Linux in the news

Open-sourcing accelerates Open-Xchange development (News.com)

News.com reports on benefits that Netline reaped from open-sourcing its Open-Xchange e-mail server. "Frank Hoberg, the chief executive officer of Netline, said this release shows the open-source business model works. He said the company had been able to significantly speed up development by collaborating with the open-source community. "If we had done everything for this release ourselves--the development and testing--it would have taken 10 times longer," Hoberg said."

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Patents - An Alternative View (Groklaw)

Groklaw presents an alternate view on software patents. "I received an email from Craig A. James, a software architect, who wishes to express an alternative view on patents. Because he believes it is unrealistic to ask that there be no software patents, he suggests alternatives. His reform proposals make so much sense I am happy to publish his article. Craig specializes in software design and architecture for scientific systems. His best-known project was a special-purpose database specific to chemistry that revolutionized the cheminformatics industry."

Comments (37 posted)

Q&A: Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux (Seattle Times)

The Seattle Times interviews Linus Torvalds about his move to Portland. "Q. Do you see Portland emerging as a hub for Linux development? A. I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail -- even if they happen to be working in the Portland area. So I really don't think of it that way. That said, there is clearly a fairly lively Linux community in Portland, and I'm not contesting that, either."

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Web 2.0: Possibly the best IT business conference of 2004 (NewsForge)

NewsForge attends Web 2.0. "Google offered rare insight into its closely guarded Linux server farm by previewing its next steps to improve Web search -- all built around clustering technology. Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality, said the company is "trying to go just beyond keywords and the linking structure of the Web and get behind the deeper meaning.""

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SCO's McBride warns of open source 'wild west' (NW Fusion)

Darl McBride rides again: Network World Fusion reports from a talk he gave in Cannes. "As he fights a prolonged legal battle on several fronts, McBride has positioned himself as a de facto champion of IP protection amid growing threats from free, open source development. 'SCO's market share has dropped from 40% to 10%. ... We are under attack from what I call 'hurricane Linux,'' McBride said. However, he praised companies that have commercialized Linux, such as Red Hat."

Comments (17 posted)

Declarations of Vuksanovich, McDonough, Nelson, Swanson, Kistenberg, Frasure and Green (Groklaw)

Groklaw reviews the declarations of seven people, submitted by IBM in the SCO case. "Significantly, four of them are (or were at relevant time periods) AT&T employees. The unanimity with which they speak seems to pull the rug out from under SCO. How can they ask for intermediate AIX versions and comments to try to trace code from UNIX System V to AIX to Linux, if the end result has no original System V code in it, when everyone who was there negotiating and signing the licensing agreements testifies that IBM and Sequent were free to do as they pleased with their own code, including modifications and derivative code, as long as no System V code remained?"

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Polese steps into open-source fray (News.com)

News.com covers a new company called SpikeSource. "SpikeSource plans to offer a range of services to corporations looking to use open-source software. Services will include support and product certification as well as consulting for corporate IT staff during the application development and installation process, according to the company."

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Netscape's DevEdge Offline (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine covers the recent shutdown of the Netscape web developer resource site. "Netscape yesterday seemingly shut down their web developer resource, devedge.netscape.com, without warning. There was a great deal of content available on the site, and Mitchell Baker today posted that mozilla.org is going to try and recover the lost content. For those who are looking for some specific content on the site, much of it has been archived on Google."

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McNealy: Microsoft needs Sun to beat IBM and Red Hat (Register)

The Register covers comments by Sun's CEO Scott McNealy on the recent cooperation between Microsoft and Sun. ""Who else are they going to choose as their second source? You know, Sun and Microsoft aren't that competitive. We don't do MSN, we don't do Xbox, we don't do applications. They don't do computers, storage or infrastructure." "They weren't going to do it with Larry (Oracle). They weren't going to do it with IBM. They can't stand IBM. They at least respect us. They really don't like IBM. And they hate the GPL.""

Comments (22 posted)

Evil of September 2004 (O'ReillyNet)

Danny O'Brien's To Evil! column for October looks at last month's bad guys. "Those with long memories will recall how a few years ago Sun released their own version of Linux - which turned out to be mostly a global-search-and-replaced version of Redhat's CD. So is Sun copying everything from Redhat, including their advertising strategy? Or is it just that Sun themselves confused Linux with Redhat so much, that it's all gone a little fuzzy over there?"

Comments (4 posted)

cat/dev/DiBona/brain: LAMP to WAMP to XAMP to SOFT (Linux Journal)

Chris DiBona writes about open source adoption on Linux Journal. "Many have credited Firefox with re-igniting the browser wars and giving Microsoft Internet Explorer a run for its money. Along the same lines as LAMP, these applications and others--such as GAIM, the terrific multi-protocol instant messaging program, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP)--all run pretty happily on Windows. And although OpenOffice.org could be a bit smoother on OS X, progress there too is coming along. It is my hope that as more users try and settle on these fine applications, they'll be driven to try Linux out for size as well."

