Bill Claybrook

Today I read an article by a journalist with quotes by analysts about Linux and how difficult that it will be to move to Linux from Windows and from UNIX in some cases. Then there is this book written by someone named Kenneth Brown based on a study of Linux and its derivation. Mr. Brown says that Linux may have been derived from UNIX and that some open source types do not respect others IP. UNIX code is in various operating systems. In the early 1980s when I was learning to be a UNIX kernel programmer, I picked up a copy of Lyon's annotated UNIX book. His book had the source code for one of the early releases of UNIX from Bell Labs along with a description of what many of the C statements meant. Anyone could have used that code and most likely did. So, what is really new here? Basically, nothing as far as I can tell. We already know that Bell Labs code was the basis ... (more)

"Novell's on a Roll," Says Bill Claybrook

In the past two days, Novell has made two important Linux-related announcements  - the release of its Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server to open source and expansion of its Premium Service support for Linux. The release of Connector makes the entire Evolution product available as open source under the GPL license. This is a good move for Novell because it is important to provide a product that allows Linux users to collaborate with Windows users with respect to e-mail, scheduling meetings, etc. without having to spend an additional $69 for the Connector. The Connector may have... (more)

What About the Linux End Users?

On Monday, Linus Torvalds announced that software developers making contributions to Linux would have to “sign their work” and “vouch for its origin” via a Developer’s Certificate of Origin. Linus claims that the Developer’s Certification of Origin is needed primarily as a trail of documentation that makes developers accountable for the code that they write for Linux. In other words, there is a need to associate code with a contributor. This announcement is driven primarily by the SCO lawsuit against IBM. However, it is my view that corporate enterprise users would have eventuall... (more)

Linux Viewpoint: Sun's Plan to Confront Linux

I don’t get it. Sun is still trying to go against market trends and push Solaris on SPARC when many customers want Linux. Sun has a wonderful volume server business with Solaris on SPARC. In fact, Sun has lowered its SPARC-based volume server prices so much that it can compete on price with some of Dell’s offerings. And some of Sun’s middleware products are included. But many users want Linux. Linux server sales are growing by at least 30%-35% per year. Users are interested in Linux for a number of reasons: they don’t want to be locked in to proprietary hardware; they know that i... (more)

Sun Open Sources Solaris...Again!

In the past day or two, a Sun executive - president and COO Jonathan Schwartz - announced again Sun’s intent to open source the Solaris operating system. This is not the first time that this topic has been recently aired. I also heard this from a couple of Sun executives at the Sun analyst summit in San Francisco in February 2004. In January 2000, Sun began publicly speaking about making Solaris 8 source code available to developers/users. At that time, Sun decided to distribute source code over the Internet or on CD. Developers/hardware vendors that used the code to commercially d... (more)