Red Hat

Red Hat 's new CEO eyes the cloud

Paul Mah — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:39:31 -0400

Jim Whitehurst, the former chief operating officer of Delta Airlines and new chief executive at Red Hat, wasted no time in conveying his beliefs on the future of the company. "The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst declared. In an interview with CNET News.com, he pointed out that many of the top tech companies continue to profit handsomely, not necessarily due to the quality of their offerings, but rather because of the high switching costs that embracing alternate solutions entails. The result is that IT budgets continue to rise as proprietary solutions vendors takes advantage of the situation to increase support fees. Not so for a support-based open-source paradigm, where a customer can simply opt to stop paying.

Whitehurst went on to elaborate about the ongoing efforts at Red Hat to position the company to embrace cloud computing in terms of certification and management tools.

For more on Red Hat:
- check out this CNET News.com article

Red Hat eyes virtualization

Paul Mah — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:22:14 -0400

The Red Hat summit in Boston last week saw Red Hat open a beta of its Linux-based oVirt hypervisor that weights in at less than 64MB. oVirt is based on the KVM, or kernel-based virtual machine, and supports both Linux and Microsoft's Windows operating systems as hosts. In addition, it also supports live migration to allow applications running on one virtual machine to be seamlessly migrated to other virtual machines without any downtime. Live migration can be done even if the target is on a separate physical server.

Overall, observers present at the Summit were impressed by Red Hat's virtualization strategy, which also involves building management tools that will eventually allow thousands of virtual machines to be created and managed on Red Hat's platform.

For more on Red Hat's virtualization strategy:
- check out this NetworkWorld article

Symantec: Microsoft patches fastest

Mehan Jayasuriya — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:20:16 -0400

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fastest of them all? If you're talking about security patches, it looks like the answer is Microsoft. Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft was found to be the overall fastest when it comes to patching vulnerabilities, in security vendor Symantec's latest security report on the malware industry. Covering the period from July 1 to December 31, 2007, the comprehensive report reveals that Microsoft released a total of 60 patches over the course of 2007, with an average patch time of 18 days during the first half of the year, and just six days during the second half. In second place was Red Hat, with an average patch time of just over a month--quite a bit higher than Microsoft. Meanwhile, Apple, HP and Sun all lag far behind.

For more on the report:
- see this Ars Technica article

A visit with Red Hat's CIO

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 06:59:57 -0400

Lee Congdon, the relatively new CIO of Red Hat, has a few pieces of advice for others in the IT arena to make sure their work excels. The most important one is to make sure there are solutions that are driving the value of the business. Have a specific set of objectives each year and review them every month. Balance your technical and business demands to make sure you achieve them both.

For more on advice from Congdon:
- See this InformationWeek article

OOXML critics speak out

Mehan Jayasuriya — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:01:16 -0400

As you might recall, Microsoft announced earlier this week that its OOXML (Office Open XML) document format had been certified as a standard by the ISO, a fact that the company was quite pleased with. Not everyone is happy about OOXML's standardization, however. A number of critics, many of whom support the competing ODF (Open Document Format) standard have released statements expressing their displeasure with the ISO's decision. "Will the real interoperability standard please stand up?" Red Hat wrote in a statement. "The Open Document Format, which has long been a multiparty-supported ISO standard, will continue to be a force in procurement decisions to be reckoned with. Government and Enterprises are tired of the lack of choice, lack of innovation, and premium rents from vendor lock-in." IBM was a little less harsh, telling Ars Technica that "We look forward to being part of the community that works to harmonize ODF and OOXML for the sake of consumers, companies and governments."

