Linux in the news

Recommended Reading

Recent security flaws highlight need for vigilance (NewsForge)

This NewsForge article looks into recent security vulnerabilities in open source software. "Most responsible organizations get that far. Many, however, fail to take the next step of correcting the flaws. They may have good reasons: No one wants to be first to install a fix in case the fix breaks something new. Sometimes servers need to run 24/7 and can't conveniently be brought down for maintenance. And it can be awkward to patch only a subset of your servers, leaving your network in an inconsistent state."

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US mod chip retailer jailed and fined (Register)

The Register reports that David Rocci has been sentenced to five months in jail for selling Xbox mod chips. "...the sentence will send an extremely powerful message to anyone else involved in the production or sale of Xbox mod chips in the USA (so far, the attempts of the US Department of Justice to extend the reach of the DMCA beyond its borders have - thankfully - been a failure). Expect a lot of mod chip projects and websites to quietly disappear in the next few days."

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Trade Shows and Conferences

Perens Addresses Individualism Vs. the Company Line (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal covers Bruce Perens' talk at SD West on "Individualism and the Company Line". "J. Random Hacker may argue that she still has freedom of speech. This is true; however, there is a context for this freedom. Publicly attacking your employer's products or services yields clearly defined results. Although Perens's contract with HP stated he could express his opinion to the press freely, attacking HP's business partner Microsoft was a problem."

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Reporter's Notebook: Linux gaining interest from Wall Street (ComputerWorld)

ComputerWorld reports from the Linux on Wall Street Show and Conference. "The show was small by recent IT standards, but it was designed as a comfortable place for Wall Street executives to get a close-up look at the Linux phenomenon. IBM was here, as were SuSE Linux AG, Hewlett-Packard Co., Computer Associates International Inc. and Reuters Market Data System, all showing off some of their Linux technologies to users and potential users." (Thanks to Peter Link)

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Companies

Vic Unis sign life sciences computing deal (ZDNet.au)

ZDNet Australia covers a consortium of Victorian Universities that have signed an $AU1 million deal with IBM Australia to give them improved access to computing power and bioinformatics tools. "The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), a consortium which provides high-performance computing facilities and support to member universities, said the deal encompassed delivery of a "life sciences solution" including a Linux-based supercomputer cluster and a series of advanced bioinformatics tools." (Thanks to Con Zymaris)

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Linux Adoption

Linux Lags On The Desktop (TechWeb)

Here's a lengthy TechWeb article about business deployments of desktop Linux. "Ernie Ball Inc. turned to Linux out of crisis more than cost savings. Three years ago, the global manufacturer of guitar strings was slammed by the Business Software Alliance for running more copies of Windows than the company had paid for. Then there were the pirated copies of software from Autodesk Inc. and FileMaker Inc. It was the spark that turned Ernie Ball into a Linux hot spot. 'We had 120 days to comply with the BSA, and we complied by throwing everything out,' says Jeff Whitmore, an IT manager at Ernie Ball."

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Whitehall dips toes into open source purchasing (Register)

The Register looks into the successful roll-out of an open source-based online purchasing system. "Called Purchase & Pay, the Linux-based system is used by civil servants in the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) for the purchase of printed forms and stationery. The government hopea to extend the role of the system to facilitate the payment of invoices resulting from orders to be added over the coming months."

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Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream (TechWeb)

This TechWeb article says Linux on the desktop is coming, but slowly. "No one is predicting a Linux landslide. While the Apache Web server forged a beachhead for Linux, the desktop fight will be an uphill battle. The key to the desktop was pointed out by a very unlikely source, Oracle's Larry Ellison: Applications. But to attract app makers, you need users in number. And to attract users, you need ease of installation, ease of device configuration, and intuitive, full-featured desktop user controls. It's all coming, but slowly."

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Legal

Report from the first Oregon open source hearing (NewsForge)

NewsForge reports on Oregon's "open source" hearing. "The sponsors of the bill had their say first. Ken led the testimony with his background and motivation for the bill. He was followed by many others, including members of the LTSP project and representatives from small school districts who said they could not be doing the things they are without the savings Open Source software makes available to them. Others provided a range of thoughtful and well-presented views."

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Open-source battle rages in Oregon (News.com)

News.com reports on the fight over the Barnhart open source law proposal in Oregon. "Lined up behind the measure at last week's hearing were Linux user groups and developers, and school district representatives, some of whom testified they were able to save so much money using open-source software that they could afford to hire additional teachers."

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'Anonymous' funds patent foe (News.com)

According to News.com, an anonymous donor is funding Bruce Perens to fight software patents. "Perens says the $50,000 yearly grant will let him spend a quarter of his time working on the IETF and other standards groups, including the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), to urge the adoption of royalty-free policies. He also plans to become an official member of the W3C, which charges a $5,000 membership fee."

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Interviews

The Linux Standards Base offers binary compatibility (IBM News)

Here's an IBM interview with George Kraft IV, LSB Chairman and IBM LSB liaison, talking about the Linux Standards Base, and how Linux applications can become Linux Standards Base compliant. "How do you make sure that the standards you specify are consistent with the way that most ISVs are coding their applications?
George: The LSB is conducting a survey to gather information about how software products are being built. This may give the LSB an opportunity to see if we are on track for ISV adoption. We think it is very important to get the broadest possible ISV participation, and we encourage any ISVs who develop Linux applications and care about binary compatibility to participate. It's a very quick survey to complete, and the results will be tabulated at the end of May."

