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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without RegulationTimothy Lee has posted a lengthy paper on the network neutrality debate. One can guess its conclusions simply by noting that it is hosted at the Cato Institute, but those conclusions are backed up by substantial research and reasoning. "Yet many deregulationists underestimate the importance of the Internet's end-to-end architecture and are too cavalier about abandoning the neutral network for a tiered, filtered, more centrally managed one. The decentralization made possible by the Internet's open architecture is the key to its astonishing growth, and there is little reason to think that it would be improvement for the Internet's decentralized 'dumb' architecture to be replaced by a more centralized 'smart' one." Worth a read for those who are interested in this subject.
Companies Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)Lars-Göran Nilsson reports that Creative has released Linux drivers with source code under the GPLv2 for its X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium series of sound cards for both 32 and 64-bit operating systems. "We'd expect a wide range of people jumping at the opportunity to be able to develop their own Linux drivers for the X-Fi cards and implement the missing features and ad some of their own. We can't wait to see what happens, but it might be some time before we see full feature support, but it's great to see that Creative has finally come to its senses."
Linux Adoption European Commission publishes guidelines on the procurement of FOSS (fossbazaar)Martin Michlmayr covers recently published guidelines on the procurement of open source software from the European Commission. "The Open Source Repository and Observatory (OSOR), a new site sponsored by the European Commission to foster the exchange of FOSS related information and software among European public administrations, recently published guidelines on the procurement of open source software. Public administrations in Europe have to follow public tender procedures and the new guidelines give practical and legal advice on how open source software and related services can be incorporated into the procurement process."
Legal Bilski: What It Means, Part 2 -- Listening to the Dissenting Opinions (Groklaw)Groklaw continues looking into the Bilski decision. "So let's look now at the dissenting opinions, as text, so you can give consideration to the point of view of those who sincerely believe that patents should cover more than they now can. You'll note that the State Street decision was in 1998. Some of these justices were sitting on the court at that time. The decision in State Street was decided by three judges, Giles Sutherland Rich, who passed away in 1999, and justices Plage and Bryson, still serving. Judge Rich wrote the decision in State Street, when he was 94 years old. Most of the 16 judges that decided Bilski were serving in 1998, only four of them having been appointed later than that. You'll see Justice Newman referenced in one of the footnotes of that State Street decision, footnote 10. So she is no newbie to patent law."
Bilski - What It Means, Part 3 - The Mayer Dissent and Some Intangibility Questions (Groklaw)Groklaw continues an analysis of the Bilski case, which is about the patentability of business methods. "I know. It takes us into OMG territory. It's what Bilski was trying to address. The AT&T decision built on and depended on State Street, and Judge Mayer is saying that State Street came out of the blue, contradicting prior common law and the patent statutes, and it really needs to be clearly killed off and buried, along with any of its children, because it was a mistake, one that launched what he calls "a legal tsunami" of regrettable patents on what ought to be the unpatentable."
Resources Booting Debian in 14 seconds (Debian-administration)Debian-Administration.org has made an attempt to reproduce the five-second Linux boot experiment using Debian. "Inspired by this work, and because I have the same laptop, I decided to try to reproduce their results. So far I have not come very close to their 5 seconds, but I have made some significant improvements compared to the default boot time for Debian on that machine; this article describes what I've done."
Reviews Test Center review: Specialty Linuxes to the rescue (InfoWorld)InfoWorld reviews several small Linux distributions. "SliTaz Linux is a unique Linux breed created from scratch by Christophe Lincoln. Heavy application of gzip and lzma compression, plus removal of everything but 'the minimum necessary to make it work' (in the estimation of SliTaz's creator) have reduced its boot image to a remarkable 30MB."
Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users? (InternetNews)InternetNews takes a look at Smolt, a hardware profiling tool developed by Fedora. "Linux users are not an easy bunch to profile or to count. Many Linux users download the operating system for free and never perform any kind of systems registration to enumerate their hardware. That's where Smolt may be able to help fill the gap. Smolt is an open source hardware profiling technology that is already being used by Red Hat's Fedora and is set for inclusion in the upcoming Novell OpenSUSE 11.1 release."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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