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Stallman, Torvalds, and Novell comment on GPLv3 (Linux.com)

Linux.com has published some comments on the third draft of the GPLv3. "When the second draft of GPLv3 was released, Linus Torvalds was one of its most outspoken critics. Although he stresses that he is giving only a preliminary opinion on GPLv3, and may change his mind as he looks at it more closely, his first response to the third draft is to give it qualified approval. "Is it better?" Torvalds asks rhetorically. "Hell yeah. But it's been limited in ways that at least make it much saner. I'll have to think about it. The language seems cleaner and better than GPLv2 in many places, and many of my 'that is obviously totally idiotic crap' areas have either been improved or seem to have been removed entirely.""

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Companies

Dell Promises Pre-Installed Linux (PC World)

PC World reports on Dell's plans for offering pre-installed Linux systems. "Thanks to requests by its customers, Dell Inc. is going to start offering Linux pre-installed on its PCs and notebooks, the company said Wednesday. Based on customer feedback Dell began soliciting last month, Dell said that top of mind among customers was that the company should begin offering Linux as an alternative to Windows on its personal computers, according to a posting on a company blog. Dell said it "has heard" what customers said and will act accordingly."

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Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Glyn Moody looks at Dell and Linux. "One of the core problems for open source has always been that as a radical force outside the mainstream it is hard for its supporters to influence conventional players there. In part, this was what made Dell's Ideastorm so important: it gave a voice to those hitherto unable to communicate usefully with the company. The effects have been dramatic, with Dell now promising to sell systems with pre-installed GNU/Linux. The question then must be, how can we build on that success to achieve maximum impact?"

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Microsoft’s Linux Woes (Red Herring)

Red Herring considers the effect of the GPLv3 license on Microsoft and Novell. "The new license, if accepted, could isolate Microsoft, as well as Novell, from the rest of the open-source community. What it means it that Novell and Microsoft would have to stay with the GPLv2 license since it would be in violation of the GPLv3 license—and the duo would not be able to take advantage of new developments made under GPLv3. Microsoft reacted to the proposal with concern. “It is unfortunate that the FSF is attempting to use the GPLv3 to prevent future collaboration among industry leaders to benefit customers,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing, in an email."

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Mozilla and eBay are working together

The Mozilla Corporation has announced a partnership with eBay. "Mozilla and eBay International AG today announced they are working together to improve the online auction experience for people in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Together, Mozilla and eBay are collaborating on new technology and approaches to enable eBay users to stay up to date with their auctions more easily from within Firefox regardless of where they are on the Web."

MozillaZine predicts how the technology will be accomplished in the Firefox browser. "No more specific information has been released but further details are promised in the second quarter of this year. However, an extension that allows users to track eBay auctions from within Firefox seems a likely possibility."

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Red Hat's gross income grows, net disappoints (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch looks at Red Hat's financial results for the fiscal year. "Red Hat Inc. reported its financial results today for its fourth fiscal quarter and full fiscal year, both of which ended Feb. 28. While total revenue was up, the market was disappointed at the report that net income for the quarter fell about 25 percent year-over-year. Specifically, Q4 net income dropped from $28.75 million (13 cents per share) in 2006 to $21.5 million (10 cents per share) in 2007. Total revenue for the quarter was $111.1 million, an increase of 41 percent year-over-year and up 5 percent from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $95.9 million, up 44 percent year-over-year and 8 percent sequentially."

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Customers happy with Red Hat/JBoss connection (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld looks at Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss, nearly one year later. "Customers seem to like the acquisition, since many Red Hat customers were already JBoss users and can consolidate their vendor base with ease. Red Hat now offers a single subscription product, Red Hat Application Stack, that includes JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with the Apache Web server, the PHP and Perl languages, and the open-source databases MySQL and PostgreSQL."

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Legal

CAN-SPAM Act - Is it working? You Decide. (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal's Tom Adelstein considers the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM act. "As I delete spam from my Gmail spam folder, I notice the volumes increasing. A year ago, I would see about five to ten emails a day in that folder. This morning, I woke up to 56 items. The volume of spam has grown, no doubt. The acronym CAN-SPAM comes from the Congressional legislation's name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. The FTC has the responsibility of policing the Act. Of course, we all know what that means, the FTC will do little or nothing to enforce the legislation."

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Defence statement released in Israeli GPL test (Linux.com)

Linux.com reports that the GPL is being tested in Israeli court. "The defence in the Jin vs. Ichessu case, in which the GNU General Public License (GPL) is being tested in Israeli court, has filed a detailed defence, which moves the lawsuit from the fast-track short proceedings option into a regular court, where arguments are longer and possible settlements are unlimited. More importantly for the free and open source software community, the case now seems to hinge either on interpretations of the GPL or whether the GPL is valid under Israeli copyright law."

