Sun Asks S.E.C. to Allow Blog Fiscal Filings
105175
The chief of Sun Microsystems has asked the S.E.C. to allow companies to disclose financial information through their blogs.
368060
The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
678700
As Sandisk throws lawsuits round like confetti Sun has issued a counter-lawsuit against Network Appliance (NetApps) which last month sued the Java overlords alleging it had violated seven of its patents.â¦
712651
The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
138166
By Patrick Wright, North County Times, Escondido, Calif.  Feb. 6--CARLSBAD -- First, Document Sciences Corp. wanted to change the  way you feel about financial statements. Now, it wants to make it easier for  workers to read e-mail attachments.
741552
DailyKos, an influential political Web site that serves as a virtual bulletin board for liberals, qualifies as a media entity exempt from federal campaign finance regulations
178479
For Sun CEO Scott McNealy, subscription-based pricing is the most interesting part of Sun s business moving forward. He claims that the model works.
286199
Also: Sun CEO among the few chiefs who blog
585276
Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
541819
The PeerFear blog is built on top of a custom CMS that I wrote about two years ago.  It doesn't support Atom, trackbacks, and some people report problems when posting from IE.  I installed Moveable Type but to be honest I am less than thrilled.  It doesn't support category RSS feeds and I can't associate images for categories like I'm currently doing.  So it appears I'm stuck...   Anyone have any feedback?  Maybe I should install one of the OSS blogging tools.
741320
Responding to a complaint filed by a blogger for politically conservative Web sites, the US Federal Election Commission yesterday declared that DailyKos, a politically liberal site, operates as a news and commentary provider. As such - in effect, as a member of the "media" - DailyKos is exempt from campaign finance laws that restrict the amounts of money individuals and organizations may contribute.
39342
(InfoWorld) - Sun MicrosystemsÂ has released a new version of its Java Enterprise System (Java ES) set of subscription-based enterprise middleware with the emphasis on making the offering more modular. The vendor unveiled Java ES 5.0 Thursday, the first major release of the bundleÂ since October 2005. The offering brings Sun's infrastructure software, support and training together into a single product and is aimed at companies looking to purchase the vendor's middleware at a gradual, predictable rate. Java ES is also available in the form of individual software suites known collectively as Java System Suites. "Java ES 5.0 continues a lot of what we started four years ago," said Jim McHugh, vice president of software infrastructure at Sun. In 2003, the vendor introduced what became Java ES as Project Orion as a way for customers to buy an integrated middleware stack made available on a regular quarterly release cycle. Users can begin by buying the Java ES 5.0 Base for $100 per employee per year, which includes Sun's application, portal, and Web servers, and then choose to add on subscriptions for Sun's Java System Identity Manager or its Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Adding in identity management brings the annual cost per user to $140, which then increases to $200 when Java CAPS is also included. Sun sees its prime middleware competitor as IBM with its WebSphere offering. "They have the same breadth of software we offer, but we did our [product] integration three years ago," McHugh said. As Oracle continuesÂ integrating its Fusion middleware, it'll also be more of a significant Sun rival, he added. Major enhancements in Java ES 5.0 include work on a monitoring console and monitoring framework and a common installer for the software components, McHugh said. The vendor is also keen to incorporate more of its own and third-party open-source components in its middleware. Java ES already includes Java DB, Sun's supported distribution of the open-source Apache Derby database. The middleware also supports the PostgreSQL open-source database. Sun now lays claim to more than 1.3 million subscribers for Java ES compared to the nearly 1 million it declared in October 2005. When Sun released Java ES 4.0 in 2005, the major focus for the new version was the additional support of operating systems from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. As well as Windows and HP-UX, Java ES supports Sun's Solaris and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux. Sun is continuing to debate whether Java ES should also support the other leading Linux distribution, Suse from Novell, McHugh said, and is seeing demand from some European users. Although Sun doesn't support IBM's AIX across the entire breadth of its middleware stack, many elements of Java ES do support the IBM operating system, he added. Java ES users include credit reporting company Equifax, auto manufacturer General Motors, health-care insurance company Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Australian telecom carrier Telstra Corp., McHugh said.
