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Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Linus explains why open source works (Linux.com)
Bruce Byfield talks with Linus Torvalds, on Linux.com. "Asked point-blank which is more important, sharing code or empowering users -- the declared goal of the free software champions whom Torvalds is routinely depicted as being in opposition with -- and his first response in what he calls "the usual Linus polite words" is "That's a really stupid question. Why do you put it as an 'either or' kind of concept?" He then goes on to explain that, because open source operates in the same manner as scientific query, and is a matter of enlightened self-interest, sharing code and empowering users "are not at odds at all" -- a view that, in the end, places him closer to the free software position than either free software or open source followers might care to admit."
Shuttleworth: Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard?
Mark Shuttleworth writes at length about the upcoming vote on Microsoft's OpenXML format as an ISO standard. "A vote of 'no OpenXML' is vote against multiple incompatible standards, and hence a vote in favour of unity.If the ISO vote is 'no', then there is every reason to expect that Microsoft will adopt ODF, and help to make that a better standard for everybody including themselves."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Antivirus Tools Underperform When Tested in LinuxWorld 'Fight Club' (Dark Reading)
Dark Reading covers an antivirus competition at LinuxWorld."'What's surprising about a test like this is how much difference there is between the antivirus products' performance,' says Dirk Morris, CTO and co-founder of Untangle. 'Some of the products you think will do well don't, and some of the lesser-known products, like open source tools, end up doing well.'"
Novell Calls For Standardized Certification Of Linux ISVs (InformationWeek)
InformationWeek covers the LinuxWorld keynote speech by Novell's Ron Hovsepian. "Novell president and chief executive Ron Hovsepian on Wednesday called on the Linux community to develop a standard certification process for independent software vendors to ensure that applications run across the different distributions of the open source operating system. During his keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Hovsepian said what drives customers' choice of either Linux or Windows comes down to the applications that run on the operating system. "Whether we like it or not, the application is what drives the final customer decision," he said. To drive more development on Linux, the community has to make it easier for ISVs to build software that can run across Linux distributions."
Linux Geeks Dust Nerds In Golden Penguin Trivia Bowl (CRN)
CRN covers the LinuxWorld Golden Penguin Trivia Bowl. "As Barry Bonds smashed Hank Aaron's home run record Tuesday evening at AT&T Park, another great sporting triumph went down less than a mile to the north at Moscone Center, where a team of Linux Geeks vanquished a Nerd squad of Dell employees in LinuxWorld's annual trivia smackdown, the Golden Penguin Bowl. The three-man Team Geek sealed its victory and secured a trio of the coveted glass Golden Penguin statuettes by besting their rivals from Dell in two rounds of tech trivia, capped with a decisive bout of Robosapien sumo."
Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)
eWeek covers a LinuxWorld talk on the Linux desktop by a Dell strategist. "Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here. For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.""
FOSS and the philosophers (Linux.com)
Matt Butcher covers the North American Computers and Philosophy conference on Linux.com. "I used to think of myself as something of a rare bird -- a philosopher and software developer with a keen interest in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements. But as I discovered at last month's North American Computers and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference in Chicago, there are many with similar interests. The conference, held at Loyola University Chicago, featured keynotes by Richard Stallman, of GNU fame, and philosopher Peter Suber, an advocate of the Open Access (OA) movement in scholarly journals. Academic philosophers and computer scientists from North America, Europe, and Africa traveled to Chicago to attend the conference and present their research."
The SCO Problem
Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! (Groklaw)
Groklaw has the news: one of the first big rulings in Novell v. SCO has come in, and Novell wins. In particular, Novell has been determined to be the owner of the Unix copyrights, and Novell has the right to waive claims against others (like IBM) based on that code. The full ruling [PDF] is available. Update: one of the (presumably many) interesting points in the ruling is that SCO owes Novell the bulk of the money it got from Sun and Microsoft. That's more money than SCO has now.
The SCO Group: we're not dead yet
Here (by way of Groklaw) is the SCO Group's response to its loss in court last week. "Although the district judge ruled in Novell's favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here."
What's Left? - A Chart of the Summary Judgment Rulings in SCO v Novell (Groklaw)
Groklaw charts the remaining claims in the SCO v. Novell case. "To help us get beyond just the overview, Feldegast has done a chart showing what the decision was on each summary judgment motion and what claim or counterclaim it connects to. I've put urls to the documents in his chart so we can connect the dots. And below the chart, I've made a list of what each claim or counterclaim is about. The chart is in the order that Judge Dale Kimball listed them in his conclusion."
Linux Goes Legit (WindowsITPro)
Here's a brief WindowsITPro article giving a view of the Novell/SCO ruling from a Windows perspective. "But the big news here is that the uncertainty over Linux is no more. Linux is now legally legitimate and free from the worrisome cloud of legal exposure that existed for the previous four years. Suddenly, using Linux isn't troublesome anymore, at least from a legal standpoint. And all that Microsoft language over the past few years about indemnification and so forth suddenly sounds a bit trite, unless you're still worried that Microsoft will unleash a patent attack on the open-source community."
Companies
Dell to Offer Inspirons With Linux in Europe (PC World)
PC World notes that Dell plans to sell pre-installed Linux systems in Europe. "Following up on its Spring 07 announcement that it will ship Inspiron notebook and desktops with the Linux OS, Dell chose the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco to add the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to its Linux stable of models. The Inspiron 1505n notebook and Inspiron 530n desktop will now both be offered with Ubuntu 7.04 Linux distribution installed at the factory."
