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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading in this post, i rant about licensingTom "Spot" Callaway shares his thoughts on licensing. "I tend to giggle a little bit to myself whenever I hear about a "100% Free GNU/Linux distribution". I'm sure it is possible, theoretically to make one, but it quickly delves into semantics. First, who defines what "Free" means? Debian has a meaning, as does the Free Software Foundation. Their meanings are similar, but not compatible. Debian determines "Free" by committee. The FSF somewhat does as well, but ultimately, the tricky decisions go to Richard Stallman (rms)." (Thanks to Scott Dowdle)
Linux Steps Into the Operating System Ad Battle (Wired)The Linux Foundation (LF) is sponsoring a contest to answer the recent Apple and Microsoft advertising campaigns as reported by Wired. It is soliciting videos that are supposed to demonstrate the "I'm Linux" theme to counter the "I'm a Mac" and "I'm a PC" ad wars. The winning entry will be shown at the LF Collaboration Summit in San Francisco in April. "But unlike Microsoft's campaign that paid Jerry Seinfeld $3 million for two commercials and acquired user videos for free, the Linux Foundation plans to compensate the winner of its contest with a free trip to Tokyo to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium next October."
Companies Adobe AIR 1.5 now available for LinuxAdobe has announced the release of Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux. "A month ago, at our MAX conference in San Francisco, Adobe announced the immediate availability of the Adobe AIR 1.5 runtime and SDK for Mac and Windows. However, since the beginning of the AIR project when the AIR runtime was originally known by its code name Apollo, it has been our intention to bring the runtime and SDK to the Linux community as well. Earlier this year we posted a public beta on Adobe Labs and collected feedback from thousands of users on forums, blogs, Twitter posts, and our team's feedback form."
VMware's year end acquisition of Tungsten Graphics (InfoWorld)InfoWorld reports on the acquisition of Tungsten Graphics by VMware. "Fast forward a month later and in November, the virtualization giant was at it again. This time, VMware grabbed up a company involved with the development of a very popular series of graphics technology for Linux. The company is called Tungsten Graphics..."
Business Linux in 2009: Recession vs. GNU (Datamation)Over at Datamation, Bruce Byfield asks for some opinions on free and open source software (FOSS) adoption and outlook for 2009. Overall, most of those he talked to seemed to think next year would be good for FOSS, regardless of the economy. "But FOSS has many more advantages than simply being a cheaper way of building infrastructure. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, points out that not only is FOSS in general and Linux in particular well-supported, with billions of dollars of investment from top tier companies, but that, unlike Windows, it is 'massively hedged,' by which he means that it is available in every form from cheap notebooks through embedded systems to super computers."
Linux at Work The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider)LinuxInsider reports on the use of Linux for in-flight entertainment systems. "If you've used an in-flight entertainment system, known in the airline industry as an "IFE," to watch movies, listen to music, or order food lately, chances are it used Linux Linux as an operating system. You might not know that Linux is the operating system behind what you see on your screen, but it probably is. United, Delta, Qantas, Emirates, Virgin America, Aeromexico, Air New Zealand and many other airlines all use versions of Linux-based IFE software."
Interviews Linux's '09 Outlook: Everywhere, Even On Windows Machines (InformationWeek)InformationWeek talks to Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation. ""The New York Times recently did a piece on big-name companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard all diving in the [Linux-powered] netbook space," he told me, "and on top of that there's QuickBoot, where you power on your machine and a couple of seconds later, you've booted into a Linux-powered mini-environment with network access, e-mail, and so on. The thing is, when people use this, Microsoft loses that much more customer experience. You're not booting into Windows, so Windows becomes further from the consumer in terms of what they're using day to day. And as you get less dependent on Windows, other things rise to the fore."
Resources An OpenVZ Experiment - How many containers? (Montana Linux)Scott Dowdle experiments with OpenVZ containers. "I was wondering just how many OpenVZ containers I could create on a beefy machine and how many processes the Linux kernel would be happy running so I decided to do an experiment. I have two OpenVZ hosts... one is the primary and the other is a backup machine. Both of them are HP Proliant DL380 Gen5 machines with dual, quad-core Xeon processors, 32GB of RAM, 32GB of swap, and a 600GB /vz partition. I decided to use the backup OpenVZ machine for the experiment."
Python 3 primer, Part 1: What's new (developerWorks)developerWorks begins a series looking at Python 3. "This article - the first in a series on Python 3 - covers the new print() function, input(), changes to input/output (I/O), the new bytes data type, changes to strings and string formatting, and finally, changes to the built-in dict type. This article is meant for programmers who are already familiar with Python and are curious about the changes but don't want to wade through the long list of Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)."
Miscellaneous Call For Articles - Cool Projects (Linux Journal)Linux Journal is looking for cool projects to write articles about. "We're the first to admit that Linux is cool. Just using it is cool, but if you're doing something extra cool with Linux this is your chance to share it with the community. Our Cool Projects issue is coming up quick and we're looking for a few more project articles. We're partial to Cool projects that have a hardware slant, but if you have a Cool software project let us know about that too."
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