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Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
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Leading items and editorialsBanks and browsers. The state of Linux-based web browsers has improved in a big way over the last couple of years; Linux users can now use the net with fast, robust, free, state-of-the-art applications and need no longer content themselves with old, proprietary, buggy code. Thanks to the efforts of the Galeon, Mozilla, and Konqueror developers (among others), life has gotten much better. It has often been pointed out, however, that it is not enough just to have a pile of nice, free code. Without open data formats, the free software community's ability to interoperate with the rest of the world is limited. Anybody who has had to exchange Word documents understands this point well. Open formats, of course, extend to data exchanged on the net, including web pages. Certain web sites have proved to be difficult to use with Linux-based browsers - free or otherwise. Commerce sites, and banks in particular, can be problematic. The developers of many of these sites do not feel that they have many customers in the Linux world - if they think about Linux at all. As a result, Linux users lose out on some of the functionality of the net. A few efforts have been made to track which banks have sites that work with Linux browsers, and which do not. Now, a new web page put together by Evan Leibovitch is pulling that information into one place. With a glance, it is possible to see which banks work well with your Linux system, and which do not. This information is useful on a couple of fronts. In cases where incompatibility is caused by a failure of the bank to follow current web standards, a public display can help members of the community to encourage changes and, if need be, to choose a more customer-friendly bank. Where the problems are caused by bugs in the Linux browser(s), the site can point developers at the problems and help to get them fixed. For the free browsers, anyway. Linux browser compatibility has gotten better as the browser software itself improves. If AOL really does deploy Mozilla-based browsers to its customers, one can expect things to improve quite a bit more. It will always be necessary to watch out for proprietary formats and "extensions," however, if Linux is not to be relegated to a small, free software backwater. Time to ban markers. Various schemes for "copy protecting" audio CDs are seeing increasing use, especially in Europe. These techniques generally involve violating the CD standard by putting corrupt data tracks on the outer part of the disk. Audio players ignore that data and play the disk without trouble, but computer drives get confused and refuse. At least, if you are lucky, they refuse: Apple drives, apparently, lock up and must be taken in for service. The many of us who listen to their legitimately purchased music on computer drives have a new hope, however, in the form of a high-tech circumvention device. Chel van Gennip pointed us at this Chip Online page (in German) which gives detailed instructions on defeating corruption-based protection (a translation into something resembling English is available via Babelfish). There are two techniques, both of which work by preventing a computer drive from trying to read the corrupted data track. Essentially, all you have to do is cover that track. This can be done with a Post-It note, a piece of electrical tape, or a carefully-drawn line with a heavy marker. All it takes is a few seconds of effort, and the "rip protection" is no more. It will be interesting to see how the entertainment industry responds to this one. The industry and the U.S. courts have been very clear on their position: a device which circumvents protection schemes is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of any legitimate uses it may have. The industry, it seems, must either (1) take the marker manufacturers to court, or (2) admit that, perhaps, some tools capable of circumvention might have uses that don't involve letting pirates take over the world. Which will it be? The digital consumer's bill of rights. On a related subject, it is worth taking a look at the bill of rights proposed by the Digital Consumer project. These rights are:
This bill of rights would not solve the entire problem, however. We are not just consumers of "content;" increasingly we are all producers as well. As many have pointed out, "content" and "intellectual property" are inputs to the creative process, not just the output. The current expansion of copyright, patent law, and "digital rights management" schemes makes it ever harder to create anything without running into somebody's claimed intellectual property. Thus the original goal of intellectual property laws - to encourage invention and creation - is being thwarted. Modern technology makes it easier for us all to be producers, not just consumers, and the world is a richer place for it. We very much need a bill of rights which protects our rights as consumers, but we also need a bill of rights which recognizes that we are producers.
No dismissal in Elcomsoft case. Meanwhile, back in the real world, here is a release from the EFF on the latest ruling in the Elcomsoft case. Judge Whyte has refused all of the defense's motions for dismissal. The DMCA, he says, is entirely clear: it means to ban all "circumvention devices" regardless of their legal uses. And, while the program involved qualifies as speech, the government still can regulate it because it is controlling its "function," not its "content." The trial date is May 20. Inside this LWN.net weekly edition:
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May 16, 2002
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel release is 2.5.15, released on May 9. Changes this time around include a resumption of the "device model" work (with an emphasis on the x86 PCI code), more IDE reworking (including the removal of /proc/ide - see last week's LWN Kernel Page), an NFS server update, many patches from the "dj" series, and lots of other fixes and updates. The in-progress 2.5.16 patch, as seen in BitKeeper, includes an ISDN update, George Anziger's 64-bit jiffies patch, the usual IDE patches, some networking updates, work on the new NFS export scheme, and more. Dave Jones's latest patch is 2.5.15-dj1, which contains a relatively small set of fixes and updates. The latest 2.5 status summary from Guillaume Boissiere is dated May 15. The current stable kernel release is 2.4.18. No 2.4.19 prepatches have been released by Marcelo this week. The current patch from Alan Cox is 2.4.19-pre8-ac4. The biggest change here is a new set of IDE updates by Andre Hedrick that went into -ac3. The 2.4 and 2.5 IDE subsystems continue to go in very different directions. On the 2.2 front, Alan has released 2.2.21-rc4, the latest 2.2.21 release candidate. Unless something turns up, this one will become the real 2.2.21. The future of in-kernel web servers. Some recent discussion on troubles with khttpd, the in-kernel web server which has been present since the early 2.3 days, led to the statement that khttpd would soon be removed from the 2.5 series. khttpd has a number of happy users, but it has been essentially unmaintained for a number of years, and it has been superseded by Ingo Molnar's TUX server. So the kernel developers see little reason to keep it around. The more interesting question, perhaps, is whether TUX will take the place of khttpd. There appears to be little consensus on whether TUX should go in or not. Some developers are worried about the impact of the TUX patch, while others claim it affects little other code. It is not clear how much of a performance benefit TUX really provides - some user-space web servers are said to be getting quite close to TUX in speed. And, of course, a number of people feel that an application like a web server has no place inside the Linux kernel. Servers like TUX and khttpd remain interesting as a demonstration of how to create the shortest, fastest path between the network and files on a disk. Chances are that TUX will find its way into a mainline kernel sooner or later. Per-driver filesystems made easy. Alexander Viro has long been a proponent of small, special-purpose filesystems as a way for device drivers (or other kernel subsystems) to communicate with user space. The mini filesystem approach, he says, is a far cleaner and safer technique than the alternatives: /proc, the ioctl() call, or devfs. This approach makes sense to a number of people, but it has not been widely adopted. After all, if you are not Al Viro (which is the case for most of us), hacking up a new filesystem can be a little intimidating. So he has been trying for a while to make the task of writing driver filesystems easier. His latest posting includes a set of library functions which mostly concern themselves with the creation of superblocks for virtual filesystems. The superblock is a good thing to hide within a library layer; virtual filesystems just need something to hand to the VFS; there should be no need for each one to duplicate a lot of "fill in the superblock field" code. The other half of the posting is a driver which creates a little filesystem to export the value of a set of VIA motherboard temperature sensors. The whole thing takes up 70 lines of code, and much of that, of course, is dealing with getting information from the sensors. The task of creating special purpose virtual filesystems has indeed been made easy. The trickier part in the long run may be on the system administration side. If the mini filesystem approach takes off, each system will have to be configured to mount these filesystems in the right places. /proc files and ioctl() calls just show up in their standard places, but filesystems must be explicitly mounted somewhere. How are VIA motherboard users to know that they can mount a devvia filesystem somewhere to read their temperature sensors? Add in a dozen other hardware-specific filesystems and one begins to see that some work on system administration tools will be needed to make it all easy to manage. A different approach to asynchronous I/O. It started with a discussion of the O_DIRECT flag, which can be used to request that "direct" I/O be performed on a file. Direct I/O moves data directly between the userspace buffer and the device performing the I/O, without copying through kernel space. Direct I/O can be faster, since it avoids copy operations and because it does not fill the system's page cache with data that will not be used again. It was noted recently that benchmarks using O_DIRECT tend to perform worse than those using regular, cached I/O. The reason for this poor performance is reasonably straightforward: direct I/O, as implemented in Linux, is synchronous. The application must sleep and wait for the operation to complete, and there is no opportunity to reorder operations for better I/O performance. If you really want to make O_DIRECT work well, you need to combine it with asynchronous I/O. So, one would think, there would be a motivation to get the asynchronous I/O patches into the 2.5 kernel. Linus, however, has other ideas, based on his opinion of O_DIRECT: The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances.
