China Martens

Linux software vendor Red Hat Inc. plans to publicly confirm that it has become a founding corporate member of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. The non-profit OLPC was established a year ago to spearhead development of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratories' project to build US$100 laptops for schoolchildren worldwide, particularly students in emerging and developing countries.

Sun Microsystems Inc. unwrapped a new family of Ultra workstations Monday -- the Ultra 20, Ultra 40 and Ultra 45. Two of the three new machines -- the Ultra 40 and the Ultra 45 -- come bundled with Sun's grid software, while all three systems ship with some of the company's developer tools.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is extending its partnership with JBoss Inc. to support the open-source vendor's entire suite of enterprise middleware. HP previously resold and supported JBoss Application Server worldwide. As of Tuesday, HP will resell and support the complete JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) on a global basis, according to Christine Martino, vice president of open source and Linux at HP.

Startup Centeris Corp. plans to officially release version 1.0 of its Likewise Management Suite software Tuesday. The company emerged from stealth mode in October with a public beta of Likewise that manages Linux servers in a Microsoft Corp. Windows network.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a US$1.24 million three-year grant to Stanford University and software vendors Coverity Inc. and Symantec Corp. The grant will fund daily security audits and analysis of more than 40 open-source projects including Apache, Linux, Mozilla, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

A group of vendors has officially launched the Ethernet Alliance, an organization to further evangelize the networking technology, the companies announced. The vendors' aim is to create an educational body that will last as long as Ethernet technology and provide a single forum to advance the plethora of current and pending Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802 standards.

Startup JotSpot Inc. has a new spin on Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheet with its JotSpot Tracker hosted online service. The Tracker service enables users to cut and paste an Excel spreadsheet directly onto a secure JotSpot Web site so that anyone within an organization can view and edit the information contained in that spreadsheet.

Motorola Inc. officially took the wraps off its iRadio subscription music service Tuesday, making the service available to U.S. wireless carriers. Subscribers should be able to access iRadio sometime during the first half of this year, according to a Motorola spokesman, although the exact timing for that launch will be made by the wireless carriers.