LWN Weekly Edition
Front pageSecurity
Kernel development
Distributions
Development
Linux in the news
Announcements
->One big page
This page
Previous weekFollowing week
| |||||||||||||
Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Is Torvalds really the father of Linux? (News.com)News.com has a long look at the ADTI report and an interview with its author. "In an interview conducted for the study, [Andrew] Tanenbaum said Minix 'was the base that Linus used to create Linux. He also took many ideas from Minix, including the file system, source tree and much more. If Linux is a derivative work of Minix, that makes Linux vulnerable to charges of intellectual property infringement by Prentice Hall, which published books and the Minix source code but restricted its use until 2000, the study said. 'Arguably, Prentice Hall has lost out on tens of millions of dollars' because of lost book sales, the study said."In this context, it is more than worthwhile to read this posting by Andrew Tanenbaum about the whole thing. "Thus, of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code. He had my book, was running MINIX, and undoubtedly knew the history (since it is in my book). But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up.... My conclusion is the Ken Brown doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. I also have grave questions about his methodology."
A followup from Andrew TanenbaumAndrew Tanenbaum has posted a second followup commenting on the strange stuff coming out of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute. Worth a read. "Brown calculates that due to the creation of Linux, Prentice Hall sold 500 fewer copies of my book, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which at $100 [sic] per book cost them almost $1 million. Reminds me of the kind of arithmetic used on the NASDAQ prior to March 2000. If Brown can't multiply small positive integers correctly, how much faith can we have in the rest of his reporting?"
Grokline Launches - Come and Help, Please (Groklaw)Groklaw announces the release of Grokline 0.1. "We hope with this Grokline project to be able to identify any conceivable legal issues that those wishing to block, slow, hobble or tax GNU/Linux may try to use in future legal assaults on the community. If there are litigation risks, even just from nuisance lawsuits, particularly with respect to patents, we want to find those risks, hopefully before they do, and mitigate or resolve them now. I am personally convinced, as you no doubt are too, that the next wave of attacks on GNU/Linux and the GPL will involve patents."
Free software guru speaks on patents (Register)The Register covers Richard Stallman's London talk on software patents. "Against this political backdrop, Stallman's message is an important one, so it is a real shame that it gets clouded by his choice of analogy. There is little doubt that allowing patents on software will have a devastating impact on the free software community, and good reason to believe, based on the current situation in the US, that it will hurt smaller companies working in the field. Likening this impending doom to the AIDS crisis in Africa is counterproductive, and merely allows pro-patent groups to label Stallman, and by association the anti-patenting movement, as a crackpot."
Trade Shows and Conferences Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web (O'Reilly)Paul Ford covers a talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web. "But now that the Web is unquestioned as a basic medium, part of a parcel with television, publishing, and radio, there is risk of stagnation. To that end, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the first Web browser and server, and inventor of HTML, gave an open-ended plenary talk focused on two open questions: What should we do with top level domain names (TLDs)? And what should we do with the Semantic Web?"
The SCO Problem Open source group won't hand over SCO docs (Silicon.com)Silicon.com covers the response from the Free Software Foundation on a subpoena from SCO. "FSF general counsel Eben Moglen said: "I'm not going to permit a fishing expedition at the Free Software Foundation from a party that has shown a great deal of hostility to the Free Software Foundation and its community. We will not produce material that is the subject of attorney-client privilege, and I don't think anybody expects us to.""
SCO Responds to AutoZone (Groklaw)Groklaw looks at SCO's response to two motions in the AutoZone suit. "Remarkably [SCO] even tells the court that they should *not* have to provide a more definite statement. It was plenty definite enough, they say, and AutoZone, they wax indignant, is improperly trying to obtain discovery.... Telling them what lines, files or organization of Linux code is the subject of the litigation is a question for discovery, they state. AutoZone will find out later. I don't think it would be prudent for AutoZone to hold their breath."
Companies CA Moves with New Open-Source Licensing (eWeek)eWeek covers this week's open source announcements from Computer Associates. "Computer Associates International Inc. will use its annual CA World user conference in Las Vegas on Monday to make a slew of open-source announcements, including establishing a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, an out-of-the-box content management system built on the free Zope Application server; unveiling a new open- source license, and placing a version of Ingres, CA's flagship DBMS, under it."
