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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Microsoft Challenges Massachusetts on Open-Format Plan (eWeek)eWeek looks at corporate opposition to the Massachusetts Open-Format Plan. "A proposal in Massachusetts to move computer networks onto an open-file format by January 2007 is sparking debate, as companies like Microsoft Corp, Adobe Systems Inc., Corel Corp., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. weigh in on the potential shift. Although the public has been invited to comment on an initial draft, available on the state government's Information Technology Division site, responses were solicited from the major tech companies. The letter getting the most attention is from Microsoft, which supplied a 15-page comment that was copied to the state's governor, Mitt Romney."
Are potential legal liabilities holding back Linux adoption? (TechRepublic)Here's a TechRepublic Article looking at whether patent fears are slowing down Linux. The answer is mostly "no," but there is an interesting side look at OSRM: "OSRM announced that its insurance would be available via brokers and that the risk would be underwritten by Lloyd's of London syndicates. However, [Red Hat counsel Mark] Webbink has questions to ask about this move too. 'The announcement was interesting from the standpoint that it contained no quotes from anyone at Lloyd's, and subsequent inquiries by others - not me- to Lloyd's raised significant questions as to the veracity of the CEO of OSRM's assertion,' he says. 'Moreover, to our knowledge, OSRM is not licensed to broker insurance in its home state of North Carolina or anywhere else in the U.S.' OSRM has not been able to clarify the matter for TechRepublic."
The SCO Problem Chart of SCO's Answer to Novell's Counterclaims (Groklaw)Groklaw has posted a chart showing SCO's answers to Novell's Counterclaims. "These are not the complete documents, just the section on counterclaims by Novell and SCO's answers to them, which is another reason I will be putting up the SCO Answer on its own next. SCO has ten affirmative defenses listed as well, for example, and they both have Wherefore clauses and prayers for relief, and that kind of thing. But this presents the claims/counterclaims side by side, so it's easy to see what SCO is denying and admitting."
Companies Red Hat and IBM to take Linux to emerging markets (PCPro)PCPro takes a look at a joint initiative by Red Hat and IBM to promote the development and adoption of Linux solutions in emerging markets. "The companies say they will provide developers with technical resources and development support at IBM Innovation Centres in fifteen locations across Asia, North America and Europe including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangalore and Seoul. At the IBM Innovation Centres, IBM says it will offer consulting support and technical expertise to help programmers migrate, test, develop and implement their applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM platforms."
Legal Bid to trademark the word 'Linux' rejected (News.com)News.com reports that an attempt by Australia's peak Linux body to register the name "Linux" on behalf of Linus Torvalds has failed. ""For your client's trademark to be registerable under the Trade Marks Act, it must have sufficient 'inherent adaptation to distinguish in the marketplace," said the letter, which was apparently written by Andrew Paul Lowe, who's named on the document as the examiner. "In other words, it cannot be a term that other traders with similar goods and services would need to use in the ordinary course of trade.""
Politicos call for music copyright reform (News.com)New.com covers copyright reform lead by Representative Rick Boucher, a congressman from Virginia. "The remedy, he said, lies in a congressional rewrite of portions of copyright law that govern licensing and royalty fees and make it cumbersome for legal download services to add material to their inventories. Boucher said he hopes his committee will have a new bill written and reported to the U.S. House of Representatives by the end of this congressional term in November." (Thanks to Max Hyre)
Interviews U.S. Patent Reform Bill: An Interview with Mark Webbink (O'ReillyNet)Richard Koman talks with Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel for intellectual property at Red Hat, about the state of patents, the patents commons idea, and the patent reform legislation working its way through Congress, on O'ReillyNet. "Defending a patent claim costs about $2 million per side, per claim. That may be, as eBay deputy general Jay Monahan puts it, "an unfortunate cost of doing business," but that's not a cost most open source projects can afford. Granted, patent trolls will go after companies with deep pockets, but companies that compete with open source may see a strategy in using patent claims to simply shut down a small company."
A Glimpse of SUSE Linux 10.0 and Other Things Brewing at Novell (MozillaQuest)MozillaQuest looks at the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.0 and talks with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open source software. "MozillaQuest: What are the reasons SUSE shifted from a closed beta program to an open beta program? Greg Mancusi-Ungaro: We've done more than just shift the beta program; we are opening the entire development process to public participation. Through the openSUSE project, we are inviting the community to really shape the future SUSE Linux. The bugs reported by the community during the SUSE Linux beta cycles are important, but by no means do those bugs represent the total activity of the community. SUSE Linux benefits from publicly submitted package requests, usability/design proposals, feature requests, etc."