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Interviews

Albert Astals Cid (People Behind KDE)

Here's a People Behind KDE interview with Albert Astals Cid. "In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE? I'm KPDF, Blinken and KGeography mantainer. I am the KDE liaison and one of the main developers of the Poppler project (a Freedesktop.org library for rendering PDF files). I am part of the okular project, that aims to give KDE 4 the best unified document viewer around. I'm working on a few new applications like Kombination (a scrabble game), PDF Transformer (a pdftk frontend) and Kiriki (a Gtali clone). Finally i'm quite active on the KDE-Edu and kdegames projects doing some maintenance work." (Found on KDE.News)

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Orbiting Debian: Interview with Bdale Garbee (Tux Deluxe)

Tux Deluxe has an interview with Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist for Open Source & Linux at Hewlett-Packard, and a former Debian Project Leader. "The role of Bdale Garbee at HP involves advising the company on both the technology and community aspects of Linux and open source. He mentors internal HP departments on how to productively participate in the free software development process, and encourages the adoption of open source software and principles across the company. A contributor to the free software community for more than twenty-five years, his background also includes many years of hardware design, UNIX internals, and embedded systems work. He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian GNU/Linux to five architectures, and remains active in the Debian community."

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An Interview with KDE-Edu Developers (KDE.News)

KDE.News interviews KDE-Edu project developers Carsten Niehaus, Albert Astals Cid and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. "The KDE-Edu developers are developing high-quality educational software for the K Desktop Environment. Their primary focus is on school children aged 3 to 18, and the specialised user interface needs of young users. However, they are also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn!"

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Portrait: GNOME Foundation's Dave Neary (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at Dave Neary. "Neary says his introduction to free software came later, while he was working on a postgraduate research project at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. "The project I was working on wouldn't compile or run properly under Windows (something about the paging in the memory model) so I was doing must of my work remotely through xterms on the department's Sun workstations. Emmet Caulfield convinced me that I'd be better off with my own personal Linux workstation, so I finally gave in and bought Linux for Dummies, which included an install CD for Red Hat 5.0.... A month later, I was up and running with my new shiny FVWM 95 desktop.""

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Resources

Linux Gazette #137

The April edition of Linux Gazette is out. Articles include Cursor Appearance in the Linux Console, Getting Started with Linux Mint, Measuring Congestion Windows of TCP Senders, Rule-based DoS attacks prevention shell script and much more.

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The April, 2007 Netcraft Web Server Survey

Netcraft has published the April, 2007 edition of the Web Server Survey. "This month the Web Server Survey adds public tracking of lighttpd, an open source server designed for high-performance sites that has been gaining popularity in recent months. Lighttpd is currently detected on 1.38 million sites for a 1.2% share of the web server market, well ahead of Zeus and moving up quickly on Sun. Lighttpd has a relatively small memory footprint and is optimized for a large number of parallel connections, which has made it popular on sites using applications based on AJAX or Ruby on Rails, or hosting environments for virtual private servers."

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OpenOffice.org Calc functions, part 1: Understanding functions (Linux Journal)

Bruce Byfield introduces OO.o Calc functions in part one of a Linux Journal article series. "A function is a pre-defined calculation entered in a cell to help you analyze or manipulate data in a spreadsheet. All you have to do is add the arguments, and the calculation is automatically made for you. Beginners might be content to use Calc for lists, but, for advanced users, functions are the main reason for spreadsheets. If you understand functions, then you can start to use the real power of a spreadsheet. In Part 1 of this article, I'll give a brief overview of functions and how they operate."

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Reviews

GNOME 2.18 shows incremental improvement (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews GNOME 2.18. "To get into full GNOME 2.18 mode, I installed the Ubuntu Feisty beta, which includes GNOME 2.18, and also test-drove the Foresight Linux release that includes 2.18. I found that the bump from 2.16 to 2.18 is pretty gentle. You're not going to find many differences in this release that really stand out -- it takes some looking."

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Pogo Linux introduces NAS appliance (Computer Technology Review)

Computer Technology Review takes a look at the Pogo Linux StorageDirector 3000, which comes in 4, 8 and 12 Terabyte versions. "Pogo Linux Inc., a provider of Linux-based servers, workstations and storage systems, has announced the release of its StorageDirector 3000 series NAS (network attached storage) appliance. The StorageDirector 3000 Series simplifies networked storage management, while providing NAS and iSCSI (Internet SCSI) functionality to meet increasingly complex customer needs at a small and medium business (SMB) price point, Pogo Linux said last week."

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Samba 3 preview release behaves more like Windows (SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com looks at Samba 3.0.25. "The latest code changes and improvements to Samba 3.0.25 weren't overly dramatic, said the project's release manager, but the subtle changes do push things along toward a scheduled production release in early April. The changes also push Samba 3 along its path toward making Linux machines behave a bit more like Windows, said Samba release manager Jerry Carter."

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Review: System 76 Darter laptop (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews the Darter laptop from System 76. "With the exception of my trusty ThinkPad, the Darter is one of the sturdiest laptops I've had the pleasure of using. The laptop's chassis construction feels solid, and the screen does not flex much when you open and close it from a corner. The review system I received included a Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU, 1GB of system RAM, an Intel GMA 950 video chipset, Intel integrated audio and 802.11 a/b/g wireless Ethernet adapter, and a dual-layer DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. The system also includes a 10/100 Ethernet port, a single PCI Express card slot, a memory card reader, and a FireWire port with a mini FireWire connector."

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Taking XenExpress for a Spin (MontanaLinux.org)

Scott Dowdle reviews XenExpress on MontanaLinux.org. "According to the XenSource About page, "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(tm) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology." The first part of that leads to various Linux distro makers integrating Xen into their distributions (like SUSE, Red Hat/clones, and Fedora). For the second part of that, XenSource currently offers a product line which includes XenExpress, XenServer and XenEnterprise. Of the three offerings, XenExpress is designed to be the entry level product and is free."

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