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Linux Software

Fujitsu Moves Towards Linux 31

Posted by Hemos from the yet-another-corporation dept.
Bernard writes "According to the announcement on the TeamWARE web site: Fujitsu corporation is taking a strategic step towards the next generation platform offerings. Mr. Maeyama, the President of Fujitsu Software Operations, says that "Fujitsu believes that new operating environments, in personal computing especially the emerging Linux alternative, is today a viable solution platform for many customers. Providing software on Linux is therefore a logical step." Note: TeamWARE is part of Fujitsu and has interesting groupware and workflow products. The first announce is about the port of their groupware (Office 5.3) to Linux. "
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Fujitsu Moves Towards Linux More

Fujitsu Moves Towards Linux

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  • offering Linux on their Lifebooks would be a better statement. Having the application suite available is a good initial step. Why not bundle it onto the hardware?
  • Another megacorp gets "a position" on Linux. Real commitment required! Bleh.
  • Having teamed up with Siemens who was one of the first companies to implement SAP on linux, this seems a fairly straightforwards and logical evolution , I guess
  • True. It's just another corporate announcement for the platform. I will believe all thehype when I actually start seeing product.
  • I hope Office (aka Steam) Power stays on the DRS6000 :) I remember that you could only send email to an internet address if you set up about three screens (per address!) of settings first.

    An ex-ICLer
  • They are licencees of Solaris from Sun, so what are they going to do on that front?
  • I have connections with Application Software Technologies (www.aztechcon.com), whose Embedded Systems Group in Green Bay, WI writes the innards to Fujitsu's cell phones. They are looking at all kinds of nifty ways to embed Linux, to do things like play MP3s, do e-mail, read Slashdot *g* from your cell phone. Just ideas being bounced around, but pretty neat anyway.

  • Riding the hype? (Score:5)

    by Gurlia ( 110988 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @04:10AM (#1490620)

    As should be expected these days, there were, there are, and there will be a lot of news like this, about companies adopting Linux, porting their software to Linux, etc.. The question is, are they merely riding the hype or do they really see the value of Linux?

    I mean, I've nothing against companies adopting Linux just because it's the "hot thing" right now. But I question where they are really going to support Open Source software, which is what Linux is really about. Seems that with all the media attention Linux is getting, people see Linux as some kind of "hero" system in a David vs. Goliath battle against MS. But how many understand Open Source, the very reason Linux exists?

    Perhaps RMS was right when he insisted on the name "GNU/Linux" as opposed to merely "Linux". I personally have always felt that RMS is a little too fanatical and nitpicky about small issues like this, but with the current trend that companies adopting Linux suddenly become "heroic" and admired by all (esp. by people like the Slashdotters), I'm beginning to think that RMS has a very good point in insisting on the name "GNU/Linux". Linux in itself means little -- it's the process behind it, ie., Open Source, that makes it so successful. Indeed, if you want to reap the benefits of Linux as a stable, robust system, doesn't that also mean that your tools and apps have to be robust and stable too? But if so, isn't Open Source the way to achieve robustness and stability in the applications that you run on your Linux kernel?

    This may sound too purist, but think about this: isn't the reason we despise MS because of their lousy products? But why don't their products "make it"? It's not a question of "we hate MS therefore let's use Open-Source", but isn't the whole reason MS products suck due to the fact that their development is closed? (Besides their goal to becoming the only software company, that is). And isn't the reason that Linux is so good because it's developed in an Open Source model? Linux is good not because it's Linux nor because the genius Linus wrote it. It's good because it's Open Source.

    Now back to my point: I have nothing against companies developing proprietary solutions for Linux. That is good to get Linux into the mainstream. However, keep in mind that for a normal user, she doesn't care if the kernel doesn't crash no matter what; if her proprietary apps continually crash and screw up her report/homework/whatever, that's bad. Worse if she's running an X server that locks up. To her, that is equivalent to a system crash, even if the kernel is still running. One bad component in the system ruins the entire image of "stable and robust" for the average user. Companies to adopt Open Source, and not merely ride on Linux hype. IMHO, a company that decides to try the Open Source model of software development ought to be bigger news than if a company merely announces, "we're porting such and such proprietary software to Linux".

    Alright. Enough of this rant. :-)

  • I suspect that they will either change nothing with respect to their Sparc clones or essentially mimick Sun's positions there. If they are really progressive they will port the same software to Sparc Linux that they are porting to x86 Linux.

  • maybe their very cool laptops 'll come with
    linux preinstalled soon.

    Make it so. (works in Star Trek!)

