Linux in the news

Recommended Reading

Moglen plans 'general counsel's office for the entire movement' (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at Eben Moglen's plans for the Software Freedom Law Center. " Yet behind the facts of the news release is a larger story. In helping to create the organization, Center director Eben Moglen, the framer of the GNU General Public License, is not just looking for a way to defend the FOSS communities against legal threats. Yet he is also looking beyond this potential need. By 2010, he hopes to see the SFLC become the center of a web of associations that will link FOSS projects, tech-savvy lawyers, and corporations, to everyone's mutual benefit."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

LinuxWorld Boston 2005: An Overview and Day One Report (Linux Journal)

Jeffrey Bianchine covers day one of LinuxWorld for Linux Journal. "The exhibition hall here at LinuxWorld has two discrete sides, one dominated by the big name players and the other populated by distribution and project communities bordering businesses--some of them well known--that invested in individual booths. After a morning spent listening to suits, I spent the afternoon working this side of the exhibition hall. It is a pleasure to report that the general buzz on this side of the exhibition hall is positive. It also is encouraging that so many of the business booths here are a mix of first-time exhibitors and new businesses."

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LinuxWorld Expo Boston: Day Two (Linux Journal)

Jeffrey Bianchine continues his LinuxJournal coverage of the LinuxWorld Expo with a look at the events from day two. "On Tuesday, Novell, IBM, Oracle and Red Hat--giants bestriding their markets--were the press area headliners. Yesterday, the press announcements were being made by considerably smaller companies, eager to make an impact. This is not a surprise, as the opening day of any event of this sort traditionally is when the major players make their big statements."

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LinuxWorld Expo Boston: Final Day Wrapup (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal wraps up its LinuxWorld coverage. "Given that LinuxWorld Expo has such an overwhelming business tradeshow ethos, where does that leave the communities and dot orgs that fostered Linux and open source in gaining the "moral high ground" Bruce Perens mentioned yesterday? At this show, it left them on the other side of a literal great wall."

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Best of Linux World Coverage: The Redhat Mistake (OSDir)

The lead editor of OSDir discusses the most significant event he saw at LinuxWorld. "Redhat's VP of open source affairs Michael Tiemann stepped up to the plate and said in not so few words, that the company messed up. It messed up big time, is sorry, and is trying to make amends. Where they messed up was abandoning their 'freebie' Redhat version two years ago to focus exclusively on their enterprise 'pay up big time' version."

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NewsForge writer rises to LinuxWorld gaming challenge (NewsForge)

This NewsForge article covers the Celebrity Challenge at LinuxWorld. "The game was not unfamiliar to me: Unreal Tournament 2004, which was released last spring and works wonderfully on GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Although I missed my home setup -- the 64-bit edition of UT2004 running over 64-bit Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system -- all the players were on a level playing field, as we were all equally disadvantaged. But the stakes were high and dozens of people were watching us prove that GNU/Linux is not just for servers and workstations."

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SCALE 3X Wrapup Report (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal covers the third Southern California Linux Exposition (SCALE 3X). "Track A was oriented to the experienced Linux user, covering the most technically sophisticated topics, including the kernel, embedded issues and remastering Knoppix. Tracks B and C were somewhat less technically oriented and included talks about application development and availability, a variety of implementation issues and relevant social issues. Track D was oriented to the Linux beginner and included tutorials on such topics as distributions, networking, content management and Samba. The VoIP panel discussion that closed the conference tracks was well attended and included a spirited Q & A session."

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Red Hat: Fedora will engage customers (News.com)

News.com reports from FUDCon. "The problem came in recent years when Red Hat threw its energies into a stable product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL let the company grow from a small market of technically savvy customers to the large market of mainstream customers. But in the process, Red Hat left those "early adopters" behind, said Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs."

