Raga Rao

Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, this morning rejected Microsoft's request to stay the European Commission's March 2004 antitrust remedies requiring it to offer European OEMs a version of Windows XP without the Windows Media Player in it and to license certain protocols to its competitors that would let non-Microsoft workgroup servers interoperate with Windows PCs. In his 91-page ruling, Vesterdorf rejected Microsoft's argument that it would suffer irreparable harm by complying with the EC's decision. Vesterdorf's ruling may foreshadow Microsoft's chances of getting the EC decision quashed on appeal, a process that is expected to take four or five years. Vesterdorf, who will also hear the appeal, found little or nothing of merit in the arguments Microsoft advanced on behalf of a stay and said it did not make a prima facie ca... (more)

Money Earned at Microsoft Goes into Linux Start-up

Paul Maritz earned a gazillion dollars running all of Microsoft’s software development, becoming one of the richest men in America, according to Forbes, before retiring in 2000. And now he’s turned traitor, putting his skills and his fortune at the disposal of, gad!!!!, Linux. Maritz is the key force behind a start-up called PI Corporation that promises to strengthen the Linux desktop with software that’ll make it easy to access personal information because it’s always available, independent of any personal device and gettable from anywhere. The provocative PI, which, come to find... (more)

Covalent Breaks Apart; CEO, Top Execs Leave

Apache commercializer Covalent - Apache being open source's pride and joy -has broken up into two separate entities and several top executives including CEO John Jack have left. One entity, which will remain Covalent, will continue to focus on the Apache Web server and the Tomcat support business. Covalent VP of field operations Mark Brewer is now its CEO. The new entity is called Hyperic LLC and will formally launch soon, focused on Covalent's unsuccessful Application Manager. Mark Douglas, senior VP of engineering under the old regime, is president of Hyperic. Covalent posted a... (more)

Opinion: IBM, Archetypical Capitalist, Sells Out; Gives China "An Important Landfall in the West"

In a tacit admission of failure, IBM, the archetypal capitalist that pioneered the personal computer two decades ago, is selling its loss-ridden PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker partly owned by the communist Chinese government, in a complex $1.75 billion deal that will make IBM Lenovo's second-largest shareholder. Losses forced IBM to abandon retail PC sales in 1998. In 2002 it sold off its PC factories and hired contract manufacturing to build the boxes it continued to sell to its corporate customers. Lenovo is getting the $10 billion operation, the equivalent of roughly 1... (more)

HP Dumps High-End Archiving System

Hewlett-Packard quietly dropped the high-end version of its StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS) archiving widgetry seven months after it launched. HP's marketing director for ILM products and solutions Gary Lyng said Thursday that the 4TB version of the Linux-based appliance was discontinued in December. Brought out last May, the thing was the first RISS appliance and was priced at $475,000. In September at the Americas StorageWorks Conference HP followed up with a smaller 1TB version priced at $100,000. Lyng suggested the price of the high-end model made it... (more)