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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Second sight (Guardian)The Guardian reports on the software patent fight. "But this time, things may be different. The European Commission has gone out of its way to thwart the European parliament, disregarding the wishes of various elected bodies by its insistence that bureaucracy trumps democracy, and that fiats beat votes. A time was bound to come when there would be a power struggle over who really runs Europe: the commission or parliament. Maybe an apparently obscure battle over software patents will not only go down in computing history, but also be counted as a decisive moment in shaping the 21st century's political landscape, too."
Gates up to old tricks over intellectual property rights (NZ Herald)The New Zealand Herald looks at software patents. "Patent 525484, accepted by the [New Zealand Intellectual Property] office and now open for objections until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML."
Trade Shows and Conferences Conference discusses why 'everybody needs an open source strategy' (NewsForge)NewsForge covers some business aspects of open-source software at the InnoTech conference. "PORTLAND, Ore. -- Far away from the usual open source software industry focus on code, freedom, and evangelism, the InnoTech conference and expo held here this week centered on the business of open source for business' sake. Sure there was talk about the advantages of Linux and open source technology, the ability to impact operating system-level functionality, and fighting unwarranted fears of a different model, but the heart of the conference was the beat of business -- cutting costs, driving value, and saving time and grief."
Welcome to a New World: JBoss World 2005 (O'ReillyNet)Chris Adamson covers the recent JBoss World 2005 conference on O'Reilly. ""Welcome to a new world." This was the theme of the JBoss World 2005 conference, held from March 1-2 at the CNN Center in Atlanta. This new world centers around "professional open source:" open source software backed up by paid support and consulting. In other words, the company provides the "professional," and the software delivers on the "open source" promise."
The SCO Problem Settlement leaves SCO board intact (News.com)News.com reports that the Canopy wars have been resolved. "Under the terms of the settlement, [Ralph] Yarro will receive all of Canopy's SCO shares, SCO said. In addition, Canopy paid Yarro, Mott and another former Canopy employee, Brent Christensen, an undisclosed amount of money. Yarro, Mott and Christensen have resigned from all roles at Canopy or companies Canopy invested in." In other words, the Canopy Group, under its new management, has shoved SCO out the door and left Mr. Yarro to deal with his own mess.
New Summary Page for SCO v. IBM (Groklaw)A new SCO case summary page has been announced on Groklaw. "I have just quickly put together a permanent page called Summary in the list of links on the left of the page, summarizing the SCO v. IBM litigation to date."
Interviews Interview: Nelson Pratt, OSDL Marketing Director (Techworld)Techworld has a strange interview with Nelson Pratt, the "marketing director" for OSDL. "We see Linux going further into the enterprise but one of the big inhibitors is licensing. We know from talking open source customers that licensing on a large scale is too labour-intensive. The typical open source licensing granting process was set up with the view of protecting developer/hacker."
KDE Technologies: Get Hot New Stuff (KDE.News)KDE.News interviews Josef Spillner about KDE's Get Hot New Stuff framework. "The GHNS concept describes a way to let users share their digital creations. For example, user A is using a spreadsheet application and modifies a template which comes with it. This template can then be uploaded to a server, and eventually be downloaded by user B by checking the contents of the "Get Hot New Stuff" download dialogue. In the context of companies, documents can be distributed to all employees, and in the context of the internet, a community sharing framework is built on top of all this."
Interview with Philipp von Weitershausen (Nuxeo Blogs)Nuxeo Blogs features an interview with Philipp von Weitershausen, author of the book Web Component Development with Zope 3. "Zope X3.0 is out there. It's stable, it's used in production, it can be used by you today! Don't be scared by the X. It originally suggested something like eXperimental which in no way means that X3.0 is experimental software. Thanks to heavy automatic testing, X3.0 is from a quality assurance point of view probably better tested than Zope 2 ever will be. Nowadays, you can see the X as a reminder that Zope X3.0 is not just a new version of Zope 2, but actually a completely redesigned product that was rewritten from scratch."
Resources Grub From the Ground Up (Troubleshooters.com)Troubleshooters.com takes a look at Grub. "Grub is a world-class boot loader with insufficient documentation. In many ways it blows the doors of LILO. For instance, it's MUCH easier to use Knoppix to rebuild a grub boot loader than to rebuild a LILO boot loader. However, until you're comfortable with grub, it might seem just the opposite. All too often grub dumps you at a grub> prompt with no hint of what you should do. You might have heard that a successful reboot is just three commands away, but which commands? The state of grub's documentation is such that you can't figure it out unless you already know grub."