An Interview with Chia-liang Kao (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet talks with Chia-Liang Kao, the creator of the SVK source code management system. "SVK allows distributed development using existing infrastructure, which means you don't need to deploy a new system for your whole organization. SVK works best with Subversion, but you can also seamlessly branch from CVS, Perforce, or even git repositories. SVK lets you commit directly back to Subversion repositories and 'commit as a patch' to other systems or to Subversion repositories you don't have commit access to."
Resources A Brief Introduction to Multi-Category Security (MCS) (LiveJournal)James Morris has written an introduction to MCS on LiveJournal. "MCS is something we've been working on to help make SELinux more user-oriented, as well as adapt some of the Multi-Level Security (MLS) infrastructure for more general use. An important aspect of SELinux is that it implements Mandatory Access Control (MAC), where security policy is managed by a system or security administrator and is not overridable by users or applications. MAC is important for dealing with security threats arising from software flaws, malware, user error and some classes of malicious users."
What Is Open Source (O'ReillyNet)Here's an O'ReillyNet article that attempts to define 'open source' in terms the average pointy-haired boss can understand. "The most important difference between software created by the open source communities and commercial software sold by vendors is that open source software is published under licenses that ensure that the source code is available to everyone to inspect, change, download, and explore as they wish. This is the essential meaning of open source: the source code--the language in which the software is written and the key to understanding how the software works--can be obtained and improved by anyone with the right skills."
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, Chapter 18 (Groklaw)Groklaw has published chapter 18 of the online book "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter Salus. The topic of the chapter is "The Web".
Peter van der Linden's Guide to Linux: A Lesson in Encryption, Part 1 (Linux Journal)This Linux Journal article provides an introductory look at encryption. "The mathematical qualities that PKE relies on have a beautiful symmetry to them, and PKE rocked the worlds of computer science and encryption when it appeared in the 1970s. Government scientists in Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping and phone-tapping center later claimed that they had invented the technique some years earlier, but kept it secret! Indeed, they did uncover some of the theory, but it was clear that the spies of GCHQ had not grasped its practical significance."
OOo Off-the-Wall: Back to School with Bibliographies (Linux Journal)The Linux Journal continues its OpenOffice.org series with this look at bibliography creation. "However, the process of creating the bibliography is confused by two things. For one, bibliographies are lumped together with indexes and tables of contents. Second, OOo Writer provides misleading samples for its bibliography database. For this reason, it is worth walking through the process step by step to avoid confusion."
Five Pitfalls of Linux Sockets Programming (developerWorks)developerWorks covers some common mistakes in socket programming. "First introduced into the 4.2 BSD UNIX® operating system, the Sockets API is now a standard feature of any operating system. In fact, it's hard to find a modern language that doesn't support the Sockets API. The API is a relatively simple one, but new developers can still run into a few common pitfalls. This article identifies those pitfalls and shows you how to avoid them."
Reviews CLI Magic: CDargs (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at CDargs. "Typing long path names at the command line can get to be a chore very quickly. Even with tab-completion, it can take a lot of typing to move from your home directory to /var/www/www.mysite.com/cgi-bin or something similar. Wouldn't it be much better if you could "bookmark" long path names and type something simple, like cdb site, to get to a directory? That's where CDargs comes in. CDargs is a program that provides bookmarks and browsing at the command line. It takes a little work to set up, but it's well worth it. I've been using this program for a few years now, and it really does help speed up work at the shell."
'Firefox Secrets' and 'Hacking Firefox' Published (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reviews the latest books on Mozilla Firefox. "Two new books about Mozilla Firefox have been published recently. Firefox Secrets by Cheah Chu Yeow was launched by SitePoint in July, while August saw the release of Mel Reyes' Hacking Firefox from Wiley."
Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at Netapplet. "After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell's SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it's nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution."
Book Review: Perl Best Practices (Linux Journal)Linux Journal reviews the book Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway. "Perl and its supporters are known for working in whatever way suits them, but that can make for unnecessarily complex and confusing code. Here's a book, though, that dares to say "enough"."
Using Qpsmtpd (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet has a review of Qpsmtpd. "Those who administer an email server more than likely have put up with the pain of adding dnsbl lookups to something like Sendmail or Qmail, or adding recipient validation for their custom user database in Postfix. Extending email servers is painful, and for the most part you can't do it easily in Perl. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do something like mod_perl in a mail server?
Sylpheed 2.0 messaging client pushes the envelope (Linux.com)Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews version 2.0 of the Sylpheed email client on Linux.com "Since I started using email in 1995, I've been on a (seemingly) never-ending quest for the perfect email client. I've used text-based, Web-based, and GUI email clients, on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, and have yet to find one mail user agent (MUA) that I'd consider "perfect." There are some really, really good MUAs -- such as Mutt and Mozilla Thunderbird -- but I haven't found the perfect mailer just yet. Sylpheed 2.0, however, is getting close."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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