China Martens

The next version of the GPL (General Public License), GPL 3, is likely to appear in early 2007, according to a board member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) who is working on drafting the future release.The GPL is the most popular license for free software and was created by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU free software operating system project.

Linux hardware and clustering company Penguin Computing Inc. is releasing two new blade servers in its BladeRunner family, the 4130 and the 4140, based on 64-bit chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) respectively.

Sun Microsystems Inc. expects to lay off around 1,000 staff at a cost of about US$100 million as part of the company's ongoing cost-cutting strategy, according to Sun's chief financial officer.

EMC Corp. unveiled its Symmetrix DMX-3 high-end, storage-array system, previously code-named Symmetrix 7, Monday. The system will begin to ship in early September, according to company executives speaking on a conference call. The DMX-3 system can store up to one petabyte of data and features increased processing power, internal bandwidth and new mirrored memory technology. It will also support the upcoming low-cost Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives due to appear in the market early next year

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and systems management software vendor Altiris Inc. have strengthened their long-standing partnership with the release of two co-developed client management software bundles.

Rackspace Managed Hosting Ltd. unveiled Red Label, a bundle of Linux software and services running on Dell Inc. servers aimed at enterprise users, the company said. The move came in response to demand from high-end users who are looking for a vendor to manage their Linux deployments, according to a Rackspace executive.

Open-source collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange Inc. has clarified its relationship with Novell Inc. and kicked off a new relationship with Red Hat Inc., the company announced Thursday.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC), a group of IT companies and public interest groups, is hoping to succeed where a previous vendor organization failed in tackling the global problem of spyware. The ASC released an agreed-upon draft definition of spyware Tuesday that it hopes will promote public comment and ultimately result in users becoming better educated about the dangers of spyware.