SteelEye Technology, a provider of data protection and application availability solutions for Linux and Windows, has become a Gold member of Novell PartnerNet for Technology Partners.

Centeris Corporation, a pioneer in developing enterprise software solutions that seamlessly integrate Linux, UNIX, and Mac systems in a Microsoft Windows network, introduced Likewise Identity 3.5, providing expanded group policies and support for more than 100 platforms.

MySQL says that BlueLithium, described as one of the top five US online advertising networks, is using its database in a mission-critical data warehouse application along with the BrightHouse database engine from Infobright and that MySQL and InfoBright will now offer other customers analytic data warehousing widgetry. BlueLithium is apparently massaging the data from 145 million consumers worldwide.

Fortune caught up with One Laptop Per Child mastermind Nicholas Negroponte at an airport after his détente with Intel last week and he told the magazine, 'We're giving them all our technology.' It seems that the unique technology developed for OLPC's AMD-based XO widgetry like its low-power screen readable in sunlight and its 'mesh' network could turn up in Intel's Classmate line, which will apparently be sold in tandem now with XO.

'Linux has become a very natural fit for telecom network and device manufacturers who are looking for an operating system from which they can easily and cost-effectively build differentiated services and value,' said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. 'There is no question that the massive success of Linux in telecom is key in today's new stage of Linux growth. Nokia Siemens Networks will add another level of expertise as we transition into this stage of increasing open development, and we welcome their participation.'

Microsoft, evidently off its meds and exhibiting an increasing tendency toward bipolar behavior, says it's going to submit two one-page shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the arbiter of all open source licenses that has been widely criticized for admitting way too many of the things into the fold and for just rushing through wiki software maker Socialtext's Common Public Attribution License without the full approval of its followers. The Attribution License requires that users cite the source of contributed pieces of code. Microsoft has five shared source licenses and didn't say which two it was talking about. Two of them restrict the use of code to the Windows platform, which would be a problem for OSI. So throw them out.

Dell is going to add to the slim number of PCs that it's currently willing to put factory-installed Ubuntu Linux on, according to what Canonical CEO Mark Shuttlesworth, inventor of Ubuntu, told Reuters. Without talking real numbers, Shuttlesworth claimed Dell is happy with the Linux sales it's been getting since May when it started to offer three consumer-targeted Ubuntu-based PCs. Most of the boxes are believed to have gone to Linux diehards. Shuttlesworth also told the wire service that Canonical isn't talking to HP or any of the other top PC makers about OEM'ing Ubuntu despite the speculation.

Movidis, the start-up using unconventional Mips chips in its Linux appliances, has discovered that the 500MHz Cavium-made network processors produce a way more energy-efficient and faster web server than x86 chips. According to CEO Ken Goldsholl, his Revolution x16 server works at a fifth the power of a dual-Xeon box, say, while serving up five to 10 times the number of pages and 25 times the pages viewed, working out to something like 98% less power per page view, persuasive statistics in places like China where they're rationing electricity while they build power plants or in Europe where they tend to be more Kyoto-sensitive.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

A seasoned Java professional has to know more than just the syntax of the Java language. Java EE offers a set of standardized technologies for enterprise development. A number of open-source frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate are widely used in a variety of Java applications. Familiarity with new 'beyond-Java' languages and technologies will widen your horizons and make you a more valuable Java professional. Real-World Java Seminar is sponsored by CodeGear, Red Hat, Nexaweb, Farata Systems, and PushToTest.

Xandros, one of Microsoft's new best friends, has acquired its own buddy Scalix, the Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging concern, a piece in Xandros' vision of having a complete Linux stack. No price was given but it's clear Scalix needed to team up to go any further despite its 200,000 downloads. The pair now has a combined headcount of 100 people under Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos and Scalix has new resources. It's going to be run as a Xandros subsidiary, which may insulate it against GPL retribution for Xandros' cozying up with the Evil Empire if things should come to that. This way Xandros can also blithely promise that Scalix, whose brand will remain intact, will continue to support its rivals like Red Hat and Novell and create an appliance-style integrated messaging and calendaring product that works as easily on other Linuxes as it does on Xandros' distribution.

Larry Ellison is planning to sell up to 100 million of his Oracle shares between September and June. Using the stock's $20.61 close last Friday as a yardstick, he could raise about $2.06 billion for asset diversification and sheer liquidity. Ellison also plans to gift around two million shares to the Ellison Medical Foundation, leaving him with roughly 1.173 billion shares or 22.7% of the company.

