Stories about: Red Hat

Linux vendor Red Hat Thursday jumped deeper into the virtualization marketplace by announcing its acquisition of Qumranet, which offers an embedded KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform that will allow Red Hat to vastly expand its capabilities for customers.

Reports of data losses and system breaches are almost becoming passe but from time to time events happen that take on a life of their own and have effects far beyond what the initial breach would normally represent.

Red Hat confirmed Friday that hackers compromised infrastructure servers belonging to the company and the Fedora Project, including systems used to sign Fedora packages.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would purchase up to $100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell, furthering a controversial 2006 partnership aimed at customers who run both Windows and Linux in their server environments.

Red Hat opened its new Asia Pacific engineering and support headquarters in Brisbane on Tuesday.

A tech vendor-backed company that buys up patents in an effort to protect the Linux community from intellectual property litigation will soon launch a Web site to help inventors file defensive publications -- documents that make details of an invention public, preventing others from later making patent claims on it.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

Red Hat and project contributors have released alpha code for Fedora 10, the next version of the community-sponsored, free and open-source Linux distribution that will include enhancements to the audio, security and wireless-connection features of the OS.

IBM Tuesday marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source by introducing new software, upgrades to existing platforms and an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.

IBM on Tuesday said it wants to free desktops from Microsoft software, announcing an alliance with Linux vendors to preload its middleware on Linux distributions.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says, "Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the "suing Linux users" jig is up.