performance in VMware environments by incorporating support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) into the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel. Demonstrating their commitment to provide open interoperability and optimization for virtualized environments, the companies have worked together to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for the VMware platform.

Parallels virtualization and automation software is powering new virtual private server (VPS) offerings from Blacknight Internet Solutions. Blacknight, a Parallels Gold Partner, is offering four VPS service plans for the Linux and Windows platforms. Each level - Starter, Basic, Standard and Enterprise - is managed through Parallels System Automation and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers

Parascale, the four-year-old firm with the Cloud Storage system software layered on the Linux XFS file system, the Linux operating system and the Internet Protocol networking protocol stack, has hired Sajai Krishnan out of NetApp to be its CEO. He ran NetApp's mid-market StoreVault business focused on network storage appliances and used to be a Booz Allen VP and a partner in its Communication, Media Technology practice.

Xandros announced the release of the all new Xandros BridgeWays Management Console for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The BridgeWays Management Console, available as a free download from the Xandros web site, brings powerful graphical management of Red Hat servers to system administrators who may have Windows Server skill sets, but no prior Linux experience. Linux administrators will also find that this all-in-one remote management console relieves them from resorting to command line options or using multiple tools to administer their Red Hat servers. Multiple servers and services are integrated into a single 'Managed Community' that can be remotely administered from either a Red Hat server, or from any Windows XP or Vista desktop.

Pushing back against VMware, its chief rival, Tuesday, Citrix released its ballyhooed, on-demand XenDesktop, the widgetry that delivers custom, managed virtual Windows desktops from a data center server to a user over the network, and priced the stuff. Theres a free Express Edition for up to 10 users; an entry-level Standard Edition for $75 per concurrent user; an Advanced Edition for $195 per concurrent user; an Enterprise Edition for $295 per concurrent user; and a Platinum Edition for $395 per concurrent user.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Right now Reiser faces a sentence to 25 years to life for first-degree murder, a conviction based on circumstantial evidence. If he cooperates it could mean he's looking at second-decree murder, a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life and the possibility of parole unless an autopsy proves the killing was premeditated like 'two bullet holes to the back of the head,' Wired said.

Wind River says it's collaborating with Intel and will develop an open, extensible Moblin-based Linux platform for Atom-bearing MIDs. Both open source and commercial versions should be available next year. The commercial Wind River Linux Platform for Mobile Internet Devices is supposed to be a full-featured, commercial-grade Linux platform that includes a Linux distribution, middleware and mobile applications that deliver rich Internet and media experiences.

Zmanda, the open source backup and recovery folks, says it's integrated NetApp's Snapshot technology with its own Recovery Manager for MySQL. It's supposed to translate into continuous data protection for mission-critical MySQL databases. With Snapshot, administrators can create point-in-time copies of file systems for granular recovery.

SourceLabs announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment. SourceLabs' automated tools and support services for Java and Linux developers, corporate IT professionals, and solution providers are an effective, on demand new way to more effectively support open source software development and operations. SourceLabs Self-Support tools dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java and Linux application development and maintenance by bringing together in one bundle all the components developers need to create and deploy web applications using the Eclipse Foundation's open source development framework.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers. Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company's two-day developer event in San Francisco, will take down the barricade. Google also disclosed what it's going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Just as we have become dependent on oil as an energy resource, we have also become dependent on a single vendor solution for saving our digital history - in the form of our word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. Last year, it was estimated that more than 90 percent of the office productivity suite market was controlled by one vendor, and, historically, because of this dominance, consumers, businesses small and large, and governments have been left with few viable options.

Ulteo is pleased to announce a new Ulteo product called 'Ulteo Virtual Desktop' (Beta) which allows you to use Linux applications on the Windows operating system. Ulteo Virtual Desktop is a full Ulteo system that runs on Windows and offers a large choice of Linux applications, including the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird email client, OpenOffice.org office suite, multi-IM software such as Kopete and many others.

Novell announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), containing enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 is a Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests and live migration of those guests across physical machines. Several improvements specific to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 are also included in SP2. Novell further unveiled the Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise, designed to help customers better manage their SUSE Linux Enterprise software updates.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent workaround for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I've heard it works fairly well on most distros but I haven't heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

Before we're all reduced to shank's mare, Concurrent is wading into the automotive industry, observing that with the amount of electronics in cars constantly on the uptick, it's a good place for an embedded Linux-based networking system. So it's announced FlexRay communication support for its SIMulation Workbench, which provides a complete framework to develop and execute real-time hardware-in-the-loop and man-in-the-loop simulations.

Wind River and Intel are putting their heads together to create an extensible open source Linux platform for the automotive industry - an infotainment (gad, that horrid word) platform for Intel's newfangled Atom chip. It's part of a major new product strategy for Wind River, which is going to open source the specification and code from the platform at Moblin.org in hopes of creating Open Infotainment Platforms that everybody uses and that attract a vibrant ecosystem.

Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. With this latest update, subscribers can achieve greater return on their IT investment with new hardware support capabilities, selected new software technologies and numerous quality improvements. And, the certified application environment provided by every Red Hat Enterprise Linux version means that subscribers enjoy the new capabilities provided in release updates without the need to recertify their applications.

Red Hat has made Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 available, saying it enhances virtualization, desktop, security, clustering, networking and hardware support. Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, is now possible and there's virtualization support for NUMA-based architectures.

Have you ever wished you could run ASP.NET applications on Linux, without having to rewrite your code or leave the Visual Studio development environment? In this article, I show you how to port Steve Clements' AJAX ASP.NET RSS Reader to native Java and deploy it to Apache Tomcat on Linux. I also show you how to add an AnimationExtender and a HoverMenu from the AJAX Control Toolkit in Visual Studio, while targeting Java.

Parallels said Wednesday that its Desktop virtualization widgetry for the Mac, which lets Intel-based Apples run Windows or Linux along with Mac OS X, has sold more than a million copies, a nice chunk of the Macs out there. It is the largest-selling Mac utility and gives Mac users access to all those Windows programs it?s starved for.

Ubuntu's first 'Long Term Support (LTS' rev in almost 23 months was pushed out the door this week along with the promise that another LTS rev would follow every two years from now on out and in between there would be point releases first at the three-month mark and then every six month after that. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth borrowed Intel's 'Tick Tock' metaphor to explain Ubuntu's plans. The only thing that would upset the planned schedule, he said, would be if other major distributions aligned their releases.

Red Hat is sporting a feather in its chapeau. It's got the mighty NYSE Euronext using its operating system for its mission-critical trading platform and purring compliments like 'Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our architecture. Red Hat is extremely strategic and without it, most of our computers wouldn't be running.'

Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its first major open source ISV - and a key one for conveying applications.

Adaptec unveiled a new family of entry-level Unified Serial RAID controllers. The new low-profile Series 2 RAID controllers, built on the same Adaptec dual core RAID-on-Chip (ROC) architecture used in its successful Series 5 RAID controllers, provide significant performance enhancement and scalability to low-cost data storage systems. The Series 2 controllers eliminate the limitations of software RAID-based hardware solutions commonly found in entry-level systems, delivering a wide range of advantages for inexpensive SATA and SAS disk and tape drive systems.