In other words, one might conclude that he doesn't like it. A statement like that, of course, raises an immediate question: how, exactly, would one design a high-performance, zero-copy, asynchronous I/O subsystem if you can't get the monkeys to share their substances with you? Linus's answer is to split apart the two aspects of the problem: performing the I/O and connecting the data to user space. In this new scheme, a process wishing to do asynchronous, direct reads from a file would, after opening that file, invoke a new system call:
readahead (file_desc, offset, size);
This call will set the kernel to populating the system's page cache with
data from the file starting at the given offset, for an amount
approximating size. At this point, the data is in (kernel)
memory, and is not visible to the userspace application. Actually getting
at the data requires calling mmap with a special
MAP_UNCACHED flag.
This memory mapping is special in a couple of ways. One is that it does not set up any page tables when the mapping is established, so it happens very quickly. The other is that, when the user application generates a page fault (by trying to access the data it ordered with readahead()), the page is "stolen" from the page cache and turned into a private page belonging to the application. Until the fault happens, the read operation is entirely asynchronous; once the application actually tries to use the data, it will wait if the operation still has not completed. If the application is, instead, looking to write data, it starts by populating its mapped memory segment. When things are ready to go, another new system call: mwrite (file_desc, address, length);is used. mwrite() puts the page back into the page cache (where it will get written eventually) and removes it from the process's page table. The (new) fdatasync_area() system call may be used to force (and wait for) specific pages to be written. A process which is simply copying data need never access the pages in the mapping directly. In this case, no page tables ever get built, and things go even more quickly. Pure copy cases are relatively rare, though, especially since this scheme would not support I/O to network connections (which do not use the page cache). The high-profile application for this sort of I/O (or O_DIRECT) is Oracle, which performs lots of I/O out of large segments. So far, all this is just a scheme sketched out by Linus, with no implementation to play with. Should some ambitious kernel hacker code it up, however, it would be interesting to see how it really performs relative to other techniques. Corrections on the buffer head work. Andrew Morton politely pointed out that your editor was more confused than usual when writing about Andrew's buffer head work last week. The bulk of that work actually affected the way the write() system call was handled. In the old scheme, data to be written back to files would find its way into the buffer head least-recently-used queue, where it would eventually be flushed to disk. With the new code, this data is written directly from the page cache, in a more page-oriented mode. Buffer heads are still used to coordinate the I/O process, for now. As a result of all the block layer work that has gone in, the block system now takes those buffer heads and digs down to the real pages underneath them. So, at some point, an obvious step will be to remove the buffer head "middleman," and submit pages to be written directly to the block layer. So, eventually, buffer heads will no longer be the main I/O mechanism for block I/O. Sorry for the confusion. Other patches and updates released this week include:
Kernel trees:
Core kernel code:
Device drivers
Filesystems:
Kernel building:
Miscellaneous:
Ports:
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet |
May 16, 2002 For other kernel news, see: Other resources: |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Distributions page.