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Linux For The Future (Information Week)

Information Week reports from LinuxWorld. "As Linux matures, some key differences are emerging between the market's primary suppliers: Novell and Red Hat. As Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman pointed out last week during a LinuxWorld press conference, his company's similarity to Red Hat begins and ends with the basic Linux kernel."

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The SCO Problem

Missing deadlines puts SCO on the spot (Salt Lake Tribune)

The Salt Lake Tribune notes that the SCO Group is far behind on the filing of its annual report with the SEC. "And SCO's missed deadlines did not go unnoticed in Manhattan, where Nasdaq officials confirmed they likely will consider actions that could lead to delisting the company's stock."

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IBM Files its Motion for Reconsideration of Wells' Discovery Order (Groklaw)

Groklaw follows IBM's latest move in the SCO case, the company will provide the AIX and Dynix code. "Sometimes it's easier to comply with an order than to argue about it, if it's not essential. We now see, by the decision IBM made about what to make an issue of, that IBM doesn't believe that SCO will find a thing in that code, onerous as the task is for IBM to produce it."

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Companies

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

News.com reports that IBM will invest $100 million in support of Linux desktop applications. "IBM said the decision stemmed from the increasing popularity of Linux among its customers. According to the company, the number of customers opting for the Linux platform for applications such as WebSphere Portal, instant messaging and Web-based document sharing saw high double-digit growth in 2004."

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Sun burns Solaris and Linux staffers (Register)

The Register reports that Sun has laid off some of its operating system staff. "Sources have informed The Register that a larger number of staffers in Sun's operating platforms group have been shown the door. Many of these workers had been cranking away on new versions of Solaris and the Java Desktop System - Sun's version of Linux. With that work mostly completed, the staffers became expendable to Sun. This looks like the tail-end of a long round of layoffs, which started last year and claimed more than 3,000 jobs."

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Legal

Lexmark suffers second knock back in DMCA case (Register)

The Register reports that Lexmark has lost its DMCA case against Static Control Components yet again. "Barring the intervention of the US Supreme Court, Lexmark's hopes of using the DMCA against Static Control Components have been dashed."

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Court questions FCC's broadcast flag rules (News.com)

News.com covers the broadcast flag hearing in U.S. Federal appeals court."'You're out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?' asked Judge Harry Edwards." This issue is relevant because the broadcast flag will make it difficult to create free digital TV systems.

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Interviews

FOSDEM 2005: Python Bindings Interview (KDE.News)

KDE.News has an interview with Simon Edwards, part of the FOSDEM 2005 series. "Simon Edwards will be talking about KDE application development using Python in the FOSDEM KDE Developer's Room. In the interview below he talks about the advantages of Python, how it compares to other languages and whether KDE should be rewritten in Python."

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The final round of FOSDEM interviews

The last set of interviews with speakers at the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (Brussels, February 26 and 27) has been posted. These are: Stuart Winter (Slackware), Ethan Galstad (Nagios), Marius Mauch (Gentoo), Gerald Combs (Ethereal), Olle Mulmo (Globus), Jimmy Jimbo Wales (Wikipedia), and kernel hacker Alan Cox.

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Audio Interview with Miguel de Icaza (LugRadio)

LugRadio has a new interview with Miguel de Icaza in Ogg format. "The latest episode of LugRadio is Monobrow (season 2, episode 9)! Interview with Miguel de Icaza, letters, why your kernel needs compiling, and much, much more! LugRadio now fully supports podcasting! You too can now get LugRadio on the move!" (found on GnomeDesktop.)

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The paradox of free/open source project management (NewsForge)

NewsForge interviews several open-source project leaders to discuss project management issues. "Leaders from three separate but related -- and incredibly successful -- free/open source projects agree: If you want the project to move to the next level, let go and let the community take over. We asked Larry Wall, creator of Perl; Brian Behlendorf, the Apache Project leader; and Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, for their thoughts on why this happens and how they and their projects have fared as a result."

