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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Let Java GoEric S. Raymond wrote this open letter to Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun. The response from Sun can be found in this PCPro article, leading to a follow-up letter from ESR. "We don't presume to dictate Sun's strategy. But what we do require of anyone before we will accept them as a "friend of the open-source community" is more honesty than this. Sun should be nervous about the consequences of allowing its spokespeople to indulge in flames, spin, and prevarication when there are serious issues on the table. Because an attempt to shoot the messenger won't make those issues go away; indeed, it makes some of them worse."
EU Council agitates for unlimited software patentsHeise Online covers the software patent battle going on inside the EU council. ""Cancelled" or "reformulated" is the standard comment in the footnotes whenever the new text speaks about the changes of the Parliament. The Council does some small concessions to the software patent opponents, i.e. the impact of the EU legislation for "small and mid-sized companies and the Open Source movement" shell be examined. This is however, no "compromise" in any way, FFII counters the Council's terminology. "It's as if in a debate on whether or not we should raise the speed limits on the roads, the compromise would be to raise them and additionally remove the requirement to wear seat belts", Belgian FFII spokesman Jonas Maebe comments on the proposal." (Thanks to Dirk Hillbrecht)
Trade Shows and Conferences The Eclipse Project Looks Ahead (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly covers the recent EclipseCon. "EclipseCon revealed the Eclipse project as not just an IDE, but a rich client platform with a flexible architecture, an active community, and a bright future. Daniel Steinberg gives a summary of the week's events."
Preview: Open Source in Government Conference (NewsForge)Tony Stanco provides a preview of this year's Open Source in Government Conference, in this NewsForge article. "At the conference, a number of government officials will present existing cases where open source has already delivered value to the government. One government implementation in particular may become a precedent for how governments around the world can do open source. The Department of Labor's (DoL) WorkforceConnections software makes it easy for non-technical individuals to create, acquire, share and control Web content in real time. WorkforceConnections lets users build and maintain traditional Web sites, online courses, knowledge repository, online coach, and communities of practice portals."
The SCO Problem SCO's year of living litigiously (CNN)Here's a CNN article on SCO's alleged plans to sue a Linux end user. "Whereas the RIAA could point to services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store and RealNetworks's Rhapsody as legitimate means for downloading songs, SCO's 'legal' alternative -- persuading users to pay for licensing -- is untested in a court of law. It's not clear that Linux users are in fact breaking any intellectual property laws."
Legal MandrakeSoft ordered to drop trademark (ZDNet)ZDNet UK reports that a French court has ruled against MandrakeSoft in an intellectual-property dispute with United States-based Hearst Holdings and King Features Syndicate. "The decision could force the Paris-based software company to surrender its trademark and domain names and to pay nearly $90,000 (70,000 euros) in damages to the U.S. companies, holders of the rights to the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician. The comic strip marks its 70th anniversary this year."
Interviews People Behind KDE: Back With Matthias Ettrich (KDE.News)KDE.News announces the return of the 'People Behind KDE' series, beginning with an interview with Matthias Ettrich. " In what ways do you make a contribution to KDE?Qt development, some financial support (sponsoring people and events), some development resources (letting my engineers work on KDE), talking, bringing people together, initiating events like Trysil and NoveHrady."
Q&A With Everaldo (LinuxCult)LinuxCult interviews Everaldo Coelho. "..for the near future I intent to concentrate all my efforts to create (together with Ingo) a new desktop experience for LindowsOS, anybody who has used LindowsOS knows how wonderful of a system it is, and it has the tools to make the Linux desktop accessible to anybody liek no other. Their Click'n Run system is just fantastic. My big challenge is to make Lindows even more pleasant to use, that will be a great task, as we will have to design allot of graphics for the entire system, a task much bigger than a simple icon theme."
Spreadsheet: Best-of-Breed (Open)Open Magazine talks with Jody Goldberg about Gnumeric. "Fans of the Open Source Gnumeric spreadsheet program are rather proud of their project. Being Open Source, Gnumeric enthusiasts can point to yet another community project that demonstrates how free software can engender best-of breed applications. Gnumeric, part of the GNOME desktop environment, is good enough to say, "See? Excel and Lotus are not the be all and end all."" (Found on Footnotes)
Stallman on XFree86 License Change (OfB.biz)Open for Business talks with Richard Stallman about the XFree86 license modifications. "So what is the problem with the new license? "The details of the requirement conflict with the GNU GPL," Stallman explained, "anyone linking GPL-covered applications with that XFree86 code would be violating the GPL.""
Resources A Computer Lab with No Windows, Part II (Linux Journal)Linux Journal continues a study of building a computer lab using a Linux terminal server network. "Most of the common programming languages, such as shell scripts, C and C++, are included in the LTSP download. If you want to have the latest Java development environment installed, however, you can download your choice of Java SDK from Sun and install it. Sun offers Java SDKs in both source as well as binary code. After installation, you might want to add a path to /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf so any user can have access to the language."
Reviews A first look at the new GIMP 2.0 (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews version 2.0 of the GIMP. "A monumental change in GIMP 2.0 is a much-improved text tool. The new tool boasts enhanced font selection and allows for multi-line entries. All changes are immediately reflected on the canvas, making it much easier for designers to preview their text within the image context. Further, you can export text as a path in order to tweak its shape, fill style, or scale."
Introducing openMosix (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at openMosix. "One of the differences between openMosix and other clustering environments, such as Beowulf-style clusters, is that for an application to run on an openMosix cluster there is no need for recompilation or integration of other libraries. Programs such as Flac, Bladeenc, Povray, and mjpeg tools work without any modifications, as does MPI."
Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2 (ArsTechnica)ArsTechnica has a lengthy review of KDE 3.2. "The K Desktop Environment, while being a highly integrated system itself, is platform- and system-agnostic. Officially supported platforms using The X Window System as the base for the GUI range from the diverse Linux distributions to *BSD, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. X Window dependent builds for Mac OS X are available through the Fink project, ditto for Windows through KDE on Cygwin." (Thanks to Joergen Ramskov)
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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