Comments (2 posted)

Will Linux finish off the Mac? (ZDNet)

ZDNet looks forward to when Linux will surpass OS X. "The premium cost of Apple hardware hurts and OS X only runs on Apple hardware. Let me remind you that none of this is really about whether you should switch to OS X or not. It’s about what happens when desktop Linux reaches that point where it provides an experience that meets or beats the one that that sets the standard for *ix-based desktop operating systems: OS X. When it does--and I don’t doubt that it will--Apple will be in a real pickle because of the hardware 'problem.' Users will have significantly more hardware options for running desktop Linux and the likelihood that they’ll find something to meet their needs in terms of cost and form factor will be excellent."

Comments (15 posted)

U.S. House Passed Anti-Spyware Bill (eWeek)

eWeek reports that the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that targets spyware and phishing schemes. "The bipartisan Internet Spyware (I-SPY) Prevention Act of 2004, passed by a vote of 415-0, is intended to punish spyware without placing undue burdens on legitimate uses of the same or similar technology. The bill, H.R. 4661, was sponsored by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas)."

Comments (5 posted)

Senate Talks Fail on File-Sharing Software (Newsday)

Newsday reports that the INDUCE act is dead - for now. "The chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America, Mitch Bainwol, acknowledged Thursday that negotiations need more time. 'So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community,' Bainwol said."

Comments (11 posted)

Sun and Kodak Settle for $92 Million (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports that Sun has settled the patent suit with Kodak, agreeing to pay $92 million. "It's a good thing I don't work for Sun. I'd be threatening to quit half the time. I was hoping they would appeal, but no doubt they are thinking of the bottom line, not the big picture, and that is exactly the problem with patents on software. No one can afford to lose a patent lawsuit, so everything is slowly shutting down."

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Staying on the cutting edge (The Age)

The Age has a long talk with Theo de Raadt. "OpenBSD was about to be born. "And so on a certain day, having exhausted all of my options, and exhausted the community, and having found other people who, like me, had struggled with the NetBSD people, to get me back in, I create a repository, and we start committing like a storm. And all these other people who had been disenfranchised by these NetBSD developers while I was there, join up immediately.""

Comments (15 posted)

Network Tool Development with hping3 (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly interviews Salvatore Sanfilippo, author of the hping security tool. "From the user point of view, hping3 should be both simpler and more powerful, assuming that there will be two different classes of users. Programmers will be able to exploit the full power of a real programming language and a flexible packet construction/analysis sytem. On the other hand, it should be much easier for nondevelopers [to] run hping3 scripts developed by others than to use hping2. For example, one could develop a hping3 script to audit a firewall without doing all the common stuff by hand."

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Open Source and Free Documentation Licenses, Part 2: The Open Publication License (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet looks at the Open Publication License. "The Open Publication license in its "standard" form (that is to say, without any of the additional restrictions that may be added, as described in more detail below), operates much like the aforementioned "academic" software licenses such as the BSD or the MIT licenses. The copyright for the licensed work, as with these academic licenses, remains with the original author and publisher, although virtually every exercise of rights under copyright law is freely permitted to licensees and there is no requirement that derivative works be licensed under the Open Publication license."

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Benchmarks for Native IPsec in the 2.6 Kernel (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal explores the IPsec implementation for the 2.6.x kernels. "FreeS/WAN has been the main IPsec implementation for Linux for a long time. Unfortunately, FreeS/WAN has never been integrated into the Linux kernel itself. Instead, the new native kernel IPsec implementation is based on the KAME project, a part of the UNIX/BSD family. The USAGI project used the BSD code from the KAME project as a base for integrating IPsec into the Linux kernel. KAME's user-space tools, specifically setkey and Racoon, have been ported to Linux by the IPsec-tools Project."

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MontaVista unveils "open" hard-real-time Linux project (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices covers a MontaVista project aimed at bringing hard real-time to Linux. "The latest real-time enhancements, which currently comprise the core of the newly launched Open Source Real-Time Linux Project, are said to revolve around two key technologies -- kernel mutexes, which support priority inheritance; and thread-based interrupt management, which enables system-wide prioritization -- [MontaVista product marketing manager Jacob] Lehrbaum explains."

Comments (15 posted)

Filesystem Labeling in SELinux (Linux Journal)

Here's a Linux Journal article on how SELinux uses filesystem labels. "SELinux has hooks located at strategic points within the core kernel code, such as the point where a file is about to be read by a user. These hooks allow SELinux to break out of the normal flow of the kernel to request extended access control decisions. Access control decisions usually are made between a process (for example, cat) and an object (for example, /etc/shadow) for a specific permission (read)."

Comments (2 posted)

The 2004 OfB Choice Awards (OfB.biz)

Open for Business presents the OfB Choice awards for 2004. "Best E-mail Client: Thunderbird 0.8 The Mozilla project's returns for spending time breaking apart the Mozilla suite are finally paying off. Thunderbird offers a much better, lighter weight and more robust option for e-mail than the previous Mozilla Mail and is quickly surpassing other e-mail clients as well. Furthermore, it provides the only available option for a modern GUI e-mail client that spans all the major operating systems, a major plus for heterogeneous computing environments."

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