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As you know, Red Hat and FireStar settled their patent litigation in June. One of the terms required confidentiality for 30 days, but that time period is over, so we now have the agreement [PDF] itself to study, minus only the clause on financial terms. Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller announced the release of the document today:

In the spirit of freedom and openness, we are happy to make the agreement public today here. We hope it will be a useful tool both in addressing existing legal threats and also in suggesting methods for addressing threats as yet unknown.
Read more at Groklaw

Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller has publicly posted the terms of the patent agreement he helped to negotiate last month with Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern Inc. The general idea behind Tiller’s post is to be transparent about the deal - the only problem in my simplistic view is that it’s missing some very key information about money.

According to Tiller:

Section 3 of the agreement is entitled ‘Payment,’ but the material on this issue has been redacted here. This is because the parties agreed that this term must remain confidential.

How can you be transparent about a settlement without discussing money? How much is a patent worth today? I certainly would want to know and I’d bet millions of others would too.

Read more at InternetNews

Red Hat Inc (RHT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the world’s largest publicly traded provider of Linux software, reported on Wednesday a quarterly profit that met Wall Street expectations as its revenue grew 32 percent.

Net income rose 7 percent to $17.3 million, or 8 cents per share, in its fiscal first quarter, from $16.2 million, or 8 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, it earned 18 cents per share, up from 16 cents per share last year, matching the average Wall Street analyst estimate, according to Reuters Estimates.

Read more at Reuters

Business continues to be good at open source vendor Red Hat despite the economic slowdown in the U.S. Part of the good times at Red Hat are the result of new product introductions that are helping to grow revenues and part comes from the actions of others, in particular Oracle.

During Red Hat’s first quarter fiscal 2009 conference call, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst outlined his company’s financial performance and credited the Oracle acquisition of BEA as being a driver for Red Hat’s revenue growth.

Read more at internetnews.com

One of the main community-driven projects that prompted Red Hat to open source its Satellite code today was the Linux boot server, Cobbler.

Cobbler is a nifty piece of code that assembles all the usual setup bits needed for a large network installation like TFTP, DNS, PXE, installation trees etc. and automates the process. It can even generate DHCP configurations to assign specific IPs to MAC addresses.

Read more at The Register

Red Hat’s new chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted his company needs to improve its approach to its customers and partners.

Speaking on the first day of the Linux specialist’s annual user conference in Boston, Whitehurst said his company need to work on its approach to “mundane” issues such as its own internal systems and managing customer records.

“There is still a lot we need to do around execution. One thing I have heard from customers and partners over the last few months is that we are basically kind of tough to do business with — great technology but not necessarily the easiest company to do business with,” he said.

Read more at ZDNet

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions 4 and 5 are going to stick around in full support mode a full year longer.

Red Hat outlined its complex release roadmap during the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

It plans to extend the initial “intensive enablement” release phase of both RHEL versions 4 and 5 from three years of earnest support to an even four years.

That means the versions will continue to receive minor releases about twice per year with new hardware updates, general bug fixing and additional features for another full swing around the sun.
Read more at The Register

My first actual panel for the opening day of the Red Hat Summit sported the eye-grabbing moniker Why computers are getting slower (and what we can do about it). With a title like that, I was worried I’d be in for a fluff panel about spyware ‘n viruses on Windows being performance killers, with Linux as the panacea for that. I couldn’t have been more wrong, thank goodness.

Rik van Riel, senior software engineer for Red Hat, braved multiple interruptions by a hair-trigger fire-alarm system to tell us how, as counterintuitive as it might seem, faster components may lead to slower systems.

Read more at Information Week

Red Hat plans to announce Thursday that it is open-sourcing Red Hat Network (RHN), its Web-based Linux infrastructure management platform, according to CEO Jim Whitehurst.
“We think it will develop more quickly, and we’ll have an instant community of use,” Whitehurst said in an interview on Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston. “We’ll find bugs we didn’t know about and features will get added. We believe it’s a superior model for developing software.”
Read more at LinuxWorld

When I added Amazon.com to our SaaS 20 Stock Index, a few readers asked me whether the online retailer is really a software as a service (SaaS) company. My answer: Absolutely. And a growing number of tech companies agree with me.

A prime example: Red Hat has inked a SaaS partnership with Amazon.com to offer JBoss middleware as a hosted service. Here’s a look at the deal, and its implications for managed service providers.