297996
(InfoWorld) - A U.S. senator has called for the U.S. government to cancel an ongoing purchasing contract with Sun Microsystems Inc., but the company says Senator Chuck Grassley's request is based on bad information. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has repeatedly criticized Sun for allegedly overcharging government agencies while on a government-wide purchasing schedule at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) called a multiple award contract. The GSA's inspector general has accused Sun of overcharging government agencies by more than US$25 million in contracts dating back to June 1997. Grassley, in a letter to the GSA last Friday, asked the agency to cancel Sun's contract. Grassley accused the company of not complying with information requests from the GSA's contracting officer and inspector general. The information was necessary for an audit requested by Grassley, the senator said. "I do not understand why Sun would refuse to cooperate fully with this audit," Grassley wrote to GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. "Why is Sun apparently afraid to open its books for inspection? It makes me wonder: Does Sun have something to hide?" Sun, in a statement released late Monday, said Grassley is "misled" about the company's cooperation with inspectors. The company has responded to "multiple demands" from the inspector general and other agencies, the company said. "Ironically, in the same week the senator accused us of not producing sufficient information [inspector general] officials canceled a meeting to discuss these matters because our document production was so voluminous that they needed additional time to review," Sun said. "We have produced tens of thousands of documents, plus transactional data covering billions of dollars in sales, while being subjected to deadlines that appear to be designed to ensure the demands cannot be met." The questions about Sun's contracts surfaced in September 2004, when the GSA Office of Inspector General received a hotline complaint about the company's pricing, according to March congressional testimony from Inspector General Brian Miller. In July 2005, the GSA told Sun resellers the agency was cancelling Sun's contract, because the company was allegedly charging government customers more than some commercial customers. But Sun avoided a cancellation by agreeing to drop some prices. Sun remains a defendant inÂ an Arkansas lawsuit alleging a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme involving IT vendors'Â work on numerous U.S. government contracts. Sun has accused the GSA's Miller of being biased and prejudiced against the company. Part of the problem, the company says, stems from a conflict between Doan and Miller after Doan questioned the inspector general's auditing tactics. Miller has defended his actions, saying he's doing his job. "The president and Congress sent me here to GSA to root out fraud, waste and abuse and to ensure that GSA programs are run with efficiency, economy, and effectiveness," he said in his March testimony. Doan in August 2005 rushed to keep Sun on the GSA contract even though there were continuing questions about the company's pricing, Miller said in his testimony. Doan was worried GSA's IT contracting division "could be destroyed" without Sun participating, he said. Grassley, in his Friday letter, called on the GSA to give Sun 30 days to comply with audit requests and cancel the contract if the company did not comply. The GSA should follow the lead of its inspector general, who has called for Sun's contract to be cancelled, Grassley said. But Sun, in its statement, said Miller's reports on its contracts "are riddled with inaccuracies and conspicuous omissions of multiple know facts." Grassley and Miller have not attempted to compare Sun's contract to contracts by other IT vendors, the company said. "The only party who would be hurt by a cancellation of the Sun GSA contract is the American taxpayer," Sun said. "Our pricing is very often better than our competitors, and the contract offers the government extremely aggressive discounts and contractual protections." Â
602195
The Sun newspaper said Monday it had been stopped from printing details about alleged corruption in party funding, two days after the government obtained an injunction against the BBC.
561988
LOCAL NEWSPAPER The Democrat and Chronicle reports that Kodak will demand $1 billion in damages from Sun Microsystems in a landmark case over Java.
63419
Sun Microsystems is backing European Union efforts to standardize office document formats, including a proposal that would enable people to switch easily between Microsoft-based documents and those created with open-source software.
574932
By Brittany Wallman, South Florida Sun-Sentinel  Sep. 11--FORT LAUDERDALE -- What's it worth to save 22 seconds of drive time?   Not $32.5 million, city commissioners agreed last week.