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No More Free Beer?

It is no secret that many commercial Linux companies are struggling to survive in a market often dominated by the perception that Linux is free. Much of the blame can of course be attributed to the unfortunate use of "free" in English, which, unlike most other languages, makes no distinction between the two common meanings of the word - free as in speech and free as in beer. Fighting off this perception is not easy and many Linux distributions are trying hard to find new ways to throttle the the free beer tap or to restrict access to it.

MandrakeSoft released its latest Mandrake Linux, version 9.2, last week. It was the first time in the company's 5-year history that the final product was withheld until the box sets are ready for shipment. Only those who had joined MandrakeClub were given a privileged access to the three ISO images - via the BitTorrent file sharing technology. Not every member was happy about it - those on a dial-up connection or some of those behind firewalls find themselves excluded from the party. But while public FTP servers will only carry the ISO images at the end of this month, MandrakeSoft has made the entire 9.2 directory tree available for those wishing to upgrade an existing installation directly from FTP servers.

Like Mandrake, Lycoris also restricted the public availability of their recently released Desktop/LX Update 3. According to notes on the distribution's mirrors, the ISO images will only be uploaded in November, more than 2 months after the official release. However, the online system upgrade has not been restricted, so anybody who previously installed an older beta release can perform a simple but unsupported upgrade to the latest stable version.

SuSE has always tried hard to convince users about the value of their boxed sets. Firstly, the product's best-known utility (YaST) comes with a somewhat hard-to-interpret, non-GPL license, which prevents users from distributing the ISO images. Secondly, SUSE does not provide ISO images as a matter of company policy, with the exception of some products made for less widely used architectures. Even beta testing is closed to public. However, SuSE does supply a means to install the distribution directly from FTP servers, usually about 1 - 2 months after the official release.

Many other commercial distributions have much more restrictive policies. The latest releases from Libranet, Lindows.com and Xandros are only available from their respective online stores. Of the three, only Libranet provides any form of free download - that of an outdated and stripped-down edition. It is interesting to note that cheap illegal copies of LindowsOS and Xandros have reportedly been spotted on the streets of Thailand and other Asian countries, right next to pirated Microsoft products.

Although Linux distributions seem increasingly inclined to restrict, or at least delay, the free availability of their products, all is not bad news. Slackware still provides complete and unrestricted access to their product immediately after release; in fact of the major and well-established commercial distributions, Slackware is the only one with such a policy. This is largely due to the fact that Slackware is a small (2-person) company with minimal development costs and a relatively large and loyal user base.

Then there is Red Hat. Always innovative and always different from the rest, Red Hat has decided to buck the trend and turn their distribution over to the Fedora community for further development. The Fedora Project has yet to establish itself and there are some rough bumps on the transition road (Fedora 0.95 ISOs were released without the usually meticulous release notes!), but freeing the distribution from its commercial shackles will almost certainly result in a better and more user-oriented product.

Of course, Linux is about choice and those unable to accept any form of commercialization or restrictions on availability from a Linux distribution can always turn to non-commercial Debian, Gentoo or any of the dozens of smaller projects for all their needs. If in doubt, talk to the wise or the penniless to find out which of the pubs still serve free beer...

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for October 21, 2003 covers the deployment of 100 new Debian GNU/Linux systems at the audit court of the German province Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Dutch robot soccer team Mission Impossible Twente's use of Debian woody, Debian and the LPI, Debian in the News, a Package Policy Checker, and much more.

Martin Michlmayr reflects on his last six months as Debian Project Leader with news about Debian internal management, Debian finance and legal matters, Publicity & events and Partner relations.

Debian developers have until October 29, 2003 to vote on a General Resolution to amend the Debian Constitution to disambiguate section 4.1.5. Here's an early status report with additional information.

Martin Michlmayr talks about Debian and the Linux Professional Institute (LPI), which has certification tests available using Debian tools such as dpkg.

DebianPlanet reports that registration is open for Debian MiniConf3, taking place in Adelaide, South Australia on January 12 - 13, 2004 (right before the 2004 linux.conf.au).

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 42

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of October 20, 2003 is out. This issue has an update on GLEPs (Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal), a look at featured developer Peter Johanson, and more.

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Mandrake Linux

A few LWN readers have mentioned that the Mandrake 9.2 ISO images do not include a kernel source package. We asked Gaël Duval for an explanation. He said they simply ran out of room on the binary CDs, so they pushed the kernel source to the CDs with all of the other source code.

There are new nss_ldap packages available for Mandrake Corporate Server 2.1. LDAP authentication did not work properly on the x86_64 platform due to the wrong location of the nss_ldap and pam_ldap libraries. This update corrects the problem.

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Red Hat Linux / Fedora

Here is Red Hat's press release on the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. This release includes the Native POSIX Threading Library, greater scalability, and a wider range of supported architectures.

There are updated sane packages available for Red Hat Linux 9 that prevent possible hardware damage to Epson 1260 scanners.

A freeze schedule for Fedora Core 1 has been posted, showing October 28, 2003 as the date the entire tree will be frozen. Get your bug reports and changes in now.

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Minor distribution updates

Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released v0.4.10 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version includes new Xvesa and Xfbdev Xservers from CVS, in which the mouse scroll is better, and there is no need to re-map the mouse buttons any more. A fun addition for this release is TuxNES, and an assortment of public domain games. The Firebird install script is updated to 0.7, and there is a new Fluxbox theme, "Lawn". Also new is Nano-tiny. It is now possible to dynamically load usb-storage only when mounting USB drives."

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Local Area Security Linux

L.A.S. Linux has released version 0.4 MAIN. "Changes in this latest version of L.A.S. include the addition of the 'toram' boot option allowing the user to boot the whole CD image into RAM. Allowing for the removal of the CD to free up the CDROM for burning etc." Many new packages were added as well.

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Recovery Is Possible! (RIP)

Recovery Is Possible! (RIP) has released v6.5 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: NFS server support was added, and some of the software was updated. A few bugs were fixed."

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rpm-livelinuxcd

rpm-livelinuxcd has released 1.0 RC 2. "Changes: This is a Red Hat 9.0=based live CD with X11/KDE, samba, Mozilla Firebird, and several other tools. It supports including home directories from a Samba server, as well as a basic 'profile' mechanism. It is a prototype for a networked workstation that gets additional resources such as office (OpenOffice.org) or groupware (OpenGroupware.org) from a server. The bzip2 package is about 193 Mb in size."

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Snootix

Snootix has released v0.4 beta with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version now has a framework of shell scripts in place to install BLFS and Snootix packages. Users are now able to install KDevelop."

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