ReadWriteEnterprise

For ReadWriteWeb's ninth anniversary last week, our founder and Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus took a loving look back at how the site has evolved over the years. But RWW isn't the only thing that has stuck around even as it's morphed over the past almost-decade.

The Web has changed dramatically over those nine years, but a surprising number of top issues from 2003 are still prominent in today's news. Back then, we had to deal with a recovering economy, the rise of Dell and Linux in the enterprise, private data collection, and a lack of Web application security. Many of those same issues are still resonating today.

It's been a long, strange trip for SUSE. What started in 1992 as a small German company (SUSE was an acronym derived from "Software und System Entwicklung," or "software and systems development") with a derivative of Slackware Linux became a mighty Linux distribution in its own right. Money problems led to a sale to Novell in 2003, which had its own share of troubles.

Finally Novell was sold to Attachmate in a deal that closed in April of this year. Attachmate then decided to spin SUSE off into its own business, and tapped Nils Brauckmann as president and general manager of the unit.

Microsoft is trying to lock down system firmware to prevent malware and pirated copies of Windows. Unfortunately, this may have some undesirable side effects for Linux users and anyone else that wants to boot an operating system not officially blessed by Microsoft and OEMs. This poses a problem for hobbyists and large organizations alike.

This was discovered by Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who's been doing a lot of work with EFI booting in general for his day job. Recent UEFI specifications have allowed for "secure boot" that requires an OS to have a signed key in system firmware to work.

The site that hosts the Linux kernel's source code, Kernel.org was compromised earlier this month. The discovery was made on August 28th, and steps are being taken now to enhance security for the site and recovery is underway. The kernel code repositories are believed to be unaffected.

According to an unattributed post on the front page of Kernel.org, intruders managed to gain access via a compromised user credential. It's currently unknown how the attacker managed to escalate to root access.

It's not unusual for Apple to dominate the news, but this week it was inescapable. Steve Jobs' decision to step down as CEO sent shockwaves through the industry. Jobs' decision doesn't come as a surprise, exactly, but the timing was unexpected. Scott Fulton looked back at Jobs' history with Apple and lessons learned from that. Fulton's coverage on Jobs' departure was joined with four things entrepreneurs should ignore when examining Jobs' legacy.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux, we also contrasted the Linux community's approach and achievements with those of Jobs. After the jump, you'll find more on this week's top news stories from ReadWriteWeb's Enteprise, Cloud, Mobile, and Hack channels.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs officially stepped down as CEO of Apple. Today, the Linux kernel turns 20. That makes it as good a time as any to look back and assess – which has shaped computing, and the world, more? Linus Torvalds' "hobby OS," or Steve Jobs?

This might seem like an unfair comparison, one man versus an army of programmers and companies. But that's at the core of the question. Is it Jobs, a leader who pays close and particular attention to detail and focuses on a single mission? Or the Linux community's collaborative but uncoordinated approach that gives free reign to companies to do what they will with the operating system?

For the last decade, Windows has held the emperor's seat in Chinese enterprises. As a result, market share for Internet Explorer 9 and usage share of Bing are believed higher in China than in the U.S. When China's National University of Defense Technology - its key research academy sponsored by the defense ministry - teamed up last January with China Standard (CS2C), the country's principal licenser of Linux, the presumption here in the States was that China was gearing up to kick Windows out of that country.

The presumption was apparently wrong. This morning in a signing ceremony, Chinese industry officials including the president of CS2C formalized an agreement with Microsoft that will pool their research efforts toward nationwide cross-platform cloud computing. In short, it's a pre-emptive truce.

Oracle continued its acquisition spree this week by snapping up Ksplice, a company that sells a zero downtime update technology for Linux. Ksplice enabled system administrators to apply updates and patches without rebooting or otherwise taking a server down.

According to the announcement, "Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates, and expects to make the Ksplice technology a standard feature of Oracle Linux Premier Support."

Linux has yet to displace Unix in the data center. Despite Unix server vendor consolidation, most data centers still run multiple flavors of physical Unix servers. That was the take-away from the 2010-11 Unix Vendor Preference Survey of 306 data center professionals conducted by Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG). GCG has been conducting its Unix surveys for five years, and focuses on physical systems, not virtual machines.

Reports that Apple is now beating Microsoft in market cap, revenue and profit were tempered by one fact: Microsoft has sold more Windows 7 licenses since its release than all iOS products combined during the same period. Whether enterprise or consumer, the Microsoft still own the operating system market. But all that could change.

According to Gartner, OSX and Linux are the fastest growing desktop and server operating systems, respectively. "Among client OSs, Mac OS was the fastest-growing subsegment in 2010 as the unit shipments of Mac desktop/laptop devices saw strong sales, although from a much-smaller basis," the firm reports. Update: Apple's total marketshare, according to Gartner, is still only 1.7% (up from 1.6%), but that's of all OSes including servers. Gartner didn't release numbers broken down by subsegment. Quantcast estimated that 10.9% of Internet users used OSX last year according to Ars Technica.