Kill Bill (Forbes)Yes, it's a Forbes article by Daniel Lyons, but he seems to have turned over a new leaf; this one is a lengthy look at IBM's involvement with Linux which doesn't mention lawsuits at all. "IBM seems to go to any length to push Linux into customer sites. Last year at the U.S. National Weather Service, IBM offered a free demo machine and a guarantee to keep its systems up-to-date, even writing software drivers for components IBM doesn't build, such as video cards. The result? The NWS spent $3 million to buy a thousand IBM desktop machines running Linux, replacing 900 HP Unix workstations."
Dell nears Sun in IBM-led server race (News.com)News.com looks at the latest Gartner numbers on server sales. "One area that blossomed in particular was sales of Linux servers, which grew 57.3 percent to $1.02 billion... IBM was the top Linux seller, with 28 percent share, followed by HP with 26.9 percent, Dell with 17.8 percent, Silicon Graphics Inc. with 3.1 percent, Fujitsu with 2.8 percent, NEC with 1.9 percent and Sun with 0.9 percent."
Business Open-source companies see profit aplenty (News.com)News.com reports on comments from a panel discussion at the Software and Information Industry Association's Enterprise Software Summit. "The mix of license models has been controversial among open-source believers, but Urlocker said it's vital to MySQL's success. "We're not a religion, we're not a cult, were not a charity--we're a business," he said. "There's always going to be grassroots people...who see open source as a free ride, but there are corporate customers who are absolutely willing to pay for reliability, flexibility, support.""
Linux Adoption Linux Going Mainstream (Information Week)Information Week looks at Linux adoption at United Parcel Service, Boeing, and other companies. "A key driver behind business use of Linux is support from high-profile vendors. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are all several years into strategies to use Linux to increase sales of Intel-based servers. Applications vendors such as Oracle and SAP push Linux as an option for companies transitioning portions of their data centers from proprietary to open-source software."
A Greens and Linux ticket (SMH)The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on the use of Linux by the Australian Green Party. "Beyond the notions that Greens candidates and open source evangelists are viewed to be on the economic 'left', or seeking a more just and sustainable environment - depending on your point of view - the party has stopped using commercial software as much for pragmatic reasons. It wants to win more seats at the impending federal election, and Linux will help it do that, the Greens believe."
Two Medical Clinics Choose OpenEMR (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews reports on the adoption of the open source electronic medical record (EMR) application OpenEMR. "Pennington Firm is delivering OpenEMR with CMS 1500 (formerly HCFA 1500) billing support, and connection to a clearinghouse for the processing of claims. OpenEMR is a full featured, practice management, electronic medical record and prescription writing application that can serve as a direct open source replacement for proprietary medical applications such as Medical Manager, HealthPro and MegaWest."
Linux at Work How Linux Saved My Files and My Job (Linux Journal)This Linux Journal author used BG-Rescue Linux to save data from a "knackered" NTFS-based drive. "The current version of BG-Rescue Linux is 0.3.1, which is compiled with kernel version 2.4.24, and it supported a host of Ethernet devices--it even had USB and PCMCIA network device support. A host of command-line utilities are provided by BusyBox, and BG-Rescue Linux uses the uClibC C library. What really made my eyes light up was the inclusion of NTFS support."
Interviews Interview with Everaldo and Jimmac (OSNews.com)OS News interviews KDE artist Everaldo Coelho and GNOME artist Jakub Steiner (Jimmac). "Currently Everaldo works for Lindows inc. and Jakub works for Novell inc. They were very kind to answer our questions related with the art in Linux, its future and much more."
An Interview with Allison Randal (Perl.com)Simon Cozens interviews Allison Randal on O'Reilly's Perl.com. "This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl Foundation. Let's hear more from Allison about what all of this means to her."
Dreams of Longhorn (News.com)News.com has an interview with Microsoft's Bob Muglia. "The world has changed a bit. If you went back 18 to 24 months ago, it was unclear what Linux would look like and how it would evolve. It was thought of as free. And there was a whole series of attributes that were attributed to Linux that in retrospect were inaccurate. As time has gone on, it's apparent that Linux is becoming a set of offerings from commercial vendors. When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.""There's no question about who our biggest competitor is. It's IBM."