  • There will always be commercial software, but remember that even if software companies do not go open source; having a vast variety of choices for Unix desktop software can only help getting more users there. If you dont want to pay for the software you want to use, there is still lots of other good software you can use.

    Choice is good, even if one of the choices is non-GPL. After all, you dont have to pick it but others might prefer that. (No, not that I would. But I also know that some people actually feel more comfortable with payware)

  • I have nothing against commercial/proprietary software. My argument was NOT whether we should all use GPL code or it is "morally OK as a Linuxer" to use proprietary software. My point was that Linux (both the kernel and the software around it) proved that quality comes from Open Source. If so, it's not big news that a company rides the Linux hype and delivers their proprietary package on Linux. Rather, it would be big news if a company decides to change its development model to use Open Source instead of traditional proprietary development.

  • In the computer/telephone market worldwide (the last time I looked) IBM and Fujitsu compete for the top spots in telephony (IBM ROLM) and computers.

    Fujitsu is trying to make sure its 'lotus notes-esque' runs on almost everywhere. Good for them, but will they go ALL the way and be sure the code will run on ANY machine that can run Linux Binaries?

    For the average /. user, the software they are offering doesn't seem to bring much to the table. There already is email, calandar, documentation storage methods, and discussion forums (news...etc)

    If Fujitsu or IBM want to make a splash in open source, they should support telephony under Open Sourced Unixes. There is a market void in this catagory, just waiting for someone to fill it with some quality software/hardware.

    Even if it is not useful software for 'most of us', the more software that can run in a Linux Binary executable format, the more ALL the machines that can run Linux binaries benefit.
  • I agree. I own a Fujitsu E330 notebook and have used linux on it ever since I purchased it (recently upgraded to Mandrake 6.1 for those interested). It works great, but of course, it has a winmodem. Even if they don't want to pre-install linux for me, they should at least make their notebooks out of hardware I can use with any OS.

    I actually wrote them a nice letter informing them that there are people who would like to use Linux on their notebooks. I explained that people using non-MS OS's aren't able to take full advantage of the laptop's features and that I hope they will take things like the this into consideration when picking modems and other hardware for future models. They never responded to me though.

  • Are they not also a vendor of plug compatible mainframes? Of which there is soon to be a Linux port that runs on the "bare iron" which is to say, without IBM licensed software.
  • In terms of the quality of machine-code they generate, Fujitsu produces some of the best linux/x86 compilers out there. (See URL http://www.tools.fujitsu.com/) -- and at reasonable prices, too! The only sticking point from my point of view is that they don't support the OpenMP [openmp.org] standard for shared-memory parallel programming.

    If anyone from Fujitsu is listening: I'll buy your compiler suite in an instant, if you'll give me support for OpenMP!.

    I do met and air quality modeling, have dual-processor RH6 desk-side boxes both at home and at the office, and

    • need
    the parallel for development work (final production tends to be on O2000's and the like).

  • I suspect Teamware Office is a tough sell at the moment, what with no PDA synchronization. Show me an IT manager with a decent budget and I'll show you the Palm cradle in their office. And an IT manager's not going to buy a group calendaring/mail/planning system they can't sync to their Palm.

    At the very least, they ought to license Starfish's web-to-Palm sync software for Win32, though between the Java conduit SDK and an XML parser, cross-platform sync for web and client/server alike shouldn't be that hard for these web-groupware vendors to do.
  • The press release at http://www.teamware.com/teamware/NewsPress/Pressre leases/frames.html?linux_office.htm [teamware.com] is exactly a Javascript script with NO provision for anything else (was going to include it -- it's a 16-liner, but it doesn't render correctly on SlashDot).

    I've had too damned many denial-of-service attacks disguised as Javascript pages, and I'm sick of $%(*&$! idiots who won't talk with me otherwise!

  • At our department, the only reason NT's are still on every desktop is TeamWare. All the work are done on Unix (Sun) boxes and 99% of the complaints are because of the NT. TeamWare manages to provide more than its fair share of the problems: we've found it to be slow, unreliable, resource heavy and complicated. And that's only the "client" side. The server operations (like mail) seem to be even worse.

    I very strongly suspect, that changing the platform will not make users any happier. Atleast in a very large network, TeamWare is lousy. Try it if its free, but don't pay for it.

  • I guess the Linux OS is a little easier to obtain than the old IBM OS ;-)

  • Re:Riding the hype? (Score:3)

    by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @09:45AM (#1490634) Homepage Journal
    I would love to see a "statement of Linux use" on websites for companies that supposedly promote or support Linux. I would like to know if they are putting official ressources into the promotion of, or the development of Linux itself, not just apps for them to sell on top of Linux. I know SGI and SCO at least have put real code into the kernel. There are many others that don't come to mind right now. ATI is opening some of their specs to us as well.