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DistributionsPlease note that security updates from the various distributions are covered in the security section. News and EditorialsALT Linux. This week we are happy to spotlight ALT Linux. ALT Linux developer Michael Shigorin was kind enough to fill out an LWN Distribution survey for us. You can find the full results here and also linked from the new entry in the LWN Distributions List (under General Purpose). It started as the Linux-Mandrake Russian Edition, created by the IPLabs Linux Team. But not all the significant changes found their way back to Mandrake, and the team went on to create ALT Linux. There are several branches now, all using the ALT Linux Master tree. ALT Linux uses RPM4 plus APT (Conectiva apt/rpm port) for package management. English, Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian, French, and German are supported, with a special emphasis on a correct implementation of The Free Standards Group's Linux Internationalization Initiative Li18nux. Sisyphus is the current unstable branch of ALT Linux. Here is the Freshmeat page for version 20020507 of Sisyphus. The recently released ALT Linux 2.0 Master can be downloaded from the FTP site, or purchased as a boxed set with 6 CDs, installation, administrator's and user's manuals, as well as a manual on OpenOffice.org, and lots of extras, including some music in Ogg Vorbis format. The Castle branch has been on the LWN List for some time. It's a secured, RSBAC-enabled, server distribution. There is also ALT Linux Junior, a single-disk distribution for home computers, designed especially for beginners, easy to install and use; and ALT Linux MSI Edition, a specialized OEM distribution for MicroStar, with a large set of multimedia applications, OpenOffice and games. New DistributionsAleph ARM Linux returns. This is one of those not-at-all-new distributions that simply got lost. Aleph One provides well-documented Linux distributions for various ARM-based systems. There is an official Debian ARM release based on Debian 2.2; and they are working on Psion and Compaq iPaq and other RISC architectures as well. Wookey at Aleph One filled out an LWN distribution survey on February 6, 2000, which somehow managed to get lost until we got another copy this week. Distribution NewsDebian Weekly News. The Debian Weekly News for May 8 covers hardware detection libraries, Bruce Perens's open standards efforts, the new Debian Developers Reference, and several other topics. Kernel Cousin Debian Hurd #118. Issue #118 of Kernel Cousin Debian Hurd looks at GCC bugs, boot messages and logging, building the parted store modules with Autotools, and more. Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter - Issue #42. The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for May 8, 2002 is available. This week's issue has news about Incident-based Support Packs at MandrakeStore; the latest MandrakeClub activities; KDE3 Packages for 8.2 PPC; errata updates for 8.2 x86 & PPC; and much more. Red Hat Linux. Red Hat bug fix advisories for this week:
Slackware Linux. Here is this week's slice of the Slackware-current changelog. Minor Distribution updates2-Disk Xwindow System. The 2-Disk Xwindow System has released v1.4rc11 with fixes to chimera (SSL tracing fixes), an "obfuscation reimpedimentation" in the SOCKS transport layer, and table cleanups. Astaro Security Linux. Astaro Security Linux has released v2.024 with minor security fixes. BasicLinux. BasicLinux has released v1.7 with major feature enhancements. ELX. ELX, Everyone's Linux, is getting ready for its global launch. "The soft launch is scheduled to take place during the third week of May all across the United States and North America. By the first week of June the product would find its way into Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and the rest of the world." EnGarde Secure Linux. EnGarde Secure Linux bug fix advisories for this week:
EvilEntity Linux. EvilEntity Linux has released DR-0.2.4f with minor bug fixes. Gentoo Linux. Gentoo Linux has some important Portage/rsync news. Edmonds Enterprises has Gentoo Linux 1.1a CDs available for $0.99 USD (plus $1.50 for shipping). Kondara MNU/Linux. Kondara MNU/Linux has updates available for several packages. There is also a change in the FTP tree and how Errata Packages are provided. LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall). LEAF has released Shorewall 1.2.13. The changes in this release include SuSE RPM support, white-listing, and the addition of TCP connection rate limiting. PXES Linux Thin Client. PXES Linux Thin Client has released 0.4-Beta2 with minor feature enhancements. Distribution ReviewsAschwin Marsman upgrades to Red Hat 7.3. Aschwin Marsman of aYniK Software Solutions has updated his review of Red Hat Linux 7.3. Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
May 16, 2002
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Distribution Lists:
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Development page. |
Development projectsNews and EditorialsThe FOX ToolkitFOX, which stands for Free Objects for X, is a C++ based toolkit that provides components for writing Graphical User Interface software. Design goals of FOX include ease of programming, portability, speed, and minimal memory usage. FOX runs on a variety of platforms, including most popular Unix and Windows variants.
FOX development was started in 1997 on the Linux platform. FOX has been designed so that applications written with it can move across platforms with ease. The FOX documentation Foreword and Goals pages explain the history and design goals of FOX in greater detail. The FOX Screenshots page give a look at various FOX applications. One such application is the FOX Calculator, a general purpose scientific calculator application. Also, see A.D.I.E., the ADvanced Interactive Editor, another FOX based application. See the FOX-Based Projects and screenshots page for more examples. FOX bindings are available for Python via FXPy, for Ruby via FXRuby, and for Eiffel via EiffelFox. Development version 1.1.9 of FOX has recently been released. This version features a new FXGradientBar widget, improved performance, bug fixes, and more. The release notes indicate that steady progress is being made on FOX development, the project has become stable enough to warrant a 1.X designation. FOX may be downloaded here, packages are available for Debian, Red Hat, and Mandrake, in addition to .gz files. FOX has been released under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). (Thanks to Dejan Lekic.) DatabasesMini SQL 3.0 Pre 4.1. Mini SQL 3.0 Pre 4.1 has been released. This version fixes a bug that was found in Mini SQL 3.0 Pre 4. See the release notes for all of the details. EducationSeul/EDU Linux in Education Report. Issue #70 of the Seul/EDU Linux in Education report looks at German efforts to bring open-source software to education, the Vidyakash 2002 online learning conference, and more. Embedded SystemsLinux Devices Embedded Linux Newsletter. The May 9, 2002 Embedded Linux Newsletter has been published by Linux Devices. Topics include penguins on the North pole, the Hippo Internet phone, real-time Linux sub-kernels, a new ELC membership structure, and more. Mail SoftwareMail filtering with Sentinel. Version 1.2 of an email filtering utility known as Sentinel has been announced. Sentinel works on various Unix operating systems in conjunction with sendmail. Sentinel is licensed under the GPL. ScienceLittlefish . Linux Med News reports that the Littlefish Health Project, a patient information and recall system, has been integrated into the Res Medicinae project. System AdministrationA Batch Job to Add New User IDs (O'Reilly). Arnold Robbins explains how to use the Korn shell to automate systems administration tasks. "A common system administration task is to add new users. In large installations, such as central computing servers at universities or in large companies, adding users is often best performed as a 'batch' job, one that is automated with scripts. Consider, for example, the start of a new semester at a large public university, where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of new students. Creating accounts by hand would be impossible, so we need to automate the task." Web-site DevelopmentManaging Images With a Web Database Application (O'Reilly). Hugh E. Williams talks about the use of PHP and MySQL for managing image archives on the web. "Web developers often need to store images, sounds, movies, and documents in a database and deliver these to users. In this article, I'll show you how to develop a simple Web database application that allows users to upload and retrieve images, but can easily be adapted to storing files of any type." |
