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To Evil! November (OSDir.com)

In the November To Evil! Danny O'Brien vents his self-righteous indignation on script kiddies and spammers. "Thinking about it, I'm actually rather glad that SCO gets hacked so often. It gives me and many others a perfect opportunity to highlight how evil crackers are, with the not unpleasant side-effect of establishing ourselves as the moral paragons."

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Open Source Wall Street for December 6

The Decatur Jones Open Source Wall Street newsletter for December 6 (PDF) is available, with looks at SCO, Red Hat, Novell, Mandrakesoft, Sun, and more. "We believe that SUNW had little choice other than to make its license incompatible with the GPL, otherwise the best parts of Solaris would have simply been usurped and added to Linux. Thus we are skeptical that a robust development community will form around SUNW's code, thereby defeating the benefits of Open Source. As we have stated in the past, we believe that SUNW is wasting critical resources by competing with broadly supported, and rapidly evolving, Open Source projects versus taking a more agnostic approach that caters to customer's desires."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

Italian Linux Day 2004 (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers the fourth Italian National Day of Linux and Free Software conference. "During the whole day, the reception desk made it easy even for the casual passer-by to try GNU/Linux software safely. The LUG members had organized a no-stop, a-la-carte CD burning service for all visitors. The catalog offered a lot of LiveCD distributions, including specialized ones like So.Di.Linux's direct ancestor EduKnoppix (Live GNU/Linux for schools), the multimedia-oriented dyne:bolic, and BristolMorphix, which includes the video-editing suite Cinelerra."

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The SCO Problem

Lots of Activity in SCO v. IBM Land (Groklaw)

Groklaw has a new set of filings in SCO v. IBM, including SCO's memo opposing IBM's copyright (GPL) infringement summary judgment attempt. "One thing is now clear -- the validity of the GPL is not going to be tested in this case. SCO's incompetence has shut the door to them being able to do that. Now, they are wrapping themselves in the GPL flag."

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Companies

Spam Sites Crippled by Lycos Screensaver DDoS (Netcraft)

Netcraft is reporting some initial success by a controversial Lycos MakeLoveNotSpam screensaver, which attacks spammer sites. "A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available. While Internet users debate the ethics of the initiative, Lycos Europe is denying reports that the MakeLoveNotSpam site was hacked and defaced last night. An intrusion by hackers would be a serious concern for an operation that controls an army of computers with DDoS capabilities. The site has been unreachable today, which could be related to traffic from Slashdot rather than a counterattack."

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Sun open-source license could mean Solaris-Linux barrier (News.com)

News.com looks at compatibility issues between the GPL and Sun's CDDL, which may be used on the Solaris operating system. ""The CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL, since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL," Claire Giordano of Sun's CDDL team said in its submission. "Thus, it is likely that files released under the CDDL will not be able to be combined with files released under the GPL to create a larger program.""

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Legal

Linux in Government: The Government Open Code Collaborative (Linux Journal)

Tom Adelstein writes about the Government Open Code Collaborative or GOCC.gov, on Linux Journal. "As so many people have said, "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come." And GOCC.gov is an idea whose time is long overdue. Open-source advocates attempting to initiate legislation and fight the battles on the floors of the various Houses, only to discover the political might and opposition of Microsoft, now have an alternative. State agencies now can download software for free and use it to create a cohesive and standard government infrastructure."

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Interviews

Interview with amaroK's Developers (OSnews)

OSnews.com interviews the core AmaroK developers. "The automatic album cover retrieval is a very popular feature with our users. It fetches album images from the Net or from your harddisk and displays the right image along with the music you play. Not only does this look extremely cool, but also it helps to associate the music with your memory - one image says more than 1000 words."

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Resources

Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small Is Beautiful (Linux Journal)

This Linux Journal article shows how to use Ruby and SQLite to create Linux clusters. "Linux clusters have become the new supercomputers. The economics of teraflop performance built on commodity hardware is impossible to ignore in the current climate of dwindling research funding. However, one critical aspect of cluster-building, namely orchestration, frequently is overlooked by the people doing the buying. The problem facing a developer with clustered systems is analogous to the one facing a home buyer who can afford only a lot and some bricks--he's got a lot of building to do."

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Reviews

New kid on embedded Linux block -- Gentoo (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices takes a look at embedded Gentoo. "A project to create embedded versions of Gentoo Linux has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM. The releases include native core system binaries, cross-platform toolchains, and, for x86, an optional hardened toolchain. The year-old project needs developers to help add cross-compile awareness to source packages."

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Linux needs better network file systems (NewsForge)

This NewsForge article covers a range of choices available for Linux network file systems. "Our current model of the network file system is defined by the paradigm of the enterprise workstation. In this model, a large enterprise has a number of knowledge workers based at a single campus, all using individual work stations that are tied together on a single local area network (LAN)."

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Book Review - Open Source Software: Implementation and Management (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews Open Source Software: Implementation and Management, a book by Paul Kavanagh. "Have you ever had a friend ask you how to introduce open source within an organization? Although some may have outstanding answers for this question, few of those answers carry the credibility that top management might require. If, as projected, half of IT professionals in 2005 will consider open source, this might be a question we all will be hearing more often. It would be nice to suggest a credible resource where those posing the question might be able to find some useful answers."

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Miscellaneous

Mozilla previews e-mail program (News.com)

News.com predicts the upcoming release of the Thunderbird 1.0 mail client may offer competition to Microsoft's Outlook Express. "If Thunderbird is to make any market inroads, analysts say, it will have to do what Mozilla's Firefox browser has succeeded in doing: capitalize on frustration with Microsoft's product. "I don't know if the same dissatisfaction is there with Outlook, but we're looking at Outlook Express and we're seeing a lot of parallels with IE," MacGregor said. "There are the nuisances of the Web, spyware slowing down your experience, spammers clogging your inbox, viruses in attachments...We think Thunderbird can help.""

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The Linux Kernel's Fuzzy Future (InformationWeek)

Information Week takes the kernel developers to task for not having published a Microsoft-style, three-year kernel development road map. "IBM's Frye sees no reason for the Linux camp to produce its own road map, arguing it's better to keep customers focused on 'what's there today.' Besides, he says, CIOs can get closed-door briefings from Linux distributors if necessary. Yet, his explanation seems a bit like a rationalization for a community-oriented development process that simply hasn't gotten around to centralized, long-term planning."

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