Linux in the news

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Will patents pillage open source? (News.com)

News.com looks at software patents and how they might effect open source software. "Software patents sometimes cause legitimate controversy not because computer programs somehow differ from other patentable technologies, but because patents on software are relatively new. Undergirding every patent is faith that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has performed a competent literature search, and awarded patent protection only to subject matter that's "inventive"--i.e., new and different from prior work. That faith has been sorely tested in the software arena." (Thanks to Richard Jones)

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XFree86(tm) Project Mission Statement

A new XFree86 project mission statement has been published. The statement defines the project's primary goals, formal organizational structure, and daily operational structure.

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Trade Shows and Conferences

Social software author 'not miffed' by conference shutout (Register)

The Register reports on who was not invited to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "So it's odd, when you peruse the Emerging Technology Conference agenda, to get the sense that you're staring at a scene that resembles the Scientology cult. It achieves this spooky effect by pandering extensively to a tiny part of the idea spectrum and excluding not just important historical figures with rich contributors to make, but emerging researching entrepreneurs and researchers, too."

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Companies

IBPhoenix Calls For More Focussed and Courteous Protest Campaign (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports that IBPhoenix, the FirebirdSQL Foundation sponsor who yesterday called for a mass forum posting and emailing campaign in opposition of Phoenix's renaming to Firebird, have reconsidered the scale of their protest.

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SuSE offers Linux for Opteron (News.com)

News.com covers the release of SuSE Linux for Opteron. "SuSE has been a tight AMD partner, beginning work in 2000 to create a version of Linux for Opteron and future members of the x86-64 chip family such as Athlon 64. Rex said AMD took suggestions on how best to design the chip's circuitry for running Linux, and when the first chip prototype emerged, it took three days to get the SuSE version up and running."

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Linux Adoption

Linux moving into the household moving business (ComputerWorld)

ComputerWorld looks at the reasons a large moving company has moved their computers to Linux. "All-American, which is the largest moving agent under the Mayflower Transit LLC banner, settled on Linux last year as it sought cheaper alternatives to rising licensing costs for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 server operating system, Pekol said. The company was also worried about security issues with Windows NT and 2000. "Windows NT servers are constantly being hacked, so we were very concerned about customer data," Pekol said." (Thanks to Peter Link)

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Interviews

Interview: Taking Samba beyond POSIX (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks interviews Andrew Tridgell on his latest Samba rewrite. "And what exactly does Tridge have to say about exotic filesystem backends? It turns out that since being hired by IBM's Almaden Research Center in January of this year, the Australian hacker has been working on pushing Samba beyond the POSIX world and figuring out what work needs to be done to get Samba to support new filesystems such as XFS, ext3, and Storage Tank. The answer is nothing less than a complete rewrite of Samba's smbd code, which has become his latest pet project."

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Interview: MySQL rides open source wave into DBs (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld has an interview with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. "MM: We are never on the bleeding edge, but we are fast movers. We hadn't spent millions on .Net thinking, but when we decided to get into it we immediately created a .Net interface and were the first non-Microsoft database to have that available. That's how we deal with any new technology. We take our time, but once we move, we move fast. XML will clearly be an important standard in the future and for us it is a tactical decision when to provide that functionality." (Thanks to Peter Link)

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Firebird Database Project Admin Ann Harrison Interviewed (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine interviews Ann Harrison, project administrator of the Firebird Database Project. "A little bit of history here. Borland owns the InterBase copyright and released one version under a variant of the Mozilla license in July of 2000. Borland declined to allow write access to "outsiders" and to accept contributions from them -- us. Mark O'Donohue and a few others who wanted to work on the code created a fork and called it Firebird. All work on InterBase Open Edition has stopped. Firebird is an active project."

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The People Behind Quanta Plus (KDE.org)

Here's an interview with Eric Laffoon and András Mantia about the Quanta Plus project. "My vision for Quanta is to make it the next "killer app" on Linux. Even though the use of web development tools is currently limited among computer users I feel there are two key aspects people overlook when they say that Quanta is not well suited for this mantle." (Thanks to Navindra Umanee)

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SCO CEO Defends $1 Billion Lawsuit Against IBM (CRN)

Computer Reseller News talks with SCO CEO Darl McBride about the IBM lawsuit. "There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done. But we're focused on the IBM situation." (Found on Slashdot).

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Resources

Secure Programming Techniques (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly begins a multipart series on secure programming, with excerpts from Practical Unix & Internet Security, 3rd Edition. "Software engineers define errors as mistakes made by humans when designing and coding software. Faults are manifestations of errors in programs that may result in failures. Failures are deviations from program specifications. In common usage, faults are called bugs."

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Quality of Surfing: An Intermediate Level HowTo (Linux Journal)

Here's a Linux Journal article on how to use the (much underutilized) fair queueing features of the Linux networking subsystem. "We'll use a fairly simple kernel filter called u32 to ferret out interactive traffic (looking at the ToS or Type of Service field in the packet), bump it to the head of the line outbound and set the bulk traffic filter ('queueing discipline') to use only a percentage of the outbound bandwidth."

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Tracking Tux: Research Round-up (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at reports from from research groups like Gartner and Illuminata. "Gartner vp's George Weiss and Andy Butler replaced a two-year-old generic "Linux" entity on the Midrange Server Magic Quadrant with three specific Linux servers. In addition to the Red Hat AS ranking, Weiss and Butler awarded respectable positions to Linux on IBM zSeries and SuSE on x86."

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Reviews

Opera 7 browser goes with Linux (vnunet)

Vnunet surfs the web with Opera, version 7. "The Opera 7.10 browser for Linux Beta, which is shipping alongside Opera 7.10 for Windows, comes with features that the company claims "are not only new to Opera, but also completely new to the world of browsing"."

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Miscellaneous

Open Source Development Lab names new CEO (NewsForge)

Here's a NewsForge article covering the appointment of Stu Cohen as the first CEO of the Open Source Development Lab. "Stu Cohen, the new CEO, will concentrate on corporate Linux evangelism. We had a brief AIM chat with Cohen Friday. He didn't have much to say; he's only been on the job for a few days, after all. But it's nice to see a new face in charge of this valuable Linux and Open Source organization, and to learn a little bit about him."

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