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Resources

Linux Magazine: KWifiManager (KDE.News)

KDE.News mentions a new article by Chris Howells on KWifiManager. "It introduces KWifiManager, tells you how to find and connect to wireless networks and how to use it for monitoring your wireless connection." The article is available as a pdf file.

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OOo Off the Wall: Cross References and User-Defined Fields (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal OpenOffice.org article series continues with this look at cross referencing. "Frankly, cross-references are a disappointment in OpenOffice.org Writer. Several posters to the OpenOffice.org mailing lists have referred to them as glorified bookmarks, and they're not far off. Compared to other software designed for writing long documents, Writer's cross-referencing tools are lacking."

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Reviews

In hopping chips, will IBM hop Solaris and Windows too? (ZDNet)

ZDNet takes a look at IBM's new Chiphopper. "Chiphopper -- a package of free technologies and services that IBM released at LinuxWorld -- is exactly what it says its. It takes the expertise that went into making Red Hat and SuSE's distributions of Linux portable to IBM's mainframe (z Series) and Unix servers (p Series) and bottles it up into a turnkey porting tool that commercial software developers can use to painlessly port their apps from the x86 version of Linux to IBM's big iron systems (thus "hopping chips")."

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The Lightweight experience:A comparison of Window Managers (Linux Times.Net)

Linux Times.Net takes a look at some of the lighter weight window managers. "One of the most popular window managers is the very simple Fluxbox, derived from the even more basic Blackbox. The developers of Fluxbox have added handy features such as window tabs, key bindings, KDE and partial Gnome support."

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GnomeMeeting: It's not just for video conferencing (NewsForge)

NewsForge has a review of GnomeMeeting. "GnomeMeeting is now at the 1.2 release, and is available in distribution-specific binaries for Debian, Fedora Core 2, Slackware, Mandrake, and SUSE. The source code is available as well, if your distro isn't included in that list."

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KDE 3.4-b2 Preview (OS News)

OS News reviews KDE 3.4 beta 2. "It seems that KDE is becoming much more concerned with look and feel of late, which I think is a very good thing. I believe KDE is a first-rate desktop environment, and to stay that way, it needs to be aesthetically appealing. Along those lines, some new eyecandy has been added."

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amaroK First to Integrate Audioscrobbler (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at Amarok 1.2, a media player for KDE with new Audioscrobbler capabilities. "Audioscrobbler allows users to share music tastes with friends on the Internet, making use of automatically submitted song statistics. amaroK goes a step further than other media players and allows users to receive music recommendations from the site."

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Translating With OmegaT (NewsForge)

NewsForge introduces OmegaT, a free translation system. "Before you begin exploring OmegaT yourself, you should understand how it, or any CAT tool, works. OmegaT is a so-called translation memory application; that is, it doesn't translate texts for you. Instead, it stores pieces of text (called 'segments') and their corresponding translations in a file called 'translation memory.'"

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Miscellaneous

Year-long Italian programming tournament announces winners (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports on the first Italian Open Source Contest. "Any software project could participate, as long as it was original (no localizations), available under an OSI certified license and counted, as of January 1, 2004, at least one Italian citizen in the development team. There were six categories, each with a first prize of €1,500. The first four were Most Innovative Software, Best User Interaction, Best Community, and Multimedia. Security, Networking, and Communication constituted another single class, while Business Software included database, office, and system integration tools."

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How to Kill Linux (PC Magazine)

Time for another strange Dvorak article in PC Magazine. This one concerns a sure-fire Microsoft plan to kill Linux. "That means tearing away the entire top of Linux from the driver layer—and that would be MS-Linux. Users who needed to add the driver layers would be offered the standard Linux driver package, which would be attached with a utility program. The utility would sew the drivers back into Linux, resulting in an OS that would be more or less the same as everyone else's. Or the user could pay for the Windows drivers and attach those to MS-Linux, resulting in an OS that had the PnP benefits of Windows."

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