May 16, 2002
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Desktop DevelopmentAudio ApplicationsWaveSurfer 1.4 released. Version 1.4 of the WaveSurfer tool for sound visualization and manipulation. is available. The CHANGES file has not been updated as of this writing. Web BrowsersMozilla 1.0 RC2. Release Candidate #2 of the Mozilla browser is available. The release notes mention a plugged security hole, fixes for the 15 most common crashing bugs and 10 freezing bugs, support for CSS2:hover, and more. Also, see the coverage of this release on MozillaZine. Desktop EnvironmentsGNOME 2.0 Desktop Snapshot 20020509: 'Cominagetcha'. A new snapshot of GNOME 2.0 has been announced. The 'Cominagetcha' release contains 17 updated modules. KDE Usability Team Takes First Steps. The KDE Usability Team has made big changes to the Kicker KControl module. Games4st Attack (PyGame). This week, the PyGame site features 4st Attack, a stone-connecting game. "The goal of the game is to connect four of stones in a straight line. This can be horizontaly, vertically and even diagonnally." GUI PackagesFLTK 1.1.0rc2 Now Available. A new version of FLTK, the Fast, Light ToolKit, has been announced. FLTK 1.1.0rc2 features portability fixes, tooltip changes, and bug fixes. InteroperabilityKernel Cousin Wine #122. Issue #122 of Kernel Cousin Wine covers the Xandros Beta, removal of the Quartz dll, SafeDisc support, the Native user32 dll, trading patches, and more. Wine release 20020509. A new developer's release of Wine has been announced. Version 20020509 features dll separation work, async I/O improvements, more unit tests, less multimedia code, as well as portability and bug fixes. MultimediaGNOME Media 1.547.0 released. A new version of GNOME Media has been released. Version 1.547.0 features general improvements and bug fixes. Office ApplicationsGNOME Office becoming more than a name. Progress is being made with the integration of AbiWord into the GNOME environment, according to this message on Gnotices. Included are links to screenshots of AbiWord embedded within Gnumeric and Evolution. AbiWord 1.0.1 released.. The stable AbiWord release is no longer a stealth product: the AbiWord team has announced the release of AbiWord 1.0.1. See the release notes for details. AbiWord Weekly News. Issue #91 of the AbiWord Weekly News covers all of the latest AbiWord development issues. Kernel Cousin GNUe #28. Issue #28 of Kernel Cousin GNUe looks at using GNUe for plant nursery management, problems with GNUe Common and mySQL, the GNUe Application Server, and much more. Bluefish needs GTK 2 porting help. The Bluefish HTML Editor home page mentions that help is needed for porting Bluefish to the GTK environment2. MiscellaneousNautilus homepage and theme tutorial. A number of resources for the Nautilus file manager are now online on the Nautilus home page. Kooka Scanner Suite Now With Website (KDE.News). A new web site has been announced for KDE's Kooka. "Kooka is a scanner management suite for KDE with support for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The Kooka web site offers extensive documentation on Kooka and the KScan library, future project plans, screenshots, and much more." |
Desktop Environments GNOME GNUstep KDE XFce XFree86 Window Managers Afterstep Enlightenment FVMW2 IceWM Sawfish WindowMaker Widget Sets GTK+ Qt |
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Languages and ToolsCamlCaml Weekly News for May 14, 2002. The May 7-14, 2002 Caml Weekly News covers new releases of gmetadom, gdome2-xslt, and lablgtkmathview, and looks at random variables, graphics without open_graph, the FFTW interface, and more. The Caml Hump. This week's Caml Hump additions include an interface to the FFTW library, gdome2-xslt, gmetadom, lablgtkmathview, Camomile, DBC, Stew, and OCamlMySQL. HaskellHaskell Communities and Activities Report. The second edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report has been published. "The idea behind these reports is simple: twice a year, a call goes out to the main Haskell mailing list, inviting all Haskellers to contribute brief summaries of their area of work, be it language design, implementation, type system extensions, standardisation of GUI APIs, applications of Haskell, or whatever. The summaries introduce the area of work, the major achievements over the previous six months, the current hot topics, and the plans for the next six months. They also provide links to further information." (Thanks to Christian Sievers.) JavaTest flexibly with AspectJ and mock objects (IBM developerWorks). Nicholas Lesiecki discusses unit testing and eXtreme Programming for Java on IBM's developerWorks. "The recent attention to Extreme Programming (XP) has spilled over onto one of its most portable practices: unit testing and test-first design. As software shops have adopted XP's practices, many developers have seen the increase in quality and speed that comes from having a comprehensive unit-test suite. But writing good unit tests takes time and effort." Developing Highly Distributed Applications with Jtrix (O'Reilly). Nik Silver shows how to make use of Jtrix on O'Reilly's OnJava site. "Jtrix is an open source Java platform for creating highly scalable, distributed, and efficient Web services. This article describes Jtrix, compares it to other Java technologies, and illustrates how to write a Jtrix application -- both a client, and the service it uses." PerlAsk Perl 6 (use Perl). It's time to send your Perl 6 questions in. The questions will be answered by the Perl 6 design team, answers will be posted on May 20th. The Perl You Need To Know - Part 2 (O'Reilly). Stas Bekman illustrates Perl debugging techniques on O'Reilly's perl.com site. Where Wizards Fear To Tread (O'Reilly). Simon Cozens explains the Perl op tree on perl.com. "So you're a Perl master. You've got XS sorted. You know how the internals work. Hey, there's nothing we can teach you on perl.com that you don't already know. You think? Where Wizards Fear To Tread brings you the information you won't find anywhere else concerning the very top level of Perl hackery." PHPPHP 4.2.1 released. Version 4.2.1 of PHP has been announced. This is a bug fix release that addresses a problem with MySQL, among other things. See the Change Log for more information. PHP Weekly Summary for May 13, 2002. The May 13, 2002 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary covers the new PHP 4.2.1 RC 2, the PHP 4.3.0 release schedule, bug fixes, and more. Developing Professional Quality Graphs with PHP (Zend). Jason E. Sweat has put together a tutorial that covers the generation of graphics from PHP. "This tutorial is intended for the PHP programmer interested in applying PHP's GD image manipulation to chart data. This tutorial will focus not on the lower level GD calls, but on using the JpGraph libraries to wrap the GD calls." PythonDr. Dobb's Python-URL! for May 14. Here's the weekly Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! with news and links for the Python community. Building basic browser functionality with wxPython (IBM developerWorks). Nicholas Bastin introduces wxPython on IBM's developerWorks. "Embedding a Web browser in your application eliminates the need to worry about which browser a client uses to view your pages, and also allows you to create custom tags that tie the HTML page back to your application." Cross-compiling Python. K's cluttered loft features an article about the trickeries involved in cross-compiling Python. "Cross compiling Python is tricky because:
