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ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

Federico Biancuzzi talks to Eric Raymond about license issues. "Q:Why did you say we don't need the GPL anymore? A:It's 2005, not 1985. We've learned a lot in the last 20 years. The fears that originally led to the reciprocity stuff in GPL are nowadays, at least in my opinion, baseless. People who do what the GPL tries to prevent (e.g., closed source forks of open source projects) wind up injuring only themselves. They trap themselves unto competing with a small in-house development group against the much larger one in the parent open source project, and failing."

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Changes loom for patent process in US, EU (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at patent reform in the U.S. "Non-obviousness is supposed to be the foundation of the patent system. No invention should be granted a patent if it doesn't contain the "aha" factor - the element of surprise that grabs experts in the technology, causing them to exclaim, "wow! I never thought of that!" Yet, over and over again, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) grants patents for algorithms that leave software developers scratching their heads and saying, "that one, we already knew.""

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European Software Patent Directive Defeated (FSFE)

The European software patent directive has been defeated, according to a press release from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). "After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes: A strong signal against patents on software logic, a sign of lost faith in the European Union and a clear request for the European Patent Office (EPO) to change its policy: the EPO must stop issuing software patents today."

Comments (22 posted)

Trade Shows and Conferences

JavaOne 2005: Participate in the Future of Java (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet covers JavaOne 2005. "Participation is Sun's theme for JavaOne 2005, as repeatedly preached by speakers in the general sessions of the two days that opened this week's developer conference. The idea was captured early by emcee John Gage, Sun's chief researcher and science office director, who began the first day by asking developers to stand up, then by asking all CTOs, VCs and other deal-makers to stand up. "OK, programmers," he said, "there's who you have to meet.""

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Report: FreeNX on LinuxTag (KDE.News)

KDE.News has a report on the FreeNX talk at LinuxTag. "During the full hour of live demoing, not only did they showcase very fast remote GUI access to various KDE desktops. Amongst these was a brandnew Kubuntu installation on an IBM mainframe derivative (a Power5/PPC64 machine) running a very nice polished KDE 3.4.1. Kurt and Fabian had recently ported FreeNX to that platform."

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Report: KDE at Le Droit D'auteur et Vous (KDE.News)

KDE.News has a report from Le Droit D'auteur et Vous (Copyrights and You). "The main thing I realised during the whole day was about education. Everyone has the right to have access to education and educational material should be free. One of the main successes of the last three years is Wikipedia showing that it is possible to achieve this."

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The MA Software Council's OSS SIG Kickoff Meeting (Groklaw)

Groklaw covers the kickoff meeting of the Massachusetts Software Council's Open Source Software SIG. "There were three sessions, one on legal issues, one on business issues, and one on how to run an open source project, plus a, um, lively talk by Mark Fleury, CEO of JBOSS, as the keynote speaker at lunch. He's Dr. Fleury, by the way. He has a PhD in Physics. It was very much an interactive speech, with the audience participating fully. How could they help it?"

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The How and Who of Where (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly presents coverage of the 2005 Where 2.0 conference. "The two days of O'Reilly Media's Where 2.0 conference flew by, and beneath all the high-tech gadgets was the fact that to support this latest generation of location-based applications, you still need to begin by collecting and organizing the data. A9.com, NAVTEQ, and Eyebeam representatives explained how they gather and organize data. Then, Ron Ondrejka brought down the house with his description of how his team used to gather images of the Earth from spy satellites in the 1960s."

Another article entitled The What and Why of Where looks at other aspects of the conference.

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The SCO Problem

IBM's Unsealed Opposition to SCO's Motion for Leave to File 3rd Amended Complaint - as text (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports that SCO's Motion for Leave to File Third Amended Complaint was denied. "Judge Dale Kimball very properly said it's too late to raise all that now: "It appears that SCO -- or its predecessor -- either knew or should have known about the conduct at issue before it filed its original Complaint. Accordingly, the court declines to permit the filing of a Third Amended Complaint.""

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Companies

Linux moves into midrange Motorola phones (News.com)

News.com looks at Motorola's plans for using Linux in its cell phones. "Motorola announced a new step this week in its plan to remake most of its mobile phone line with Linux, expanding use of the open-source operating system to midrange phones. The E895 is a flip-phone design that uses a version of Linux from MontaVista Software, said Cheryln Chin, vice president for Motorola mobile phone marketing. Motorola expects to begin shipping it in Asia in the fourth quarter of the year and in other parts of the globe after that."

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Trolltech and Opera aim to get Linux on the road (Heise Online)

Heise Online looks at a joint effort by Opera and Trolltech. "Opera, the Norwegian vendor of the web browser of the same name, and Norwegian software firm Trolltech, the developer of the C++ framework Qt for the KDE Unix/Linux desktop among others things, have entered into a strategic partnership. Their joint efforts will focus on products for mobile communications and home entertainment, as Opera announced today. The Qtopia development environment and software platform for mobile devices will be combined with Opera. In addition, the two firms will be collaborating on marketing campaigns. They intend to strengthen the position of the Linux operating system on the markets for mobile and home electronics."

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Creating a clearinghouse for open-source info (News.com)

News.com looks at SourceLabs' new Swik site. "Called Swik, the site combines a search engine, a wiki for posting documentation and reviews, and information-sharing tools that use Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. The site was launched Wednesday. Swik is aimed at people, notably software developers, who seek a listing of open-source products and a communications hub to help navigate through the tens of thousands of projects out there."