MySQL ends distribution of Enterprise source tarballs (Linux.com)
Linux.com reports on a change in the distribution of MySQL Enterprise Server source code. "MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions. While the Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), MySQL is making it harder for non-customers to access the source code. Kaj Arnö, the company's vice president of community relations, wrote that the Enterprise tarballs "will be removed from ftp.mysql.com. These will move to enterprise.mysql.com, and will be available for our paying subscribers only.""
Legal
Linux Foundation adds legal eagles (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch reports that the Linux Foundation (LF) has hired two attorneys. "Once upon a time, the only thing Linux needed was great coders. That was a long time ago. Today, Linux needs excellent lawyers as well to navigate the 21st century's increasingly lawsuit-happy IT world. To address that concern, the LF (Linux Foundation) has added two top attorneys to its ranks. Last week, at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, LF, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, announced that open-source licensing expert Karen Copenhaver and standards and consortium expert Andy Updegrove have joined the Foundation's legal team to provide leadership on legal issues affecting Linux."
Interviews
People of openSUSE: Stephan Kulow
Here's a People of openSUSE interview with Stephan Kulow, release manager of the openSUSE distribution. "What do you think the future holds for the openSUSE project? I hope we can grow our community as we did in the past years. I envision an even stronger integration between community, distribution and users through the use of build service. This is a very strong tool. And who wouldn't want to have it's own kernel patch maintained by an automatic build service, so that if you update your distribution to the latest factory, you get a new kernel and your patch is still in there."
Resources
How To Convert Songs From An Audio CD Into MP3/Ogg Files With K3b (HowtoForge)
HowtoForge has published a tutorial on converting audio CDs to MP3 and Ogg files using K3b. "This guide describes how you can use the CD/DVD burning application K3b to convert songs from an audio CD into MP3 or Ogg files that you can use on your MP3 player, for example (if you choose the Ogg format, your MP3 player must support it)."
Is my hardware Linux-compatible? Find out here (Linux.com)
Linux.com takes a look at choosing Linux compatible hardware. "Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available."
Mono: A Progress Report (O'ReillyNet)
Edd Dumbill discusses the state of the Mono project on O'Reilly's OnLamp site. "Mono has always been a bit of an outsider. Open source folks distrust it because it helps people use Microsoft technologies on non-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft people don't see the need for it. But this social outcast has been making steady progress and can offer a lot if you take the time to check it out."
Anatomy of the Linux networking stack (developerWorks)
As seen on Slashdot, IBM developerWorks has an overview of the Linux networking stack. "Practically speaking, the layers of the networking stack go by much more recognizable names. At the link layer, you find Ethernet, the most common high-speed medium. Older link-layer protocols include the serial protocols such as the Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), Compressed SLIP (CSLIP), and the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). The most common network layer protocol is Internet Protocol (IP), but other protocols exist at the network layer that satisfy other needs, such as the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). At the transport layer is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Finally, the application layer includes many familiar protocols, including the standard Web protocol, HTTP, and the e-mail protocol, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)."
Reviews
LyX 1.5: What you see is what you mean (Linux.com)
Linux.com reviews LyX 1.5. "According to its Web site, LyX is "the first WYSIWYM document processor," coupling a familiar word processing front end to the powerful LaTeX typesetting engine. Last month's new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines."
MEPIS releases KDE 4 Beta 1 Live DVDs (DesktopLinux)
DesktopLinux looks at a MEPIS release with KDE 4 Beta 1. "Warren Woodford of MEPIS announced on Aug. 10 that his company has built KDE 4 Beta 1 Live DVDs to verify the compatibility of KDE 4 with SimplyMEPIS 7.x."
Watch online video? Get Miro (Linux.com)
Nathan Willis looks at Miro on Linux.com. "First it was called DTV, then Democracy Player, and now it is Miro. Whatever you call it, the Mozilla-based, cross-platform, open source video player is now in public release. Miro differs from playback front ends like VLC by offering integrated content-finding and content-management tools. If you think that's a meaningless distinction, think again."
Mylyn 2.0, Part 1: Integrated task management (developerWorks)
IBM developerWorks looks at Mylyn 2.0. "Now in release 2.0, Mylyn (formerly called Mylar) enhances productivity by seamlessly integrating tasks into Eclipse and automatically managing the context of those tasks as you work. Mylyn Project Lead Mik Kersten has updated his two-part guide to using Mylyn to cover the improvements driven by the massive amounts of user feedback since Mylyn 1.0. Part 1 introduces Mylyn's task management facilities and integration with repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. You'll learn how context management eases multitasking and reduces information overload in Part 2."
Children's Reviews of OLPC XO Technology (OLPC News)
One Laptop Per Child News reports on several children's reviews of the XO. "Note that Gabe had never seen one of these things before, and with practically no help from the adults, he had started painting, typing, and playing with the webcam, cackling quite evilly the whole time."
The Ultimate Linux Handheld (Linux Journal)
Doc Searls and Jim Thompson search for the Ultimate Linux Handheld. "Last year's winner in this category, the Nokia 770, has a younger sibling, and, as oft happens, the kid takes the cake. Nokia's N800, the follow-up to the 770, is smaller, lighter, better-looking, faster and has a larger brain."
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