Robert McMillan

(IDG News Service) — The mainframe may be a dinosaur, but it is a carnivorous one. That was IBM Corp.'s message Tuesday at a press event in San Francisco where it launched its new line of mainframe computers, the first model of which is called the z990 — code-named T-Rex. IBM said that with the z990 it will be reducing the number of its mainframe offerings from 42 to 4, and that the first two of the two z990 products, the A08 and B16, are scheduled to become available on June 16. These first systems ship with 16 processors — the same number available in IBM's current z900 offerings. They will contain a new 16-chip multichip module that will be half the size of IBM's current offerings, and the modules will contain over 3.2 billion transistors, according to IBM. Built using IBM's Silicon-on-Insulator technology, these new chip modules will help account for a threefold... (more)

Q&A: Does the U.S. government have an open-source security plan?

(LinuxWorld) — Is there room for open source in the U.S. government's forthcoming cybersecurity plan? A recent draft of the plan, which will eventually outline the government's computer-security strategy, mentioned open-source software only once. But in the last few months, Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) has been lobbying to have the plan explicitly reject the use of the GPL, and he has circulated a letter around Washington calling for the authors of the plan to do just that on the grounds that the GPL license is bad for computer security. LinuxWorld recently caught up w... (more)

SCO shows Linux code to analysts

(IDG News Service) — The SCO Group Inc. is taking its case against the Linux operating system and IBM Corp. on the road. Last week, the company began showing code to U.S. analysts that, it claims, prove that the source code to the Linux operating system contains sections of code lifted directly from SCO's Unix code base. SCO's presentation, which has been seen by analysts at Gartner Inc. and Aberdeen Group Inc. features pieces of software that IBM contributed to the Linux code base, SCO said. That code was derived from SCO's Unix code, itself derived from AT&T Corp.'s System V Un... (more)