The Daily Python-URL. This week, the Daily Python-URL features articles on the European Python and Zope conference, the Wing IDE, the webAppWorkshop, the Python pattern, fun with generators, Coffee, conversation and ZUBB, and more. RubyThe Ruby Garden. This week, The Ruby Garden looks at Array.rassoc and Array.assoc for making arrays of arrays, and Float#to_s issues. The Ruby Weekly News. The Ruby Weekly News has announcements for SOAP4R 1.4.4.1, QuantLib-Ruby 0.3.0, JTTui 0.11.0, Practical Ruby 0.3.3, PageTemplate 0.2.0, REXML 2.3.2, and xample-pp 0.0. Other ruby discussions are also included. Tcl/TkDr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. This week's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! covers interpreter aliases, concurrency and re-entrancy problems, the grid manager, documentation, and more. Integrated Development EnvironmentsPhpmole 1.3 released. A new version of the Phpmole IDE, which is used for developing web based and phpgtk based applications, has been released. This version features a new look, a beta interactive debugger, a database navigator/viewer, an html presentation module, and more. GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The GNUstep Weekly Editorial for May 11, 2002 covers the latest developments to the GNUstep object oriented development environment. Revision Control SystemsAn Introduction to the arch Version Control System (Linux Journal). Linux Journal introduces arch, an alternative to the popular CVS version control system. "One reason for arch's creation was to overcome some weaknesses in existing version control systems, such as the lack of atomic commits, the inability to keep track of file renames and difficulties when working on different branches of a project. arch also provides support for easily and intelligently merging code from several different branches (e.g., stable, development, feature-test) of a project. Projects and revisions stored in arch have globally unique names, which allows branch and merge operations to span network boundaries." Section Editor: Forrest Cook |
Language Links Caml Caml Hump Tiny COBOL Erlang g95 Fortran Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) Gnu Compiler for the Java Language (GCJ) Guile Haskell IBM Java Zone Jython Free the X3J Thirteen (Lisp) Use Perl O'Reilly's perl.com Dr. Dobbs' Perl PHP PHP Weekly Summary Daily Python-URL Python.org Python.faqts Python Eggs Ruby Ruby Garden MIT Scheme Schemers Squeak Smalltalk Why Smalltalk Tcl Developer Xchange Tcl-tk.net O'Reilly's XML.com Regular Expressions |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and BusinessProposal: free software in the Spanish administration. Hispalinux, the Spanish Internauts Association, and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya have given a proposed law to governmental representatives which would promote the use of free software in the Spanish administration. A partial English translation of the proposal is available via Babelfish. Red Hat Opens Major Engineering and R&D Facility in Massachusetts. In an unusual bit of expansion in the current business environment, Red Hat has issued a press release stating that it has opened a new research and development facility in Massachusetts, and 50 new jobs have been created. "The facility will work on developing high-performance computing products, enhanced enterprise capabilities for Red Hat's line of Advanced Server products, 64-bit technologies and other projects as part of Red Hat's expanding efforts in open source enterprise computing." Caldera announces results, layoffs. Caldera International has put out a press release lowering its projected second quarter revenue to a little over $15 million (the estimate had been $16-18 million). The problem is the economy, of course. Also in the PR is the announcement that the company will lay off 15% of its staff - about 73 people. Finally, CTO Drew Spencer has left the company. IBM Delivers Open Platform for Business Partners. IBM has announced a new business platform based on Linux, DB2, WebSphere, and its xSeries servers. Opera 6.0 released. Opera Software has announced the release of version 6.0 of the Opera web browser for Linux. See the release notes for a list of new features. Linux Stock Index for May 10 to May 14, 2002.
The high for the week was 25.76 Press Releases:Open Source Products
Proprietary Products for Linux
Linux Hardware
Embedded Linux Products
Products With Linux Versions
Linux At Work
Java Products
Books & Documentation
Training and Certification
Partnerships
Financial Results
Other
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
May 16, 2002
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsRecommended ReadingGreenpeace cans Windows (vnunet). Vnunet reports that environmental advocate Greenpeace has migrated its operation-critical fundraising systems in the UK from Windows to a Java Enterprise system running on Linux. "Greenpeace UK evaluated Red Hat against Windows NT and Sun Solaris, comparing performance, reliability, configurability and support services. The result was Dell servers with Red Hat Linux 7.1, running a Java application server and IBM's DB2 database." (Thanks to Richard Kay) Sustainable Computing Consortium 'foolish' if it doesn't embrace open standards (NewsForge). NewsForge takes a critical look at Carnegie Mellon's "Sustainable Computing Consortium". "The "benefits of membership" listed by the Consortium in its FAQ lays it out: 'Members are entitled to a non-exclusive, internal-use license for the intellectual property created by the SCC.' So what benefit would it be for a Free Software company to get involved in an environment that prevents them from using the innovations created in that environment, since the very nature of Open Source software is that the source code must be offered to those who purchase software?" 'Fair Use' Is Getting Unfair Treatment (BusinessWeek). Business Week looks at the copyright battles. "Copyright law has always tried to strike a delicate balance between the rights of content creators to be compensated for their work and the rights of consumers to use what they have paid for. But the development of digital media and Big Media's attempt to completely control it have destroyed the delicate equilibrium that is copyright law." (Thanks to Kyle Roberson). Does new Europe law mean slammer for DRM crackers? (Register). The Register examines the implications of the pending European Union Copyright Directive in the area of copyright protection. "Fears that the pending European Union Copyright Directive could lead to a European re-run of the Dmitri Sklyarov prosecution were much in evidence during the recent Campaign for Digital Rights mini-conference at London's City University." Respect for IPR key to new economy (Taipei Times). The Taipei Times looks at intellectual property and anti-piracy efforts. "But will the computer world really come to a halt without Microsoft? There are many other companies providing similar products. People in Taiwan are not alone in wanting non-Microsoft options, as seen in the growing boycott of the Windows operating system in favor of the open-code Linux system." (Thanks to Andy Tai). The technology behind Napster is far from dead (SiliconValley.com). Dan Gillmor reports from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "Open source and the public domain are under attack as never before, largely from the entertainment cartel that so successfully brought Napster to heel. But resistance is beginning to surface to tactics that would not just curb the Napsters of this world, but would literally require Hollywood's approval for technological innovation." States: Microsoft Urged Linux Retaliation (Reuters). Here is a Reuters article on another Microsoft memo which has turned up. "In the memo, Microsoft senior vice president Joachim Kempin complained to Gates and other senior executives that computer chip-maker Intel Corp. was encouraging computer makers to support Linux and funding development of new devices that would work with Linux. Kempin said Microsoft should withhold technical information from Intel and 'work underground' to promote its competitors in the computer chip industry..." Microsoft winds up on both ends of software piracy stick (NewsForge). Did you know Microsoft was convicted of software piracy last year by a French court? Not many people do, says this NewsForge article. "And nobody else in the segment of the tech media that's traditionally anti-Microsoft picked up the story, either -- not Slashdot, nor LinuxToday, nor NewsForge. Neither did any of the mainstream tech outlets. Nobody noticed this news. Nobody except Peruvian congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez." Heise Online also investigated the situation (in German). See the English translation from Babelfish. (Thanks to Pascal