TimeSys has launched 2.6-based TimeStorm Linux Development Kits for Intel's IOP321, IOP331, IOP332 and 802.19 XScale I/O processors for storage, telematics, security, print/imaging, iSCSI, control plane processing and customer premise equipment applications.

The Justice Department, Microsoft's old bete noir, is buying 50,000 copies of WordPerfect from Corel; lawyers having remained the software's last bastion evidently because of the way it handles long files.

Linux backup specialist Arkeia has upgraded its Server Backup and rolled out a new pricing model.

IBM distinguished engineer Brian Carpenter is going to be the next chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The fight for control over SCO's biggest shareholder, the Canopy Group, resolved itself Monday on the courthouse steps when the two sides agreed to settle. In the settlement, Canopy's ex-management may be getting Canopy's 32% interest in SCO.

The controversial pro-software patents directive that has garnered so much opposition was sent back to the European Parliament for reconsideration Monday without any changes, infuriating its critics who call it a 'mockery' and claim it's a 'minority position.' If adopted over the heads of Denmark, Poland and Portugal - among others, particularly those of the open source persuasion - Europe will be one step closer to having a patent system similar to the US.

Japanese regulators said Tuesday that Intel cuts prices and throws 'Intel Inside' marketing money around to make sure Japanese PC makers buy Intel CPUs, not AMD or Transmeta widgets. They've told the company to knock it off or face prosecution. Intel has until March 18 to respond. Intel, who was expecting the decision, called in Japanese antitrust parlance a 'recommendation,' immediately put out a statement saying it believes its business practices are 'both fair and lawful,' but that it's evaluating what to do next.

Barely three months after its acquisition of PeopleSoft, and Oracle, true to its consolidation theories, has put an offer on the table for retail software specialist Retek Inc, outbidding rival SAP, which also wants to buy the company. Oracle is offering $9 a share, $525 million cash; counteroffers are expected.

The review by the multi-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) triggered because of congressional security concerns aroused when IBM said it was selling it stumbling PC unit to the Chinese for $1.75 billion, has resulted in the deal being okayed.

Going into its mid-quarter update, Intel raised its worst-case scenario for the first quarter from $8.8 billion to $9.2 billion but continued to say that the best it could do was $9.4 million. The first quarter is historically Intel's weakest quarter and Intel is operating under the threat of chip demand decelerating. However Intel CFO Andy Bryant described the worldwide economy as 'relatively healthy' and said 'people were acting normally,' during a conference call.

Neoware has bought the thin client business of privately held eSeSix Computer GmbH near Munich along with its development and engineering affiliate in Vienna, adding to its string of recent acquisitions. It has acquired eight businesses in the last four years.

AMD is pitching Opteron as a high-end embedded chip alongside its Geodes and Alchemies, and it's guaranteeing designers that certain models like the 152, 252 and 852 or their functional equivalents will be around and supported for at least the next five years to get them to bite.

Cray has made its senior VP of sales, marketing and service Peter Ungaro president, reporting to CEO Jim Rottsolk. Cray, which prides itself on its R&D, said the move was intended to signal its increasing market focus. Ungaro was once IBM's VP of worldwide deep computing sales and joined Cray in the summer of '03.

AMD is supposed to explain its Pacifica virtualization technology by releasing the specification by the end of the month. It wouldn't say much of anything else about the stuff at it counter-IDF meeting. Pacifica, AMD's version of Intel's Vanderpool techno-widgetry, isn't due in AMD chip until next year.

Intel says it has something like 15 dual- and multi-core processor projects in the oven that are set to appear in servers, workstations, desktops, mobile devices and networking platforms over the next few years.

VA Linux Systems Japan KK, a subsidiary the old VA set up before it hit the wall and morphed into VA Software, says it's tying up with Sun Wah Linux Ltd (SWL) to develop a universal Debian infrastructure and promote the adoption of Debian on Japan and China.

Novell's second shot at getting SCO's slander-of-title suit throw out on its ear has been postponed.

Driven by the growth in volume servers, worldwide server revenues grew 5.1% to $14.4 billion in the fourth quarter representing the seventh consecutive quarter of growth, according to IDC's number crunchers.

Novell says the next version of its ZenWorks management system, due out this half, is going to support Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT). Novell says it will cut the time needed to re-image replaced or upgraded system hardware.

IBM was the first OEM in the Opteron pool, but has only managed to paddle around the shallow end. Now, however, it appears that we are supposed to expect an Opteron addition to its BladeCenter.