OOo Off the Wall: Fielding Questions, Part 3 (Linux Journal)Linux Journal covers the use of fields for editing and content management in OpenOffice.org. "Many of the fields on the Functions tab can take time to set up. For a document that is printed once, they probably are not worth bothering about. It is when you are building templates that many of these fields come into their own. With a bit of planning, you can have your templates serve multiple purposes, making them even more useful than they already are."
Reviews AmaroK is a step up for Linux audio players (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews amaroK 1.2. "The keystone of any audio player is the database it keeps of your collection. AmaroK allows you to create file trees using artist, album, year, or genre in any order. So to find, say, all the albums that were released in a particular year, sort by year first and then by album, and a file tree opens that lists all the years in the first level, and all the albums in the second. There's also a simple search filter to find something particular. I have four different versions of The Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee," and I can quickly find them all by typing that song title in the search box. The ability to structure the file tree in a number of different ways and to search it easily is amaroK's single most important usability feature."
Asterisk a star of the future? (Register)The Register looks at the Asterisk phone system. "However, cost isnt the only reason why a company might wish to switch to Asterisk, [creator Mark Spencer] says. Its an open source system, so anyone has access to the code and can do what they want with it. 'If you bought a PBX from a major vendor, and you wanted the features to behave differently, you dont have the ability to make that change,' says Spencer."
Filesystem data visualization using JPGraph (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at JPGraph. "JPGraph is a set of programs written in PHP that plots data into a wide range of graphs and formats the results. Licensed under the Trolltech QPL License, JPGraph is now at Version 1.17. Whatever your data, JPGraph can help you to view it graphically, letting you to see relations in more clearly."
At the Sounding Edge: Introducing KeyKit (Linux Journal)Dave Phillips reviews KeyKit on Linux Journal. "KeyKit is a powerful MIDI composition and processing environment that includes an abundance of features and tools designed for conventional MIDI music-making--for example, MIDI sequencers and virtual drum machines--as well as for unconventional MIDI music-making. Indeed, for the Linux musician who wants to explore some exotic and unusual ways of composing with MIDI, KeyKit is required software."
Linux-powered robot streams video to Bluetooth-enabled phones (Linux Devices)Linux Devices covers a camera from Sony Ericsson that can be controlled via Bluetooth. "The ROB-1 is powered by a 200MHz Freescale Dragonball processor with an ARM9 core. It has a user memory size of 2MB, according to Sony-Ericsson, and runs a Linux operating system. According to Sony-Ericsson, the ROB-1 is compatible with "any phone that has a Java platform with Bluetooth API JSR-82," including most Sony-Ericsson Bluetooth phones. Such phones can maneuver the ROB-1 using a joystick interface. "
Review: SmoothWall Express 2.0 (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews SmoothWall Express 2.0. "In these days of always-on Internet connections, a firewall that protects your network from unauthorized access is indispensable. Though most home routers have some sort of basic firewall capabilities, their rules for incoming and outgoing traffic are often basic and arbitrary. An alternative is to run a Linux-based firewall on old hardware, but configuring this sort of setup is generally not easy. An exception is SmoothWall, a free application you can install on any old machine to convert it to a dedicated hardware firewall. SmoothWall has a friendly interface and more configuration options than standard hardware firewalls."
Linux in Government: Linux Desktop Reviews, Part I (Linux Journal)Linux Journal begins a new series focusing on the best desktop candidates with a look at Xandros Business Edition. "You also may consider the Xandros desktop to be suitable for use by people wanting a modern and trouble-free Linux system. Xandros uses KDE as its windowing environment instead of GNOME. Fortunately, applications such as Evolution and the GNOME infrastructure are available as updates to the system, as are traditional GTK applications, such as FireFox and The GIMP."
Miscellaneous To Evil! March '05 Edition (OSdir)Danny O'Brien's March "To Evil!" column is up on OSDir. "Old school packet driver hacker Russ Nelson replaced Eric S. Raymond as President-In-Charge-Of-Controversialism at the Open Source Initiative on Febuary 1st. The presidency of the OSI is one of the highest positions one can hold in the open source world. Unfortunately, that doesn't count for much. I think it means you're allowed to refer to everyone else as 'your tribe', and have editorials run on Newsforge whenever you want. Twenty-two days later, Nelson resigned, it seems as a result of public pressure over a blog posting he made on February 7th, titled 'Blacks Are Lazy'."
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