Can There Be Only Two Linuxes?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A week before the spring LinuxWorld tradeshow got underway in Boston in March, Novell's chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, was quoted in the trade press as saying that eventually, when all the dust clears, there would only be two commercial suppliers of the Linux operating system: Red Hat and Novell. READ MORE >

Oracle's Ellison Ponders Owning a Linux Distro
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I don't know from personal experience, but I suspect that when you are rich, you might have a tendency to think that you can buy yourself out of any trouble and into any opportunity. If you are rich enough, and your friends are rich enough, that brings a lot more power to bear, and you can shape the political arguments or businesses and the markets they play in. This must be what it is like to be Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle, and the other titans of the IT industry. READ MORE >

AMD Pushes Single-Core Opteron Clocks to 3 GHz
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices is keeping the pressure on industry juggernaut Intel in the market for high-end processors for workstations and servers, and last week announced that it had pushed up the clock speeds on its single-core Opteron 64-bit processors to 3 GHz. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Patent Lather
by Hesh Wiener

A while ago, in 1449 to be precise, King Henry VI of England issued a written proclamation bearing his official seal that for 20 years granted Flemish-born John of Utynam the exclusive right to make stained glass using his special process. Many other similar declarations, called litterae patentes or letters patent, meaning open letters, followed, each granting a monopoly to its holder. Only some went to inventors. Then and now, not every invention is patentable. In the Elizabethan era, you couldn't patent a toilet bowl; today you can't get an unequivocal patent on software in Europe. In both cases, content is a fa ctor. READ MORE >