LinuxWorld reporter's notebook

HP takes the stage

Martin Fink, HP's vice president of Linux, scored points for honesty during his keynote address at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Boston. "My speech today can't match the drama of Carly [Fiorina] leaving HP last week," he told audience members.

Our hopes really rose when Fink brought two customers onto the LinuxWorld stage to discuss their open source installations. But the scripted, teleprompter-driven dialogue proved painful to hear and did make us wonder if lip-syncing could be far behind. At least Fink did get each customer to address what went wrong with their rollouts.

CA and SOX

Computer Associates CEO John Swainson drew smirks and eye rolls from the audience at his keynote address at LinuxWorld when he lamented the cost of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley rules. After all, the rules went into effect to clean up the sort of irresponsible corporate behavior to which CA has been no stranger (albeit before Swainson recently joined the company).

Giving away Ingres

Mercifully, Swainson finished his prepared comments early, which allowed time for a Q&A with the audience during which he become much more personable. One questioner asked whether Computer Associates' move last summer to deliver its Ingres database to the open source community was mainly a publicity stunt: In other words, did CA see that Ingres wasn’t making any money for the company anyway, so why not give it away and have other people work on it? Swainson responded that Ingres pulled in about $40 million for CA last year ("not chicken feed") and that Ingres continues to be important to CA in that the technology is embedded in many of its products. He said CA has no illusions of competing with IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in terms of its database budget, but added that CA still has over 100 engineers working on Ingres. "We think the [open source] community needed a robust, Unix-class database," he said, further explaining the offering up of Ingres.

In Microsoft's backyard

Talk about having some… gumption. Pogo Linux, which sells Linux-based servers and storage devices, calls Redmond, Wash., its home. President Tim Lee says that while the company doesn't really work with Microsoft, it has sold the company a few of its boxes for testing purposes.

Enough of the penguin already

No penguins. That was one thing Greg Wallace says he was sure about when he and a fellow Nortel alumnus decided to start up Emu Software, a Durham, N.C., maker of products for managing open source server applications. "The penguin is overused," he says. So he started thinking about other flightless birds, and Emu Software was born. "The options are limited," he said.