Haible.) Microsoft steps on Samba's toes (ZDNet). ZDNet looks at the problems involving Microsoft's Common Internet File Sharing (CIFS) protocol and GPL software. "Specifically, Microsoft requires programmers to sign an agreement that prohibits using information in the document when building software governed by the General Public License (GPL). Among the products affected by the restriction is Samba, widely used software that competes with file sharing technology in Microsoft's Windows operating system." Hackers turn on open source (vnunet). vnunet reports that crackers increasingly are not limiting themselves to proprietary systems. "Security watchers warned this week that May has seen a dramatic increase in defacements on Linux boxes, most noticeably on those from German speaking domains. Websites associated with Germany (.de) and German speaking countries such as Austria (.at) and Switzerland (.ch) have been the hardest hit of the open source community." Report roasts Linux on mainframes (ZDNet). ZDNet looks into a report from market research company Meta Group that says Linux on the mainframe will not be cost effective in the long term. "Meta Group predicts that by 2007 the Linux-based data center workload, which will make up 15 to 20 percent of the market, will be almost exclusively running on Intel-based hardware." Judge: Elcomsoft Case Can Proceed (Wired). Wired covers the continuing Elcomsoft case. "U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Whyte of San Jose said that the DMCA was neither vague nor did it violate the First Amendment, as Elcomsoft had argued. Although the judge agreed with Elcomsoft that computer code is speech, he said that the DMCA does not unconstitutionally ban that speech." Sklyarov/ElcomSoft case sent to trial (Register). The Register examines the latest news from the Elcomsoft case. "On Elcomsoft's First Amendment argument, Judge Whyte ruled that the computer program qualifies as speech, rejecting the government's argument that software is not speech. But the court then ruled that the First Amendment was satisfied because the government's purpose was to control the 'function' of the software rather than its 'content', and that the statute did not ban more speech than necessary to meet its goal of preventing piracy and promoting electronic commerce." CompaniesCaldera cuts costs (IT-Director). IT-Director covers Caldera's latest financial results. "Just last summer Ransom Love called for some consolidation of Linux distributors. In his words, "There is no place for multiple Linux distributors. There's no business to be made from the bits and bytes of Linux." Consolidation and take overs are always a possibility when stock markets are low. Open Source suppliers will almost certainly fall victim to basic economic forces. The questions are who and when." Commentary: Linux bid needs time (News.com). Here's a Gartner Viewpoint article about IBM's latest Linux e-business initiative. "To succeed, IBM must reassure smaller businesses that Linux will be around for the long term, that reseller support will remain constant and that the application pool will grow. Smaller businesses should take none of those factors for granted, nor has IBM proven that the new offerings decrease total cost of ownership." IBM backs developer bot battle (ZDNet). ZDNet covers the Robocode programming game that was launched at IBM's DeveloperWorks Live conference. Finals for the IBM backed competition will be held at the Linux World conference scheduled for August. IBM brings grid computing to games (News.com). IBM is working with Butterfly.net to bring grid computing to the video game world. "The expense and complexity of hosting online games has been a sticking point for the growth of the industry. Game publishers have to maintain hundreds of servers to host a popular game and risk angering subscribers when games are unavailable due to malfunctioning or overloaded servers." The grid will be built from Linux-based IBM eServer xSeries systems. See IBM's press release for more information. Lynuxworks gets a shot in the ARM (ZDNet). ZDNet covers a Lynuxworks deal with ARM to bundle the two companies' products into a single embedded Linux development platform. War among the penguins? Red Hat goes all competitive (Register). The Register looks at an offering from Red Hat. The company is offering a $20 rebate on 7.3 Professional and $10 on Personal for people upgrading from earlier versions of Red Hat or competiting operating systems. "Well, that'll certainly put the wind up Redmond, won't it? Er, no. Aside from the earlier Red Hat distributions, the other qualifying products are various versions of Mandrake and SuSE, including the recently-released 8.2 and 8.0 versions respectively." RedHat Puts out a New Release and Offensive (Open For Business). Open For Business examines Red Hat 7.3 and its associated upgrade rebate offer. "Oddly enough, while RedHat went very cutting edge with packages such as XFree86 and KDE, other packages are left oddly outdated. The included Mozilla is behind by at least six minor releases (0.9.2 is included, whereas Mandrake includes 0.9.8), which is especially strange since RedHat has been a big proponent of Mozilla." The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C., Business Briefs Column. The first brief item in this Raleigh News & Observer column covers a new Westford, Massachusetts office for Red Hat. "Earlier this year Red Hat acquired the assets of ArsDigita, a Westford software company. The new operation will employ a number of former ArsDigita engineers. The new facility will focus on developing high-performance computing products and enhancements for Red Hat's corporate line of server software" Sun's Office competitor to cost $76 (News.com). Here's a News.com article on the upcoming commercial StarOffice release, which will be priced at $76 (US). "There are more costs than just the initial purchase fee, though, all agree. Gartner puts the price of switching a Microsoft Office user to StarOffice a $1,200--costs that include factors such as retraining, lost productivity and the difficulties of translating StarOffice files to and from Microsoft formats." Sun works to converge Linux, Solaris (News.com). News.com covers Sun's efforts to integrate Linux interfaces into its Solaris operating system. "The change in strategy is momentous. First, it requires Sun to translate software products such as its Sun Open Network Environment suite to a new operating system. Second, because Linux is most popular on Intel processors, it furthers Intel's aims to encroach on Sun's server turf." BusinessMicrosoft customers shun new licensing (vnunet). Vnunet reports that two thirds of Microsoft's business customers have yet to sign up for the company's controversial Software Assurance program, in which customers are required to pay up front for software upgrades. "Experts said that the plan could drive IT managers to consider rival packages such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, and to switch operating systems to the open source alternative, Linux." Total Cost of Ownership. The Italian ERLug has published a study (in Italian) on the total cost of ownership of a GNU/Linux system versus a Windows-based system. For an English version of the article, see the Babelfish translation. (Thanks to Pietro Suffritti.) City sees the appeal of Linux (vnunet). The New York financial community is increasingly adopting Linux to cut costs, and London's banks aren't far behind, says this vnunet article. "IBM says it has 10 potential users on each side of the Atlantic. HP says it is talking to seven London banks, has nine users already in New York, and another 10 contemplating a switch." IBM wooing smaller businesses to Linux (News.com). ZDNet reports on IBM's efforts to bring Linux to small businesses. "At its DeveloperWorks Live conference Thursday, the computing giant said it is courting small and midsized businesses with a new hardware and software bundle. The package includes IBM's eServer xSeries Intel-based servers running Linux; the WebSphere application-server software, technology that runs e-business and other Web site transactions; and the DB2 database, IBM's software for storing, managing and retrieving data." Linux's future in the embedded systems market (Linux Devices). Linux Devices has published a white paper that summarizes the results of an