Comments (3 posted)

Linux Adoption

City of Vienna Chooses KDE (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports on the use of Debian systems with KDE in the city of Vienna, Austria. "A customized version of Debian with KDE, dubbed "Wienux" was chosen as the official alternative to Windows for the 18,000 PCs of the city. It is up to the individual workers to choose if they prefer a KDE Desktop or a Microsoft based system. The officials expect that about 4,800 machines will run KDE in the short term."

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Legal

It's a NO! - 648 - 14 (Groklaw)

Groklaw covers the European Parliament's rejection of software patents. "Of course, this is not the end. After the vote the EU Commission said it would respect the vote and would not put forth "any new proposed legislation in this area", according to Reuters. There are hints that the next chapter will be an attempt to pass the so-called "Community" patent. Talk about Orwellian-newspeak. Here's the plan: Lawmakers including Kauppi said the rejection of the legislation should give fresh impetus to the creation of a single European system, known as the ``Community'' patent."

Comments (8 posted)

Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided (use Perl)

use Perl covers Chip Salzenberg's legal troubles. "'In April of this year, Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA, told police that they feared I was misappropriating trade secrets. That very afternoon, police raided my house with a search warrant to seize every computer in the house, paper files, CDs, and DVDs... even my wireless router and cable modem!' Chip was the pumpking for perl's 5.004 release." Find out more at geeksunite.net.

Comments (10 posted)

Interviews

Arnd Bergmann on Cell (developerWorks)

developerWorks talks with Arnd Bergmann, a kernel hacker with the IBM Linux Technology Center. "developerWorks caught up with Arnd Bergmann, the IBM Linux on Cell kernel maintainer, to talk about the port, about the Cell and Cell-based "workstations" (which aren't workstations at all) and about programming to Cell -- among other things."

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KDE-Artists.org: Featured Coder Ryan Nickell (KDE.News)

KDE.News mentions an interview with Ryan Nickell. "The KDE-Artists website is featuring an interview with Ryan Nickell, one of the current authors of SuperKaramba and Smooth Blend. He talks about his baby SuperKaramba, the KDE community website KDE-look.org, Plasma, KDE 4 and he even answers some personal questions."

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All SAP Solutions Should Soon Run on Linux (Sap Info)

Sap Info talks to Stefan Schindewolf about running SAP applications under Linux. "The Linux interest group of the German-speaking SAP user group, DSAG, is currently working on entering the world of 64 bits and is collaborating closely with the SAP LinuxLab. Stefan Schindewolf, the chair of the interest group, explains how SAP customers can profit from Linux."

Comments (14 posted)

Resources

The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin, Ch. 14, by Dr. Peter H. Salus (Groklaw)

Groklaw has chapter 14 of Peter Salus' The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin. This chapter covers Plan 9 and Inferno.

Comments (3 posted)

Keeping email under lock and (public) key (NewsForge)

Marcelo Rinesi explains how to encrypt mail archives in a NewsForge article. "With governments and law enforcement organizations pushing for increasingly intrusive monitoring and logging of business email messages, network administrators are put in an uncomfortable situation. Even disregarding privacy implications, such systems pose security problems at least as serious as those they attempt to solve. A "master archive" of emails is after all an extremely tempting target to external hackers, but it also has staggering potential for internal abuse. Ideally, we would want no centralized mail logs, but legal and corporate requirements mandate suitable record-keeping in the case of an internal or external audit. One way to meet both goals is by encrypting the archive using public key cryptography."

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Porting LinuxBIOS to the AMD SC520 (Linux Journal)

Ron Minnich explains how to build a custom BIOS in a Linux Journal article. "Building a Linux system that will boot in seconds, not minutes, requires a custom BIOS. But thanks to a new compiler and development process, we can build a BIOS for a new motherboard with only C code-no assembly. In this article, we describe the work done by the Cluster Research Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory to port LinuxBIOS to the AMD SC520 CPU."

Comments (3 posted)

GNOME and KDE on LUGRadio

GnomeDesktop points to Episode 31 of LUGRadio, which features an interview with Yannick Pellet and Carlos Guerreiro about the GNOME and GTK+ using Nokia 770 internet tablet.

KDE.News covers all the KDE activity at LUGRadio Live.

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Blowing the lid off of TiVo (IBM developerWorks)

Peter Seebach looks inside of a TiVo video recording appliance. "Everyone's heard that the TiVo "runs Linux™". In this installment of Linux on board, Peter takes a look at the Linux system installed on the TiVo. Examining the TiVo system reveals how one company made the transition from desktop operating system to embedded system."

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Reviews

DNS name serving through NSD (NewsForge)

Daniel Rubio reviews NSD on NewsForge. "Given the sheer importance of name servers in providing Domain Name System (DNS) resolution -- a process used by every Web-facing application to translate domain names into IP addresses and vice versa -- not many people put much thought into the available software alternatives for pulling off this feat. One compelling application is NSD, an alternative to the widely deployed BIND name server."

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Miscellaneous

Final Voting in 2005 Readers' Choice Awards (Linux Journal)

The final round of voting in the 2005 Linux Journal Readers' Choice awards is underway. "The final ballot is based on the results of two previous rounds of open voting, in which write-in votes were accepted in every category. The top two vote-getters in each category have made it to the final ballot. In categories were the vote totals were close, an additional one or two nominees also made it to the official ballot."

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