Israeli WiMax bellwether Alvarion (NASDAQ:ALVR) reported a record revenue in the second quarter ($48.8 million, or roughly a 9% increase over the $44.7 million amassed in Q1).  This comes on the heels of the company's purchase of 3G equipment (CDMA and GSM) maker interWAVE last week, at a price tag of $56 million.  The goal behind that acquisition is to boost WiMax, since 3G wireless phone mobility will be fundamental in the development of the 802.16 standard.

Alvarion remained quite active thus far in 2004, achieving quite a few milestones, such as the introduction of various versions of its Breeze Access VL products (one in the 5.4 GHz band and another in the 5.2 GHz frequency, in order to meet broadband specs in regions such as Asia/Pacific and Russia).  Another key introduction was the BreezeMAX platform, a WiMax-ready platform that enables customers to deploy WiMax in anticipation of the availability of WiMAX CPEs.  Finally, Alvarion also successfully completed its trials with British Telecom (NYSE:BTY), having deployed wireless broadband access in four cities around the UK.

Forbes.com today had an article about Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) new laptop model, the HP Compaq nx5000.  The big news out of HP's camp is that the company will be the first major computer manufacturer to actually ship a notebook PC that comes pre-loaded with the Linux operating system.  Could this be a sign that Linux might start making a move from servers and back-office servers to the mainstream PC market, including business and consumer models?  Perhaps so, but a few key stumbling blocks need to be cleared first, including the issue of drivers for various hardware elements, which need to be ported over to Linux.  HP worked on some of these drivers (controlling peripherals such as printers and batteries).  The other factor is software, with most people being a lot more familiar with Microsoft Office applications such as MS Word than Unix/Linux-based text editors such as Emacs.  So the industry consensus is that Linux will ship on between 3 to 5 percent of PCs sold this year.  However, that picture might change by the time Microsoft introduces its next-gen OS, Longhorn, which will entail a major system overhaul.  This will cause some IT managers to re-evaluate Linux, which can help the OS to make more inroads in niche areas, such as contact centers and the educational vertical segment (universities students tend to be more familiar with the Unix environment and its tools). 

Yesterday, news of a recent study commissioned by Open Source Risk Management LLC (OSRM), might have surprised the thousands of enterprises currently using Linux in their data centers.  The company specializes in providing insurance against lawsuits associated with the usage of open source products. OSRM held that none of the 400 court-tested patents could be utilized against Linux.  However, 283 of the 1,000 untested patents could pose a potential threat to the kernel. IBM Corp (NYSE:IBM), with roughly 60 potential patent infractions, and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) with about 27, can conceivably threaten the Linux kernel.  OSRM plans to charge enterprises $150,000 a year for $5 million in legal coverage that becomes active if the enterprise gets sued for using open-source programs like Linux.

Update (Aug.4/04): My own take on OSRM's claims is that while some of their observations could be true, the power of the Linux community is something that simply cannot be under-estimated.  Just as an example, I can mention a personal experience installing Slackware Linux back in 1993.  I had a larger hard drive and when I used fdisk, the physical and logical addresses for the newly created partitions did not match.  Back then, I found out Linus Torvald's old e-mail address (while he was still at HUT - the Helsinki University of Technology).  So I sent him an e-mail explaining the problem.  And guess what?  Pretty soon (less than a day later), I got a reply, with new binaries (he recompiled the code to accomodate a larger HD size), and presto! - the problem was solved.  Of course, the Linux community has grown immensely since those days, but this is just an example of how close-knitted the open source community is and how quickly an issue can be solved.  Therefore, I believe that even if there are some potential patent infringements, the Linux community can always find work-arounds and even replace the code when such issues arise.