analysis by Venture Development Corporation on the future of Linux in the embedded systems market. "Embedded developers using Linux identified a high level of satisfaction in Linux meeting their technical requirements and technical support provided by their Linux solution providers." Desktop Penguins (InfoWorld). Here's an InfoWorld column saying that it's time to look at desktop Linux. "So if someone tells you Linux isn't ready for the office desktop, ask them to make sure their facts are current. Or, if they happen to be a vendor, check their product line. They may have a lot to lose if you realize that you have choices." ReviewsAbiword reviewed by MSNBC. Here's a review of Abiword from MSNBC. "AbiWord began during the Internet IPO craze. It was hoped that an open software office suite might help SourceGear Corporation become a player in the Linux/Open Source world and would produce a lucrative ITP. That didn't happen. So SourceGear stopped working on the project and released the source code. Since then more than 200 people have worked on the open word processor over the years. It?s now down to a core of nearly two dozen, finally bringing the product to fruition." Linux Orbit reviews VMWare Workstation 3.. Linux Orbit has reviewed VMWare version 3.1, a commercial product which allows guest operating systems to be run under a host operating system. "There have been many improvements in performance and stability, but not many truly new features are in the 3.1 release. That's good news for longtime VMWare users. However, there is one new feature that will interest learning and training institutions. VMWare 3.1 now allows repeatable suspend and resume functions for all guest operating systems." Device Profile: Rio Central digital audio center (LinuxDevices). LinuxDevices.com reviews SONICblue's Rio Central, a high-fidelity home stereo component that stores up to 650 CDs (or 6,500 individual songs) on its built-in 40GB hard drive. "The device can also be used as the basis of a broader 'Rio experience', serving one or more companion Rio Receiver 'thin clients' (which also run Embedded Linux) via HomePNA (phone line networking) or Ethernet, and can download files to Rio portable MP3 players via USB." Linux Phone and VPN Offerings Rule N+I (Linux Journal). Linux Journal takes a look at Avaya's new Integrated Stackable Telephony Solution, and other Linux-based products introduced at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas. "Avaya's high-end PBXes already run Linux and support up to 36,000 conventional phones and 12,000 IP phones. Avaya is using Pentium III processors and the Reiser filesystem, said Avaya's Cheryl Tomlinson." Update on IBM/Citizen Linux WatchPad (Linux Devices). Linux Devices has posted an updated review of the IBM/Citizen Linux WatchPad. "'The WatchPad is actually a lot larger than what I expected,' noted Lehrbaum. 'It makes quite a fashion statement -- perfect for those geek-intensive social events in Silicon Valley.'" SuSE 8.0, KDE 3.0 first look (Register).
The Register
reviews SuSE 8.0 and KDE 3.0. "People have been wondering why a
conservative company like SuSE would go with two x.0 versions, theirs and
KDE's, to form the core of their latest distro; and I must say that on
the basis of my experience with x.0's I was ready for some comic
frustration when I installed SuSE 8.0-Pro the other day.
Resources'Argument list too long': Beyond Arguments and Limitations (Linux Journal). Linux Journal shows how to deal with intentionally long command line argument lists. InterviewsMozilla chief: RC2 and what happens after that (News Forge). NewsForge has interviewed Mozilla's chief lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker on the topic of Mozilla 1.0 release candidates. "Mozilla releases are intended for the development community rather than the general consumer market. Mozilla.org is not set up for marketing, distribution or support for the consumer market; we rely on companies building Mozilla products to do that." An interview with Robocode creator Mat Nelson (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks features an interview of Robocode creator Mat Nelson. "Robocode is competitive programming for fun, and fun is definitely the key word. With a few simple lines of code, your can watch your robot blast its way around the screen, crushing anything in its path. And while you're doing that, you'll learn a real language that's solving real problems in today's world." How tech neutrality paid off for ARM (News.com). CNET News.com spoke with Robin Saxby, chairman of ARM. "ARM's goal is to work with all the best players to enable as many things to happen as possible and then let the market decide who the winners are. We support Bluetooth, we support 802.11, we support CDMA, we support Microsoft, we support Palm, we support Linux. We're the Swiss of the IP industry." GNU-Friends interviews Mike Haertel. GNU-Friends has interviewed Mike Haertel, who worked with the FSF in the late 1980s. "It was at the end of my freshman year at St. Olaf. I worked as a student system administrator on the Unix systems there, and I stumbled across a tape from the 'Unix Users of Minnesota' that contained GNU emacs. I'd heard of Emacs before, I think from a friend who went to MIT, and I wanted to see what it was like. I was hooked when I discovered it was partly written in Lisp, because I'd been fascinated by Lisp ever since I'd read Douglas Hofstader's columns about it in Scientific American, in the early 1980's. " MiscellaneousIs Linux Infrastructure? Or Is it Deeper than that? (Linux Journal). Doc Searls examines the meaning of 'infrastructure' and how it applies to the Linux operating system, in this Linux Journal article. "An answer came to me while I was flying into Minneapolis last Wednesday to give a keynote on Thursday titled "Why Linux is still the best OS for business", at the Strictly Business Expo. I was looking for a way to characterize Linux that would not reduce it to yet another "component" or "strategy" or "business model". I wanted to make clear that Linux, like the Internet, supports the stuff we call infrastructure in the same deep way that geology supports roads, bridges, reservoirs and power lines. And that Linux is no less free and open than the Internet." From Bit Part to Leading Man: Moving Linux into the Enterprise (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal looks at network management products for Linux. "Without the support of major software vendors, Linux is relegated to a few side functions, such as web serving, without reaching the core business applications--sort of like being an extra in a lavish Hollywood production." ELJonline: VOCAL: Open Source VoIP Software for Linux. Here is an ELJonline article about the open source Vovida Open Communications Applications Library (VOCAL) project. "In this article, we discuss how the state machine for our user interface has been implemented both from a state machine/operator view and a source-code view. We're hoping that by reading this article, you will be encouraged to log on to our site and check out our stuff, literally." Embedded Linux Journal announces NIC contest winners (ELJonline). ELJonline covers the winners of the Embedded Linux Journal's second annual design contest. "From twenty finalists selected last August who were sent NICs and later submitted their results, one winner and two runners-up have now been selected." The Stallman Factor (LinuxWorld.com). Joe Barr writes about Richard Stallman on LinuxWorld.com. "Mention RMS in a Linux crowd and you'll find people who love him, hate him, and those who simply roll their eyes. People call him a whacko, egotist, genius, saint, and communist. Precious few are ambivalent about Richard Stallman." (Thanks to Sean Summers.) Section Editor: Forrest Cook |
May 16, 2002 |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesLinux Test Project. The Linux Test Project has announced a new version of it's testing suite. Included is a new paper from the IBM LTC Test team, more tests, and script updates. Living Without Microsoft. A new site called Living Without Microsoft has popped up. "Our aim is to provide accurate information about, and analyses of, non-Microsoft software and to discuss the benefits and problems you are likely to encounter if you adopt it instead of a Microsoft solution." (Thanks to Karl Vogel.) Headaches? Use Linux.
