Apple & Microsoft Face a ‘Warrior Rabbit’
Canonical has nicknamed the future Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, a jackalope being an imaginary creature said to be a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. Picture a bunny rabbit with antlers like the star of “Boundin.” Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says Jaunty, which he describes as a “warrior rabbit” – fit to take on Microsoft and Apple – has to boot “as fast as possible” to live up to its name and blur web services and desktop applications into jackalope-like “weblications.” Meanwhile, Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu 8.10, is due out the end of next month.

Adobe AIRs Numbers
Adobe says there have been more than 25 million installations of applications deployed on AIR in the six months since its release. It counts AOL, eBay, Nasdaq and the New York Times as users. Atlantic Records and DirecTV are joining the list.

Amazon To Sell One Laptop’s XO
One Laptop Per Child is going to resuscitate that Give One Get One scheme it tried last Christmas to boost the number of XO machines that Quanta was making. But this year Amazon is going to be handling sales and distribution to eliminate last year’s gruesome delivery problems. The idea is you buy two of the little widgets for $400 and donate one (or both) to a third-world kid and get a $200 tax deduction. The appeal is supposed to start in late November. Last year, OLPC sold about 188,000 laptops under G1G1, 100,000 of which were donated.

Berners-Lee Faults IE
W3C director Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, doesn’t usually go around knocking people’s products but he made an exception of Microsoft the other day when he talked to the AP and told the news service that Internet Explorer’s SVG support sucked. The W3C standard is not built into IE like it is in Firefox and Safari. Microsoft, which backed the VML vector format, depends on an Adobe plug-in that Adobe’s supposed to stop supporting January 1 to read SVG-encoded web images.

Ex-Microsoft Exec Lands Behind Yahoo’s Lines
How’s this for ironic…Yahoo has hired ex-MSN chief media officer Joanne Bradford, who left Redmond for an ad boutique six months ago, to replace its US ad sales chief David Karnstedt. He’s leaving after a year to go to Redpoint Ventures as an executive-in-residence. Bradford joins Yahoo as SVP, US revenue and market development, a newly created position bigger than Karnstedt’s job.

Linux Foundation Bags Black Duck
Black Duck Software has joined the Linux Foundation. It intends to work on legal programs that support software development that includes Linux and open source, sensible enough given its copyright-sensitive solutions for software development teams and legal counsel for managing the hybrid software development process.

Sun Claims Money Deal for MySQL, GlassFish
Sun claims it’s struck a “multimillion-dollar” deal on behalf of its MySQL database and GlassFish app server with Belgian ISV Stésud, an ERP provider with e-government clients in the Belgian government. MySQL will replace Oracle.

Apple To Pay for Backdating
Apple and some of its officers and directors – (Apple’s insurance companies actually) – are going to pay $14 million plus $8.5 million in attorney fees and $350,000 in court costs to make an assortment of five derivative state and 14 federal suits related to backdating go away even though Apple maintains they had little chance of succeeding. The deal still has to be approved by the courts. The defendants include Steve Jobs, ex-CFO Fred Anderson, current CFO Peter Oppenheimer, COO Timothy Cook, ex-general counsel Nancy Heinen, SVP Ronald Johnson, former hardware chief Jonathan Rubinstein, former software chief Avie Tevanian, former SVP Mitchell Mandich and board members Bill Campbell, Millard Drexler, Arthur Levinson and Jerry York.