The release of StarOffice 8 Beta is reportedly causing Sun to make global changes.

Court-appointed doctors have found ex-Novell CEO and industry icon Ray Noorda, 80, legally incompetent because of age. The doctors were summoned because Noorda is currently the center of a Tennessee Williams-style fight for control of the Canopy Group, the VC operation Noorda founded that is the single biggest shareholder in the SCO Group, which is suing IBM claiming damages of upwards of $5 billion.

SCO, which has gotten itself in a bit of a fix because it hasn't yet filed its 10-K for the fiscal year ended back on Halloween, says it's going to restate the first three quarters of calendar '04 because of 'certain accounting errors.' SCO said Thursday that the restatement won't impact its previously reported financials but will get certain items in the columns where they belong. The restatement is not expected to have an impact on this year's P&L.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Richard Hackborn, HP board member and retired architect of HP's printer business, was instrumental in ousting Carly.

Amid what she describes as 'some muttering over the inappropriateness of a vendor taking the job,' Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs, Michael Tiemann, has become the new interim president of the OSI, replacing Russell Nelson, who has stepped down after only a month. Maureen O'Gara reports.

Adobe has released two software components known as Adam and Eve under the MIT open source license. Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships in a collection of values while Eve is a layout engine and declarative language for constructing a human interface.

Intel and VMware say they're going to collaborate on tuning VMware's software-layer virtualization widgetry to Intel's anticipated chip-level Vanderpool virtualization technologies.

Carly Fiorina, HP's late unlamented CEO, a woman whose corporate checkbook left much to be desired, is in the running to be the next president of the World Bank, according to what a Bush official told the AP Tuesday.

The European Commission has rebuffed a move, backed by the European Parliament, to water down the infamous software patents directive that would give the European Union the same kind of software patent system as the US has. Florian Mueller, who mounted the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, blames Microsoft.

Last week we incorrectly identified Andrew Aitken, one of the people who signed the 'Boycott Oasis' document, as an IP attorney with Venable.

Six-year-old Mandrakesoft has designs on being a first-tier player. The last surviving European commercial Linux distribution, it going to acquire Conectiva, the Brazilian Linux distro, for $2.3 million in stock to increase its size and R&D capabilities.

Novell has hired ex-IBMer Sen Ming Chang to be its managing director for Asia and get it into China. He will be based in Beijing.

Novell's attempt to dominate the news coming out of LinuxWorld last week left Linux watcher Prudential Equity unmoved. It still thinks Red Hat is king of the hill and that 'Novell will likely be a distant #2 provider.' It says, 'Novell is making positive headway, but still faces the difficult task of supporting a billion-dollar-plus run-rate as they transition to a new business model.'

The UK's immigration folk are starting to use Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB Transactional Data Store 4.3 at 70 ports of entry to improve border security. The software was reportedly picked because it's embedded and so supposedly more secure than SQL databases that reside on a distributed client/server network.

The Open Source Initiative has yet to address those allegations of racism hanging over the head of its newly ensconced president Russell Nelson since that posting he put on his personal blog. The Open Source Development Labs has refused to get involved with OSI in some sponsorship or another because of the cloud.

IBM, Sony and Toshiba engineers used the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) recently in San Francisco to hike the skirt on the vaunted and mysterious multi-core Power-derived ~4GHz chip code named Cell that they've been designing for four years and show a bit of ankle.

Novell, which had $1.7 billion in the bank at the end of the quarter, up $500 million, says it's toying with strategic acquisitions. Thanks to that fortuitous antitrust settlement it got from Microsoft, Novell technically earned $392 million, or 90 cents a share, on revenues of $290 million, up 9% year-over-year, in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31, but it doesn't think it should return the Microsoft money to shareholders.

The Mozilla Foundation just updated the Firefox 1.0 browser. Release 1.0.1, available on all platforms, is primarily a security fix to protect against spoofing and arbitrary code execution.

'It seems,' writes Maureen O'Gara, 'IBM doesn't want the court to look too deeply into Project Monterey and whether Dynix and AIX might infringe SCO copyrights.' IBM has asked the court to limit the scope of its own Ninth Counterclaim.

A petition posted and distributed to the press Tuesday by Bruce Perens, the long-retired co-founder of the flagging Open Source Initiative, called for a boycott of Oasis, the standards organization, on the theory that the Oasis patent policy threatens to undermine the open source development and licensing model. Open source leaders want Oasis to abandon its brand new IP rights policy because it tolerates RAND as well as royalty-free.