For more on OOXML's critics:
- see this Ars Technica article

Microsoft: Vista more secure than Linux, Mac

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 06:59:59 -0500

Microsoft--like most tech companies--is known to toot its own horn from time to time. So it comes as no surprise to see yet another security study out of Redmond looking to debunk the idea that Windows Vista is insecure. Insecure? Far from it--Vista is the most secure major OS on the market, if you ask Microsoft. And how, you might ask, did they arrive at this conclusion? Well, it looks like they put together a handy little graph that compares the number of vulnerabilities found during the first year of release to the number of vulnerabilities fixed during that year, for four different operating systems: Windows XP, Vista, OS X 10.4, Ubuntu 6.06 and Red Hat RHEL4. According to the data, Vista had the fewest number of vulnerabilities and the highest ratio of vulnerabilities to fixes. In another chart, data is collected on the number of security updates, patches and weeks with at least one patch. And once again, Vista sweeps all three categories with the lowest score.

So what do you say, folks, is Vista the most secure OS around? If you ask me, despite all the charts and graphs, this is all still pretty subjective. After all, the vulnerabilities and fixes are boiled down to raw numbers without any comment on the nature of the vulnerabilities, whether or not an exploit was actually produced and circulated, the amount of time elapsed between the discovery of a vulnerability and the patch, etc. What do you think, readers, does Vista deserve all the kudos? Let us know in the comments.

For the full scoop:
- see Microsoft security strategy director Jeff Jones' blog entry

Fedora 8 released

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:59:54 -0500

Here at DailyTechRag, we loves us some Linux, so it's good news all around that the Red Hat-sponsored, community-developed Fedora Linux distro has gone all official on us with the latest version. Fedora 8 brings a number of new features to the table, including the PulseAudio sound daemon (a next-gen sound solution that allows individual volume levels to be set for each application), the PolicyKit authentication system (which should make life a little easier on admins), improved support for laptops and multimedia files and a bunch of eye candy including GNOME 2.20, a new visual style called Nodoka and Compiz visual effects. If all of that sounds good to you, hitch your wagon to the nearest torrent and get downloading.

For more on Fedora 8:
- see this Ars Technica article

OLPC: Run the Sugar OS, buy the XO for $350?

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 06:59:53 -0400

Fans of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project have been following the program for years now, admiring the XO's innovative design and altruistic aims. Still, that doesn't mean we've been able to stifle that most primal of geek urges when faced with a shiny, new piece of tech: we want it. To that end, I've got two bits of good news. First, folks wanting to take the XO's Sugar OS for a test run are in luck: as the Red Hat-based OS is open-source, it's available as a free download. As if that wasn't enough, the folks at UneasySilence have gone a step further, making available a pre-configured VMWare image of the OS, as well as instructions for Mac users who favor Parallels.

Still, for those of us waiting patiently to turn the XO's hand crank, merely running the Sugar OS isn't going to cut it. The good news, however, is that you may not have to wait much longer. OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen told Reuters the foundation is deciding whether or not to sell XO units in the United states later this year. The laptops would retail here for $350 or even $525--considerably higher than the $176 they retail for in the developing world. The reason? Jepsen says the foundation is "looking for ways to subsidize manufacturing of the devices so that it can get more of them into the hands of poor children." So for each XO purchased here in the States, a few more lappies would get cranked out for the kids who need them. That could make the XO that rare piece of kit that satisfies your thirst for tech while also appeasing your conscience.

For more on the XO:
- see this article from UneasySilence on the Sugar OS
- and this article on consumer sales from OLPC News

OLPC: Run the Sugar OS, buy the XO for $350?

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:01:33 -0400

For more on the XO:
- see this article from UneasySilence on the Sugar OS
- and this article on consumer sales from OLPC News

Patents Slow Innovation, says red hat CEO

Wed, 23 May 2007 20:01:38 -0400

Red Hat's chief executive, Matthew Szulik, had some harsh words to say about patents at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco: "In the last 30 years, we've continued to see patents really being a challenge to innovation. The industry moves much faster than a remedy process. There is very little empirical evidence that builds a correlation between patents and innovation," he told several hundred attendees. While he said that Red Hat does apply for software patents, he said it plans to use them only defensively. What's the solution? He is proposing a better searchable database, a "cleaner distinction between patents and trade secrets" and a shorter review process for assigning patents, Silicon.com reports.

For more on patents and innovation:
- read more at Silicon.com