    I deal with PICK [picksys.com] on a day to day basis and although they've recently ported their database system to Linux, I've yet to see them do any work on the kernel to make it any better. For instance, they've griped for ages about the 2G file size limitation; well, do they have any of their programmers trying to help with new filesystems, etc?

    This is what I want to know: are you promoting the use of Linux and/or making it a better platform, or are you just soaking it as a free platform for your products?
  • Not only do they have WinModems, but the B-series notebooks have touchscreens which only work on Win98.
  • It runs very nicely on their Biblo range of
    1kg laptops, with sound, apm, IrDA and so on
    all working fine.

    ian
  • Yes, big companies to move toward Open Source would be nice, but it won't be soon. Give them a break! They just started to taste Linux, they like it (of course if it brings money :), let's hope that someday they will be ready for "the real thing" (Open Source that is).

    Remember that Linux and Open Source did not grew over night. Step by step, that's the way. It's hard to move companies like Fujitsu and TeamWARE to new ideas (especially if they don't understand them :). But the work is in progress. We, on the Independent TeamWARE Users Mailing List [romus.com], are doing what we can.

  • I must disagree with you and bogomipe. I have some years now of using TeamWARE Office and, believe me, it's very easy to send e-mails. You just write the address (or the nickname) in the TO, CC and/or BCC lines, like in any other e-mail :).

    As for it's robustness, I run it on a machine with no UPS, I have power surges at least each four nights, but TeamWARE Office re-starts OK every time. TW Office has its share of problems, but reliability is not one of them.

    Bogomipe, if your system has problems, I would check NT first, not TeamWARE. Having it now on Linux will make users VERY happy, no more systems failures due to NT.

  • Yes, TeamWARE Office is similar with GroupWise and Lotus Domino (mail, document repository, discussion forum, web interface etc). Using any of them just as e-mail servers is not worthing, I have sendmail for that. They are worthwhile only when using all the functionalities.

    TeamWARE did only the server port for now since the average user still prefers it's old windoze desktop. But you can anytime use a Web browser as a client from any machine. Check out the demo at http://office.teamw.com [teamw.com]. It's a beta for the next version, so expect some glitches, but should give you an idea.

  • Okay, I'm responding to this article a day late, so nobody's ever going to read this, but here goes anyway:

    Having worked for the Fujitsu corporation in the past, as a second level support rep, I can honestly say that I don't think they're "jumping on the bandwagon".

    I honestly believe that Fujitsu America at least (the division I worked for, laptop division), is dedicated to providing GOOD, quality support for users of their products. They have very strict quality control in their support, and better than average QA on the product itself. Now there's no reason to believe this, except that I no longer work for them, which means I'm not kissing their asses. I only left because I got a better offer, and don't have any resentment towards them whatsoever.

    Having worked as a "go-between" for first and second level support, I can honestly say that (at least as of two years ago) they are honestly trying to implement Linux solutions. They couldn't support it at the time, due to too many differing versions of Linux, and lack of support from Fujitsu Limited (or International, can't remember), who makes most of the components for Fujitsu America. (ie: They couldn't get the horizontal and vertical sync rates for their monitors, and therefore couldn't give them out to Linux callers)

    Even at a time when Linux support was virtually unheard of in the big-name hardware manufacturer arena, Linux was trying to develop partnerships with companies that could "create 'on-the'fly' video settings", or drivers that could produce the same results, so as not to damage the most expensive part of that laptop, the screen.

    Anyway, while I was working there, they WERE trying to implement support for Linux, however nominal it may seem. True, they weren't going to officially support it out of the box, but they were trying to find workarounds for the limitations of this support whenever possible.

  • Bogomipe said:At our department, the only reason NT's are still on every desktop is TeamWare. So why did you choose not to run TeamWARE on Solaris? TeamWARE 5 was running on Solaris in 1996 and TW 3 for many years before that. It can support many thousands of users on a single box.
  • To my understanding, the server is available for Solaris, but the client is only available for Win95/98/NT.

    Doesn't help much, does it?
  • Although I don't completely agree with this situation, I understand their reasons.

    Anyway, this is starting to sound like a TeamWARE specific discussion. If you want, I would like to invite you to join the Independent TeamWARE Users Mailing Lists [romus.com]. I am there, Antony is there too, so we can continue this discussion. And meybe we can also help you with the problem you mentioned you have on the TeamWARE servers.

    Regards,
    Sebastian Paul A.
    E-mail: proteus@romus.com

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