Linux Growth Doesn't Offset NetWare Decline in Q1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Novell may be relatively new to the Linux game, it is no stranger to the difficulties of operating system transitions. Back when Linus Torvalds was just an unsatisfied young man who wanted a cheap Unix-oid operating system, Novell came out of nowhere to create a business based on cheap network operating systems. However, making the transition from NetWare to Linux is proving as troublesome as Novell's top brass has always said it would be. READ MORE >

IBM and Friends Fight Identity Theft with 'Project Higgins'
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A new IBM-backed identity management initiative named after a Tasmanian rodent could result in a new Web services framework for people to control the release of personal information, prevent identity theft, and to authenticate themselves on the Internet. The open-source "Project Higgins" initiative, unveiled Monday, could also spell trouble for the big dog on the block, namely Microsoft and its nascent Windows-only identity management technology, called InfoCards. READ MORE >

The Balance of Server Powers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past couple of decades, when people talked about computing power, it was understood that what they meant was the ability of a computer to do work of some sort--number crunching, database churning, transaction processing, or, more recently, data streaming. Power is work over time, and when you invest in a server platform, processing power was by and large what you were investing in. READ MORE >

Lincoln to Open SQL
by Hesh Wiener

In 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. Today, one of his relatives, Cherie Booth (Blair), is the First Lady of the United Kingdom. In its youth, IBM was insanely jealous of its rivals. But by the mid-1970s, the mature IBM was so secure in its dominance of information processing that it felt it could, without risk, tell the world one all about one of its ideas, a database language called SEQUEL, later dubbed SQL. Today, competitors' implementations of relational database engines built around SQL threaten to do to even more harm to IBM than the nearly fatal PC. READ MORE >