Red Hat

Open Source companies Red Hat and Canonical have highlighted serious concerns about a Microsoft plan to rid the world of rootkits, arguing that Redmond’s UEFI technology is "buggy".

Microsoft’s UEFI is an attempt to address the recent explosion in the number of viruses and other malware targeting low-level system services. Known as rootkits, these attacks are capable of infecting systems at a level that's difficult or impossible to detect with traditional anti-virus software, and often require complete system rebuilds to fix.

Red Hat has announced that it will acquire Gluster, the company behind cluster/cloud filesystem GlusterFS. In an announcement on its web site, Red Hat explains that the company considers the technologies used in Gluster to be a good fit with its cloud computing strategy. Red Hat will continue to support Gluster customers and will integrate Gluster products into its portfolio over the coming months. It hopes to continue to involve the GlusterFS community in developing the filesystem.

A running joke at this years LinuxCon is that “X is the year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Zemlin, head of the conference’s sponsoring organization, The Linux Foundation, started it with his keynote in noting how often he’d made that prediction and how often he’s been wrong. The current prediction, which I believe Linus Torvalds made last night was : “2031! The year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has another year in mind for the Linux desktop though: Never. Oh, and the Windows and Mac desktops? Get ready to say good-bye to them soon.

Red Hat has launched a "platform-as-a-service" cloud called OpenShift, a service for building, hosting, and readily scaling applications. Think of it as a Microsoft Azure that isn't so Microsoftee.

Initially, it's aimed at developers looking to test applications. By the end of the year, the OpenShift platform cloud will be able to support production applications and offer the sort of service level agreements that businesses expect.

At long last, a version of the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) for Red Hat Linux Desktop is in the house. The first set of USGCB security requirements were created some five years ago by the Office of Management and Budget, specifically for Windows Vista, with the assurance that other OSes would follow. With the proliferation of Macs and iPads, I'm surprised not to see a USGCB for Apple products. How far behind can the mobile platforms be?

Right from the time it was set up in the early 1990s, Red Hat has always been some kind of a beacon to the GNU/Linux community.

There have been peaks and troughs, times when the community has been furious with Red Hat and others when the people have drowned the company in praise. There have been times when Red Hat has taken a wrong fork in the road, times when it has chosen the right strategy.

The Fedora Project announced the Fedora 14 final release, adding Amazon EC2 support. Fedora also features faster boot-times and JPEG downloads, the MeeGo for Netbooks UI stack, improved debugging, and a new "Spice" virtualization desktop framework, says the project.

Released in beta form at the end of September, Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") is now available in final form. This community-driven open source distro is a techie-focused upstream contributor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The community has also upgraded its Fedoraproject.org site with the Fedora 14 release.

Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced Monday. The beta version of REV 2.2 will include a number of new programs that will allows customers to run a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Elliott's proposed acquisition of Novell promises to shake up the software industry, which has grown a bit staid in the past year or two. But what will it mean for Red Hat, and for the broader open-source software industry?

In particular, Novell's acquisition might well spur a mergers and acquisitions revival, as Barron's notes. But will it create overwhelming pressure for Red Hat to sell, too?