Links List 9.5.08

September 5th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Sanjay Kumar is singing like a canary from federal prison. Just when you thought it was over, the CA accounting scandal is back and even more juicy. Ex-CEO Kumar is about a year into his 12-year prison term but still busy pointing the finger at everyone else who he says knew about the company’s fraudulent accounting practices that lead to $2.2 billion in misstated revenue. From a former Salomon Brothers vice chairman to a former US senator to company founder Charles Wang, it looks like open season on CA board directors.

Ten days before VMworld and VMware still can’t get good press. First their CEO, Diane Greene, gets ousted, then a high-profile licensing bug is found and now the Director of R&D, Richard Sarwal, leaves his $1.25 million salary after just 7 months. (Note to self: get into R&D) It will be interesting to take the pulse of the VMware community at the show and in person. And in the meantime, Microsoft Hyper-V comes out of the gate with customers already touting its benefits.

The hypervisor is the “new” operating system. If you didn’t think that before, take a look at Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet for $107 million. With Qumranet, Red Hat gets KVM, described by CTO Brian Stevens as an extension to the Linux kernel that allows it to be used as a bare-metal hypervisor, running directly on the underlying hardware and hosting guest operating systems. But according to Brian Madden, the “press” around the purchase is all focusing on the not-so-interesting part. Along with KVM, the SolidICE product includes Spice, a remote display protocol for VDI.

I wonder if this will be like Symantec buying Altiris or Microsoft buying Softricity, where the portion that we care about sort of loses focus as The Borg concentrates on the parts of the acquired technology that are more relevant to them?

(I’m a sucker for quotes that reference The Borg)

Network World publishes “10 open source companies to watch”. On the list, Qumranet!

Also on the list: Kickfire, Marketcetera, Vyatta, Sonatype, Untangle, XAware, SnapLogic, Acquia and Openmoko. What’s best about the list: Matt Asay gives it a thumbs up.

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September 5th, 2008