Trial is set for April 16 in Oracle v Google and the list of patents Oracle is claiming have been violated is now gutted. The court recently ruled that the entire value of SUN’s stuff is $561 million for the purposes of the trial and since Google used only a fraction of that, Oracle’s maximum payout is much less. Oracle’s minimum payout is $0 because the copyright violation is de minimus at most.

see GROKLAW – Oracle v. Google – Trial On; Most of Cockburn Third Report Stricken

As M$’s client OS teeters on the brink of irrelevance, M$ will have to increase prices for the truly locked-in or face severe drops in revenue. The latest announcement is a change to M$’s database product licensing. Instead of charging “per CPU”, they will now charge “per core” and all those who plunked for 6, 8, 10 or 12 cores can face huge increases in licensing, perhaps $500K per server. All the savings IT people have earned by consolidating servers and increasing core-count will now vanish as M$ does its usual “taking of value”.

They really should look into using PostgreSQL. It’s $0 per core, CPU, server, cluster etc. If they insist on support there are plenty of companies who will support PostgreSQL. e.g. EnterpriseDB would provide and support PostgreSQL for a fraction of the cost of M$’s database under the old pricing scheme. Under M$’s new scheme this should be a much simpler choice.

US Department of Energy were using Oracle’s database and switched to PostgreSQL mainly to reduce costs while maintaining performance. They also looked at M$’s database.

Today could be the day malware artists figure out how to do remote code execution on many millions of PCs and servers running M$’s OS with RDP enabled. M$ has released a patch this patch Tuesday but who knows how many machines will be unpatched in the next few days?

see M$ MS-12-20

Need we say more about the foolishness of leaving your IT as a monoculture of M$’s stuff after decades of them demonstrating little or no concern for security?

UPDATE IT World has a thoughtful review of the situation. They believe M$ has underplayed the seriousness of the vulnerability by mentioning that RDP is not enabled by default in M$’s OS. Many organizations use RDP to control servers and in Wintel, servers control desktops…

see Experts sound worm alarm for critical Windows bug

Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed the 2.6.32 conspiracy that got many important organizations to gather round the 2.6.32 release of the Linux kernel and support it for years. He had seen the benefit of long-term support for 2.6.16 and inspired the conspiracy to do the same for 2.6.32. The advantages for large deployments and distros to support the same kernel were huge increases in contributions and bug reports.

Interestingly, the period of support more closely matched the cadence of Debian GNU/Linux rather than frisky releases like Ubuntu and their “cadence” strategy. Chuckle. Debian developers played a large role in supporting the endless string of backported code from newer kernels. This strategy may become more important as use of GNU/Linux grows in business and government and breaks through to an OEM to consumer channel. Expertise in the kernel is scarce. It is important to get the greatest benefit from the global contribution and that is to share the result widely in the most usable form, a kernel with long-term support upstream. That takes a burden off everyone using the product, right down to the end user.

“During a few of these meetings, in mid to late 2009, the kernel developers working for all of the various distros quickly figured out that the timeline for the next major releases of a number of products appeared to be lining up to happen all near the same timeframe. Because of the success of the 2.6.16 kernel, and how it worked to provide a solid base for a distro to work off of for a long time, we all agreed, informally, to push for a specific kernel release within our communities/companies that I would then maintain in the kernel.org community in the same way I had done for the 2.6.16 kernel release.

We all drifted back to our companies, and planted the seeds that maybe something like the 2.6.32 kernel would be a nice one to do our product on. This planting worked so well, I had to refrain from fits of laughter in one meeting where a project manager got up and said, “We decided that the 2.6.32 kernel would be the best for our product, what does engineering think about this?”"

I still have 2.6.32-5 on one system. It works. Why change it?

see The 2.6.32 Linux kernel

Mark Shuttleworth: “You can call up Dell or Lenovo and order tens of thousands of laptops or desktops with Ubuntu pre-installed, and they will show up on time, certified.”

He was speaking of the reasons governments and large enterprises are using more Ubuntu GNU/Linux. OEMs know Canonical is serious about promoting and supporting GNU/Linux and now bid on tenders to supply PCs in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India and Spain.

It does pay to advertise and Canonical has been doing that. I expect they and others will do more. It’s just a matter of time before this activity leaks through to all retailers. The OEMs are ready. They need the higher margins GNU/Linux gives. The market is there.