Read more at MSPmentor

———————————————————————
PostgreSQL New RPM Sets
2008-06-14

Versions: 8.3.3, 8.2.9, 8.1.13, 8.0.17, 7.4.21

Set label: 8.3.3-1PGDG, 8.2.9-1PGDG,, 8.1.13-1PGDG 8.0.17-1PGDG, 7.4.21-1PGDG
———————————————————————

———————————————————————
Release Info:

PostgreSQL RPM Building Project has released RPMs for new PostgreSQL
minor releases, and they are available in main FTP site and its mirrors.
Users should upgrade to these versions as soon as possible.

• Read more: New RPM Sets for Fedora / Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS

You’ve probably been wondering why I’ve been quiet, when there is news about a patent settlement between Red Hat and Firestar and DataTern in the JBoss litigation. It’s because I wanted to be positive I was correct that this is the first known settlement involving patents that is harmonious with GPLv3. It is.

It’s also harmonious with GPLv2, of course, but this is history in the making, friends. They settled a lawsuit brought against them in a way that licenses patents without violating the GPL. I’ll show you how, but first, so you know I’m not just dreaming, here’s the answer I got from Richard Fontana, Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel, Red Hat, to my question about whether this is the first known GPLv3 patent agreement that works:

Read more at Groklaw

=====================================================================
Red Hat Security Advisory

Synopsis: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice
Advisory ID: RHSA-2008:0521-01
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Advisory URL: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0521.html
Issue date: 2008-06-03
=====================================================================

1. Summary:

This is the 1-year notification of the End Of Life plans for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 2.1.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (Advanced Server) version 2.1 - i386, ia64
Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation 2.1 - ia64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 2.1 - i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS version 2.1 - i386

• Read more: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice

Red Hat’s Mark Cox has produced a report on the vulnerabilities fixed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and 5.2. These periodic reports do a bit of analysis of the numbers of flaws as well as their impact. In addition, Cox looks at the threat mitigation provided by security technologies like SELinux and ExecShield that ship with RHEL.

Read more at LWN.net

The Linux business is going well for Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL). In its second-quarter report for fiscal 2008 the company reported increased Linux business revenues that helped it post a profit for its overall business.

Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian used the investor call with analysts as an opportunity to land a low blow against Linux rival Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and its desktop Linux business.

Revenue at Novell for the second quarter of 2008 hit $236 million, an incremental gain over the net revenue of $232 million reported for the second fiscal quarter 2007.

Read more at InternetNews.com

Today we released the second update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. As with earlier minor releases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 comes with a broad set of bug fixes, updated hardware support capabilities, quality improvements, and a set of new software features that have been backported from upstream open source projects to the Enterprise Linux 5 code base.

Of course, we don’t normally make a big deal about the release of a minor version, but for this update we’ve decided to go wild and issue a pair of blogs. In this one we will talk about the new features and capabilities on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. In the other we will highlight something that we are proud of and applies to all Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, our software maintenance and lifecycle policies.

Read more at Red Hat News

Red Hat is announcing availability Wednesday of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, with enhancements in virtualization, clustering, and hardware support.
Version 5.2 was described as a minor update by Red Hat’s Daniel Riek, product marketing manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“We do these twice-a-year updates,” Riek said.

With the release, virtualization of very large systems with as many as 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory is possible. Support for NUMA architectures is featured as well as improvements in security, performance, and management, Red Hat said.

Read more at InfoWorld

Hey, it’s dirty and unglamorous coding, but somebody’s got to do it. Jon Masters is one of the people who do Good Things for GNU/Linux but get little recognition for their work outside of a small circle of friends. But if you take a look at his personal page you’ll immediately realize that Jon, like many inner-circle Linux developers, has many interests besides programming. And despite his many serious accomplishments, as this casual video interview (shot at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit) clearly shows, he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Read more at Linux.com

Red Hat announced that announced that a European branch of the the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has implemented its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Network. NYSE Euronext is using RHEL for key components of its “mission-critical,” high-speed financial trading environments, Red Hat said.

NYSE Eurotext chose Linux due to its greater flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, cost savings, and the ability to handle heavy workloads, says Red Hat. The company beat out another Linux vendor for a variety of reasons, it says, including enhanced support and RHEL’s implementation of the open-source Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) guidelines.

Read more at DesktopLinux.com

Is the UK really a laggard in open source? Red Hat denies there is any problem.

“Red Hat does more business in the UK than in any other European country,” Malcolm Herbert, senior manager of consulting practice at Red Hat UK, told ZDNet at the Open Source Forum event. “There’s no problem with open source take-up in the UK.”

There are plenty of people who disagree with him. OpenForum’s Graham Taylor, speaking at the same event, is just the latest person to say the UK is crap at open source - it’s become a common story from all open source activists.
Read more at ZDNet