Intel has started the Mobile & Internet Linux Project (moblin.org) in support of Intel-based widgetry. It's supposed to be an umbrella operation under which a number of key elements for embedded distributions like Ubuntu's Mobile and Embedded Edition, Pepper Linux and Red Flag's Midinux are hosted. It's also supposed to be a point of integration to ensure interoperability.

The Linux Foundation has borrowed Markus Rex from Novell to be its CTO replacing Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian Linux who went off to Sun a few months ago to be its chief operating systems officer reportedly in charge of Linuxizing Solaris to make it more popular and easier to use - reportedly easier said than done. Rex, lately Novell's VP, services strategy, is on loan from Novell until the end of 2008. Apparently Novell will pick up Rex' tab. At the foundation, he is supposed to lead all its winnowed-down technical efforts including the Linux Standard Base and be the primary technical interface with members and technical advisor to the board on which he has previously served.

Symantec's Veritas software has been certified on Oracle's Linux widgetry. Both vendors are supposed to support Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0, Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System 5.0, Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, Veritas NetBackup 6.0 Client and Veritas i3.

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that Markus Rex, a long-time Linux executive at SUSE Linux AG and Novell, will serve as chief technology officer at the Foundation.

For a small business, flexibility and cost are key factors to bear in mind when considering a network threat management solution. Given the cost and inflexibility associated with proprietary vendors, open source solutions may seem like a good option. However, many businesses have traditionally steered clear of open source alternatives, because early projects lacked the commercial support and documentation that they were familiar with. In addition, most people who haven't had experience with open source don't even know where to begin when evaluating if a particular application is appropriate for the business.

Mozilla COO John Lilly calls Steve Jobs' browser ambitions and the thinking behind it 'out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking' because it divides up the world - and access to the web - between Microsoft and Apple making no allowance for Linux, Firefox and the Creative Commons.

Well, the only thing Oracle is willing to confirm is that it's supposed to ship its shiny new 11g database, the result of a reported 36.000 man-months of development, for Linux this quarter, maybe August. Oracle's been beating the ground to tout the thing, but won't say when any other operating systems models are due.

Dell, which is like a year behind in its paperwork, has got until Monday July 16 to produce its missing financial statements to stay in Nasdaq's good graces, but the company says it's going to ask for still another extension promising the numbers 'as soon as possible.' It has been under formal investigation by the government since November though it seems longer because the informal probe started in August of 2005, even if it took a while for Dell to share that particular factoid.

There's been a lot of pubic discussion recently about what it means to be open. While the OSI has published the Open Source Definition, which lists 10 attributes of what it means to be 'open source,' commercial entities have emerged that are described as 'hybrid' models. Many companies offer a version of a product that's sold under an OSI-approved license and another version under a commercial license. Others sell and support products that meet some but not all of the 10 attributes. These companies purport to be 'open' without meeting this strict definition, leading to a spirited debate about what it means to be open in an evolving market.

The single-day, multi-track Real-World Java Seminar will be held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 13. Produced by SYS-CON Events, this is the largest Java developer event on the East Coast, and features a business track as well as two technical tracks. All attendees will have full access to all sessions at the event, so can either stay with one track or pick and choose specific sessions.

ICEsoft Technologies, a leading provider of enterprise AJAX solutions, announced the availability of ICEfaces 1.6.0, the newest release of ICEsoft's flagship AJAX development environment. Among its other improvements, ICEfaces 1.6.0 offers complete integration with JBoss Seam 1.2.1 GA, ensuring fast, efficient creation of Web 2.0 applications featuring the benefits of AJAX and other next-generation Web technologies.

Mandriva says it won't follow Novell, Linspire and Xandros into Microsoft's lair and wants no part of any stinkin' Microsoft patent protection scheme. CEO Francois Bancilhon says he has seen 'no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagandists that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents.'

Red Hat earned $16.2 million, or eight cents a share, up 17% year-over-year on revenues of $118.9 million, up 42% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31. On a non-GAAP basis it made 16 cents. Wall Street was thinking 15 cents on $117 million but it wasn't happy with the quarterly non-GAAP cash flow of $52.25 million, which may explain why the stock dipped Wednesday after-hours with the conference call and didn't come back.

IGEL Technology has announced the inclusion of a Leostream client in the latest version of its Linux firmware. As a result, IGEL now offers customers a broad range of thin clients supporting the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) standard.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

Transitive Corporation, a provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, has released Version 1.2 of QuickTransit for Solar is/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64 solution.

'We applaud all of today's winners and finalists on their achievement in winning our Readers' Choice Award,' said Roger Strukhoff, Editorial Director and Group Publisher of SYS-CON Media. 'Our readers live and breathe the uniquely compelling vision and potential of the Linux OS in particular and open source software in general, both as an integral contributor to enterprise IT today and its collaborative potential for continued innovation on a global basis.'