Resources Top Ten Ethereal Tips and Tricks (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet presents the top ten list of Ethereal tips and tricks, from the book Ethereal Packet Sniffing (from Syngress). "Installing Ethereal from the source code is very beneficial in a number of ways. Not only will you have all of the source code, additional documentation, and miscellaneous files to peruse, you will also have the ability to control numerous aspects of the build process. Building software from source will give you a better feel for how the whole process works and what goes on behind the scenes. What you will take away is a wealth of knowledge about the software package, programming, and operating system management."
Secure programmer: Minimizing privileges (developerWorks)David A. Wheeler covers secure programming by minimizing privileges, on IBM developerWorks. "Real-world programs have bugs in them. It's not what we want, but it's certainly what we get. Complicated requirements, schedule pressure, and changing environments all conspire to make useful bugless programs unlikely. Even programs formally proved correct using sophisticated mathematical techniques can have bugs. Why? One reason is that proofs must make many assumptions, and usually some of those assumptions aren't completely true. Most programs aren't examined that rigorously anyway, for a variety of reasons. And even if there are no bugs today (unlikely), a maintenance change or a change in the environment may introduce a bug later on. So, to handle the real world, we have to somehow develop secure programs in spite of the bugs in our programs."
Build Web apps with Maypole (developerWorks)developerWorks is running a lengthy introduction to Maypole (a Perl framework for creating database-backed web applications) written by Maypole's creator. "The big problem with Ninkasi's recipe is that the nicer the end result, the more of it you consume, and, for some reason, the less likely you are to remember how good it was in the morning, and so you never know whether or not you want to buy that particular beer again. So you have to buy it anyway to try to work out whether or not you liked it. This is enjoyable, but not particularly economical. I found myself needing some kind of database to keep track of my tastings."
Reviews GUI Administration with KSysguard (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews KSysguard. "This app has absolutely nothing to do with guarding anything. KSysguard lets you manage processes and monitor resources on local or remote systems. According to the documentation, it can be built on Solaris, BSD, and Linux." (Found on KDE.News)
Book Review: The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide (OSNews)OSNews reviews The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide. "The book was written around the time of Gnome 2.0-2.2 but was released recently in the English language, and so newer material like the new GTK+ file selector or Gstreamer are not discussed. Even back then though, Gnome was capable of games, OpenGL views (via GtkGLArea), generic music and video, which are also not discussed. Also, while there is a whole chapter on the auto* development tools, there is not a mention of how to properly debug a GTK+ application using existing tools, or how to use Alleyoop and Valgrind to trace memory leaks. And there are not any tips & tricks on how to profile or optimize your application." (Found on GnomeDesktop)
Linux Magazine: Play and Manage your Music with JuK (KDE.News)KDE.News points to a review of JuK, the KDE Jukebox. "For starters: JuK is KDE's outstanding playlist-based jukebox application with a lot of unique and powerful features. The article talks about playlist management, advanced tag guessing with musicbrainz and how to keep your music collection consistant easily."
Miscellaneous A model for open source software development (NewsForge)In this NewsForge article a pediatric oncologist finds analogies between biomedical research and the open source software development model. "It has been argued that the only way to make money off of software is to follow the closed proprietary system of software development. If this were true, then no company would be able to make money in biomedical research, which depends on full disclosure and published research. It can hardly be argued that there is no money to be made in biomedical research. Pharmaceutical companies do make money. But they do so in no small part due to the fact that they participate in research that is published in peer-reviewed journals."
Results from the 2004 ONJava Reader Survey (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly has published the results of the 2004 ONJava Reader Survey, with some interesting operating system statistics. "There was a healthy variety of operating systems reported in our questions about what you develop on and what you deploy on. 86 percent of you develop on Windows, 58 percent on Linux, 21 percent on Solaris, 16 percent on Unix, and 14 percent on Mac OS X. It looks like a lot of our readers have two boxes -- or emulators -- on their desks, given the implicit level of multi-platform development. As for deployment, Linux was a target for 69 percent of our readers, as was Windows, followed by Solaris at 37 percent, Unix at 29 percent, and Mac OS X at 10 percent."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
|||||||||||||