EventsLinux and Free Software Festival, Turkey. The first Linux and Free Software Festival will be held in Ankara, Turkey from May 16 through 19, 2002. OSHCA 2002 Call for Participation. A Call for Participation has been posted for the The Open Source Health Care Alliance conference, to be held at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA on November 14 and 15, 2002. CFP: EuroPython 2002 Lightning Talks. A Call for Participation has been posted for the EuroPython 2002 conference lightning talks, the event will be held from June 26-28 in Charleroi, Belgium. Free Linux@work events. A number of free Linux@work events will be held across Europe in June, 2002. (Thanks to Roberto Zicari.) Perl Foundation Summer Fundraising Tour Kicks Off (use Perl). Use Perl has an announcement for the Perl Foundation's upcoming fundraising tour. Events are in the planning stage, sponsors are needed. Ruby Conference 2002: Call for Presenters. A CFP has been issued for the Ruby Conference 2002, to be held in Seattle, Washington on November 1-3, 2002. Events: May 16 - July 11, 2002.
Additional events can be found in the LWN Event Calendar. Event submissions should be sent to lwn@lwn.net in a plain text format. MiscellaneousSamba team gets award. The Samba team has received the Innovation in Infrastructure Award from eWeek and PC Magazine. Section Editor: Forrest Cook. |
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Software AnnouncementsHere are this week's Freshmeat software announcements. Freshmeat now offers the announcements sorted in two different ways: The Alphabetical List and Sorted by license |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Letters See also: last week's Letters page. |
Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. |
May 16, 2002 |
From: Ronald Cole <ronald@forte-intl.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: Subsidizing the development of non-free software Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 14:15:10 -0700 dm@chrononaut.org (David Moles) writes: > Let me put the question another way: Is it acceptable for private > interests to take free software developed with the public's money > and make it into software that is not available to the public? If it's licensed under the GPL, then the answer is *yes*! I am free to take GPL's software, make enhancements and sell it. Can you get a copy if you want one? Only if you pay my exorbitant fee (the GPL doesn't require me to distribute to just anyone who asks). Bonus for me if I sell binary-only with the written offer for sources and the three years (the minimum) that the GPL requires me to make them available passes without anyone taking me up on that offer! Essentially, I will have taken GPL'd code and made proprietary enhancements for which I won't have had to distribute the source (and it's not entirely clear to me whether the GPL forbids the binary-only recipients from further redistribution if they don't have the source, but I would think so). Stallman writes in his GNU Manifesto: "GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free." However, Stallman's aims in his Manifesto don't seem to be embodied in the GPL. "Free Software" seems to require altruism and vigilance in order to succeed thus far and the GPL only requires that, if you can manage to get your hands on some GPL'd software, then you can get the sources if you want them, and it seems to allow non-public enhancements to be created. -- Forte International, P.O. Box 1412, Ridgecrest, CA 93556-1412 Ronald Cole <ronald@forte-intl.com> Phone: (760) 499-9142 President, CEO Fax: (760) 499-9152 My GPG fingerprint: C3AF 4BE9 BEA6 F1C2 B084 4A88 8851 E6C8 69E3 B00B | ||
From: Bernhard Bablok <mail@bablokb.de> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: TCO Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 10:34:51 +0200 Hi, one additional point to the TCO discussion. Microsoft with its release policy forces companies to upgrade to XP: without support for NT, companies will have to migrate solely because you cannot buy computers running NT anymore (NT does not support USB, and PS/2 and serial ports tend to be removed). A migration of 20000+ PCs will take more than a year and costs quite a lot. Now consider that support for XP will stop 06/2004. So every two years your will spend money and time migrating the OS and the applications - or you will have to support numerous OS-versions and applications. This aspect of TCO is seldom taken into account. Of course, migrating to Linux will have a one-time cost-effect. But that's it. A number of large companies and governmental organizations in Germany are already thinking about migrating to Linux because of these issues. Others will stick to XP, only because of all their Windows-based applications. But they will have to think about the whole issue again in 2004 (and in 2007...). One day, they will migrate to Linux, just because the migration-costs will kill them. Bernhard | ||
From: Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> To: rms@gnu.org, bkuhn@fsf.org Subject: seeking FDL 1.2 draft comment summary Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 16:56:51 -0500 Cc: fdl-comments@fsf.org, debian-legal@lists.debian.org, lwn@lwn.net Gentlemen, At <http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html>, the following text can be found: "On 7 February 2002, the FSF released a draft of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 for comment. The comment period lasts for three weeks, until 1 March 2002. If you have comments on this draft, please direct them to <fdl-comments@fsf.org> by 1 March 2002. "The FSF always seeks input from the community at large before adopting a new version of our Free licenses. We consider all feedback carefully; however we may not be able to respond to each comment individually. At the end of the comment period, we will post a summary of the most common comments." The comment period concluded a two-and-a-half months ago, and still there is no sign of any public posting of comments received by the FSF, or any summary thereof. I think this lag stretches the meaning of "at the end of the comment period". Several Debian Developers participated in your comment process and we are extremely interested in what perspectives may have been raised by other parties. We are also interested in the FSF's position on the feedback it received, and whether and how the feedback has influenced the forthcoming revision of the GNU FDL. I sent a message regarding this very subject on 1 April[1], and received absolutely no reply of any sort from anyone affiliated with FSF[2]. Please acknowledge your receipt of this message, and advise as to the current disposition of the GNU FDL revision process. The current version of the GNU FDL can be applied in ways that a substantial number of Debian developers regard as non-free[3], and more to the point some GNU Manuals will be impacted by our assessment of the license. If a new version of the GNU FDL is not forthcoming from the Free Software Foundation, then Debian will need to make its evaluations based on the current version; we cannot table these issues indefinitely. Thank you for your attention, and for your encouragement of community participation when making strategic decisions about future versions of the licenses you endorse. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200204/msg00002.html [2] Clarification: I did receive a private reply from a person affiliated with the FSF, but who attested that he had nothing to do with the development of the FDL, and appears to be as much of an outsider to the process as Debian is. I received no reply from Richard M. Stallman, Bradley Kuhn, Eben Moglen, or anyone purporting to speak for any person of leadership in the FSF. [3] The GNU FDL and the issues it was designed to address sparked massive discussions within Debian; there is clearly a demand for a copyleft that deals with materials that aren't obviously software. References to the "root nodes" of several discussion threads follow. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200110/msg00096.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200110/msg00126.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00000.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00006.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00063.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00094.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00100.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00001.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00007.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00010.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00052.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00250.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00276.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00336.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00358.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00361.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00394.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00450.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200201/msg00250.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200202/msg00114.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200203/msg00009.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200203/msg00054.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200203/msg00104.html Also, several threads contained direct commentary on the FDL 1.2 draft: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200202/msg00046.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200202/msg00071.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200202/msg00079.html -- G. Branden Robinson | If you have the slightest bit of Debian GNU/Linux | intellectual integrity you cannot branden@debian.org | support the government. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- anonymous | ||
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