Stories by: LinuxWorld staff

"Social" sites are not enough. Watch your "inbox" on LinkedIn or any of the other social sites, and you'll see floods of invitations from nervous IT professionals looking to build up some connections before the big job hunt. But people who survived the last tech bubble are taking a few more important steps. It's more important to butter people up than just to collect social network links.

Antispam software vendor SurfControl has released its first network gateway e-mail hardware appliance, called RiskFilter, into the Australian market.

Linux-based enterprise e-mail and calendaring platform, Scalix version 9.1, is now available in Australia.

Take Linux and Sun Microsystems, mix in the telecommunications sector where Sun's Java already does so well, and what you get - industry rumors are saying - is a possible Sun acquisition of MontaVista Software. . . . .widely seen as the only profitable pure play Linux distribution that is still private. Not for long though, maybe.

Is Sybase targeting MS SQL or PostgreSQL or both? That's what developers and DBAs have been asking themselves after last week's big announcement by Sybase that it has released a free (as in beer) version of the Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database - which Sybase claims is the first free Linux enterprise-class database for production use.

What do Sun's Joshua Bloch, BEA's Adam Bosworth, and three developers from Microsoft's team including Joe Beda, the lead developer on Avalon, have in common? The answer is that all left their respective employers recently... to join Google.

In ongoing efforts aimed at expanding into enterprise systems, 3Com announced the development of a channel-ready Linux-backed variety of the company's VoIP softswitch.

Major Linux vendors, including Novell, Red Hat, the Gentoo Foundation, and MandrakeSoft, have warned of potential security holes in two Linux components. The vulnerabilities are related to LHA, a compression module, and lmlib, a library used in graphics viewing applications in Gnome. Patches are available to correct both possible entry points.

Available starting September 17, IBM is releasing a new version of its DB2 database software. DB2 version 8.2, codenamed "Stinger," is aimed at users of Linux and Unix. With prices beginning at US$25,000 for DB2 enterprise edition, IBM is aiming at taking market share from Oracle, the database market leader.

"Headlines like this...really drive me nuts," writes Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz in his most recent blog. He is referring to the Forbes Magazine headline on September 1: "Sun Micro Still A Potential Threat To Linux." Not so, Schwartz thunders, using his deliberately provocative lower case 'l': "Sun is not a threat to GNU/linux. Innovation is not a threat to GNU/linux. dTrace is not a threat to linux. Nor is Solaris 10, nor Janus." What is a threat, then? The answer, according to Schwartz anyway, is: Red Hat.

Red Hat, the world's largest distributor of Linux, has sent what its CEO Matthew Szulik calls "a very strong message to investors and customers" by appointing Charles E. Peters Jr. as its new chief financial officer to replace Kevin Thompson.