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MySQL's open challenge (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld interviews Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. "Jon Udell, the InfoWorld Test Center's lead analyst, spoke with Mickos about dual licensing, modular architecture, and the perception vs. the reality of MySQL."

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Grady Booch polishes his crystal ball (IBM developerWorks)

IBM's developerWorks has an interview with Rational Software's Chief Scientist, Grady Booch. "Grady Booch spends his time pondering how to improve software development. As such, he thinks about how current trends -- UML, aspect-oriented programming, Web services, and so on -- will evolve into tomorrow's development environments. Most importantly, Grady believes that we solve the complexity problem by continually raising the level of abstraction."

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Interview with Jeff Nguyen from ASL (LinuxQuestions)

LinuxQuestions.org interviews Jeff Nguyen, CEO of ASL. " Jeff: I got involved with Linux due to my working background as Unix software engineer for Fintronic USA during the early 90. Because Unix platforms were expensive due to their proprietary model, there was a need for an alternative solution."

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Daddy, Are We There Yet? A Discussion with Alan Kay (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has an interview with Smalltalk creator Alan Kay. ""Twenty years ago at PARC," Kay says, "I thought we would be way beyond where we are now. I was dissatisfied with what we did there. The irony is that today it looks pretty good. The result of our work is techniques for doing software in an interesting and more powerful way. That was back in the seventies. People today aren't doing a lot of work to move programming to its next phase.""

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Resources

Rolling Your Own Firewall (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal sets up a firewall on an old system. "I had been looking at Pebble, a Debian-based mid-sized distribution, for a while, and it looked perfect for the job. Pebble is designed to run on a 128MB Compact Flash chip, but it works easily with other devices, including CD-ROM. It mounts root read-only and keeps the log files and other writables on a 10MB RAM disk; you can pull the plug on the box and lose only the logs."

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Cheap IP Takeover (O'ReillyNet)

In this O'ReillyNet article, Rob Flickenger offers a scheme for monitoring the health of a server that lets another server take it over if it fails. "One way is to use the send_arp utlity from the High Availability Linux project. This very handy (and tiny) utility will craft an ARP packet to your specifications, and send it to a MAC address of your choice on the local network. If we specify all ones (for example, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) for the destination, then it effectively becomes a broadcast ARP packet."

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Who's your favorite Linux hardware vendor? (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks for your favorite Linux hardware vendor. "I strongly prefer dealing with a local company that can say, "Bring it in, let's see what's wrong, and get it working for you right away." Once you get used to this level of service, no national or multinational company can successfully compete for your business, even if their price is slightly lower than you might pay a local vendor -- which it usually isn't anyway for units of similar quality, assuming your local vendor is half-decent in the first place."

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Linux Gazette issue #89, April 2003

The Linux Gazette issue #89 for April 2003 is out. This month features articles on The Linux Scheduler, by Vinayak Hegde; Ecol, by Javier Malonda; Laurel and Hardy Try to Write a C Program, by Stephen Bint; and much more.

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What's So Free About This DVD? (Wired)

The documentary film "REVOLUTION OS" is finally out on DVD. Wired covers the release. LWN received a note from J.T.S. Moore, the director of "REVOLUTION OS", who assures us that "the REVOLUTION OS DVD has been released CSS-Free to call attention to the problems of DRM and the DMCA." For those who may have forgotten about this film, it is a feature length documentary about the origins of GNU, Linux, and the Open Source movement, starring Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and many others.

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Anyone can be a Google hacker (Boston Globe)

Here is a Boston Globe column on hacking Google. "Calishain was inspired by the realization that it's possible to write code that modifies the operation of the ultra-powerful Google search engine. Google doesn't mind; as a matter of fact, the company's come up with a way to help people who want to do it. It's published an "application programming interface," or API, a bit of code that allows other programs to hook directly into Google's computers and perform special tricks. But even without using the API, people have found ways to add extra horsepower to their Google searches.""

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Reviews

The Web Framework Shootout

Ian Bicking has put together a comparison of a number of web Frameworks. "In the beginning for the Python web programmer there were two choices: Zope and the cgi module. On one hand you had a featureful but complex application environment, on the other a simple but featureless and low-level module. For a significant number of web applications Zope's features weren't helpful and the complexity daunting, but the alternative was discouragingly primitive.

In response to this a variety of web application frameworks have been developed in the last few years, often by developers who created a framework in the process of their own application development. I try in this paper to show the flavor of these alternatives, and to inform the developer that's trying to decide on a framework for their application."

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FOSS Billing Project Announced (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews looks at a Free and Open Source medical billing project for FreeMED. "This XML-RPC interface will be FreeMED neutral, which means other. GPL FOSS systems will be able to make us of it. So far at least TORCH and OSCAR have expressed hopes that the system will be designed and implemented well enough that they might be able to integrate it. Hopefully this project will eventually play a similar role as OpenSSH does in the Operating System community. Helping lots of different projects, by addressing a common need."

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Miscellaneous

Seti@home flaw could let alien invaders in (News.com)

News.com covers a security flaw in Seti@home. "Wever and SETI@home both recommend that users download the latest software from the project's Web site. In addition, SETI@home software users can download a patch from its Web site. The command-line versions of the software for Windows, Linux and Solaris will be available later on Monday, said SETI@home's Anderson. Information about the security flaw has been sent to open-source projects that have created other versions of the software as well."

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