Linspire developer of the commerical desktop Linux operating system of the same name and Freespire, the community desktop Linux operating system, and SageTV, a pioneer in personal video recording and home media center technologies that combine television, music and related media into a complete, easy-to-use home media experience, today announced the availability of SageTV Media Center Version 6 for users of the Linspire and Freespire desktop Linux operating system. SageTV Media Center software lets users watch, pause and record TV programs on their desktop Linux PCs without the monthly subscription fees required by current personal video recorder (PVR) services and provides a single user interface for accessing online video as well as personal music, photos and videos stored on the personal computer.

Novell also came out with a Virtual Machine Driver Pack of paravirtualized network, bus and block device drivers so unmodified Windows and Linux guest operating systems can run at near-native performance in Xen virtual environments integrated with SUSE and Intel's Virtualization Technology or AMD's Virtualization hardware. Novell says it's the first vendor to support Xen VM guests. It's got drivers for XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 that are due out in July. Red Hat 4 and 5 drivers will follow later this summer.

From Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog entry: 'Linus, First, I'm glad you give credit to Sun for the contributions we've made to the open source world, and Linux specifically - we take the commitment seriously. It's why we freed OpenOffice, elements of Gnome, Mozilla, delivered Java, and a long list of other contributions that show up in almost every distro. Individuals will always define communities, but Sun as a company has done its part to grow the market - for others as much as ourselves.'

Ubuntu is the darling of the Linux desktop space. Voted #16 in PC World's Top 100 Products for 2007, millions of users and now coming as an option for Dell users straight out of the box, this Linux distribution is increasingly being deployed on corporate networks. With a free server edition, a professional support organization and a growing band of enthusiasts in and around the IT divisions of enterprises it is becoming the Linux distro of choice for all types of user. But how does a commercial organization engage with a community built product like Ubuntu? How are licensing and other commercial and legal issues resolved? And how does an organisation protect the code it needs to keep proprietary from that it is happy to put open source?

Microsoft has tapped Tom Hanrahan to run its side of its interoperability efforts with Novell. The appointment comes seven months after Microsoft and Novell signed the now-famous pact that raised FOSS hackles because of the built-in patent claims. Interesting choice Hanrahan considering that since 2004 he's been director of engineering at Open Source Development Labs, now the Linux Foundation, the home Linus Torvalds and a hotbed of the Linux push against Microsoft. Before that he was senior program manager in charge of software development and testing at IBM's Linux Technology Center. He came to IBM with its acquisition of Sequent and NUMA.

Today's Web service providers must understand Quality of Service, filtering techniques and implement QOS and access list filters on their networks. A proper QOS and filtering design helps to avoid network bottlenecks caused by worm and virus infections, sudden spikes in traffic, broadband users, file sharing, and other network conditions. Service providers can use QOS and filtering techniques to align network usage with business policies and requirements, all while still serving customers and supporting their own back office needs. This presentation covers the key concepts of quality of service and access-list filtering using open source tools. The presentation includes an explanation of filtering using Linux's iptables tool and standard queuing methods as defined in the Differentiated Services RFC as well as applications of these methods through generic case studies.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anton Chuvakin, Director of Product Management at LogLogic. We had an interesting discussion about log management and the open source project he's involved in that collects Windows event logs. Here's an overview of our chat.

When the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) launched in February, there was a lot of interest. But some of that interest has been industry head-scratching, wondering about the results and the intentions of the OSA (ww w.opensolutionsalliance.o rg). Noted open source business blogger Matt Asay was among the skeptics in his post 'Yet Another Alliance (OSA)' ( http://weblog.infoworld.c om/openresource/archives/ 2007/02/yet_another_all.h tml). He asks three pertinent questions, mostly about the OSA's purpose.

The FSF left in the tentative grandfather clause that Novell needed to use GPLv3 software upgrades, revs or programs in its SUSE Linux operating systems so no immediate risk of a fork there. And Novell says that it will move to GPLv3 code as necessary. However, that doesn't mean that its controversial relationship with Microsoft, which it needs - like really needs - for the money, and the promised interoperability that goes with it - is safe.

'Companies today are running a mixture of Linux and Windows systems,' said Andreas Typaldos, Chief Executive Officer of Xandros. 'Cross-platform data centers are a reality. To meet evolving customer needs, vendors need to recognize the value of sharing intellectual property, developing more interoperable solutions and providing management tools that are familiar and easy to use.'

'They have ethical and community responsibilities to return at least those modifications that are not critical to their business and that are of general value to the community,' said Eben Moglen. 'We will see over time whether there are additional measures necessary in order to secure cooperation in the community.'