Linux in the news

Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge)

NewsForge tackles possible conflicts between trademarks and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. "Do trademarks require a special license for software to be free? That is the question that Debian developers are currently debating. The specific concern is whether AbiWord's recent assertion of trademarks conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), the set of principles under which the Debian distribution operates. However, the implications could affect not only Debian's use of other trademarked packages, such as Mozilla, Evolution, and OpenOffice.org, but other GNU/Linux distributions' use of them as well."

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The Problem of Software Patents in Standards (Technocrat.net)

Bruce Perens has written an article on software patents in standards, at Technocrat.net. "Patents, originally created to stimulate innovation, may now be having the opposite effect, at least in the software industry. Plagued by an exponential growth in software patents, many of which are not valid, software vendors and developers must navigate a potential minefield to avoid patent infringement and future lawsuits. Coupled with strategies to exploit this confusion over patents, especially in standards setting organizations, it appears that software advancement will become stifled unless legal action is taken to resolve the situation. This article examines the current situation facing software developers and users, the methods employed by standards setting organizations to address these problems, and recommends strategies for resolving the problem caused by software patents."

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Firefox maps its next moves (News.com)

News.com looks at what comes after Firefox 1.0. "Now that it has the Firefox 1.0 milestone under its belt, the Mozilla Foundation has identified three areas for future growth and development: Cell phone and small-device browsing, desktop search integration, and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) distribution."

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Linux, x86 clusters take over top 500 supercomputer ranking (CBR)

Computer Business Review looks at the trends at SuperComputing 2004. "It wasn't all that long ago that the entire Top 500 list was measured in tens of teraflops, and when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory takes final delivery of Blue Gene/L early next year, this behemoth will have 131,072 customized PowerPC 400 cores running at 700MHz and it will deliver over 360 teraflops of peak computing power. Blue Gene/L, as you might have guessed from the name, runs a cut down version of Linux on its compute nodes and Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on its I/O and management nodes."

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Novell's reply motion on Groklaw

Groklaw has Novell's reply in support of its motion to dismiss SCO's "slander of title" lawsuit. Among other things, Novell turned up a the minutes of a 1995 board of directors meeting where it was stated that copyrights would be retained. "And there is another bombshell. Novell says that by introducing evidence outside the complaint, such as the Ed Chatlos declaration, SCO is inviting the Court to convert the motion to dismiss into a summary judgment, which they say means the Court now has the option to decide the matter once and for all and with finality right now."

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Top Linux exec departs from Novell (News.com)

News.com reports that Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman, has resigned from the company. "Stone had been instrumental in Novell's acquisition of two Linux companies, Ximian, in 2003, and SuSE Linux, in 2004. Stone had been in charge of technology development and alliances for Waltham, Mass.-based Novell, leaving most financial matters to Chief Executive Jack Messman."

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PalmOne ponders OS options (News.com)

The palmtop hardware company PalmOne, which recently split off its Palm OS subsidiary PalmSource, is considering the use of Linux (and Microsoft) operating systems on its devices, according to this article on News.com. "Using the royalty-free Linux OS would enable PalmOne to reduce the costs of building its handhelds. By how much is not certain, but analysts estimate that the company currently spends anywhere from $5 to $15 per device for the Palm OS, depending on the price of the gadget."

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Linux cluster companies attract new funds (News.com)

News.com reports on new funding for cluster computing. "San Francisco-based Penguin Computing raised $10 million, while Linux Networx in Salt Lake City received a $40 million investment. Both companies will use the funds to develop new technology and expand into new markets, they said in announcements Thursday."

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Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute Will Introduce Linux Supercomputer (Phys.Org)

Phys.Org reports on a new SGI Linux-based supercomputer to be installed at Japan's Atomic Energy Research Institute. "As a result of a competitive bidding process, Fujitsu Limited in cooperation with SGI Japan will deliver to JAERI the new SGI(R) Altix(R) 3700 Bx2 model which is based on 2,048 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, the Linux(R) operating environment and over 13 terabytes of memory -- the world's largest memory capacity."

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Police use Linux to comply with Freedom of Information (Silicon.com)

Silicon.com reports that a Scottish police force is developing a Linux-based system for ensuring it complies with the impending Freedom of Information Act legislation. "Inspector Campbell Dick, of Central Scotland police, told silicon.com the system will be rolled out across the force's 1,100 users if the three week pilot, which begins on 15 November, is successful."

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Interview: OSDL chief Stuart Cohen - Part 1 (vnunet)

Vnunet talks with Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. "What are the OSDL's main successes to date? Technical: Obviously with [Linux creator] Linus Torvalds and [kernel maintainer] Andrew Morton we're doing our fair share of code development, and the subsystem maintenance and performance testing work we do is significant. Business: some thought leadership we've been doing has been very helpful. Legal: the white papers, the legal defence fund, education, ideas around a prior art repository and work we're doing around trademark, patents, licensing and copyright is all very important [although] we haven't come out very much on that [yet]. Then there's our work in the telecoms market [with carrier grade Linux]."

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Firefox launches with a Kiwi boost (Computerworld NZ)

Computerworld NZ interviews Ben Goodger of the Firefox browser project. "Firefox wasn't the first experimental Mozilla browser. A version for Mac OS X lives on as the Camino browser, and Goodger says an even earlier version was built with .Net — which raises some intriguing possibilities. From the beginning, however, Firefox was envisaged as a browser for the masses. Open source projects are often criticised for including every feature or UI widget that some developer was motivated enough to add, but Goodger says keeping the interface simple was always a priority."

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Interview with Inkscape Founder Bryce Harrington (KDE.News)

KDE.News has an interview with Bryce Harrington, author of the Inkscape vector drawing program. "When we formed Inkscape it was important to us to communicate where the project intends to go, and what steps are needed to get there. There were several reasons for this. First, having an established plan makes it easy to figure out where to "fit" your work in. When working on projects where the overall vision is not communicated, you find your patches getting rejected for unpredictable reasons. By specifying a clear vision, it helps new developers in figuring out how to make their contributions tie into the project's goals."

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Kim Polese: Next stop--open source (ZDNet)

ZDNet interviews Kim Polese, CEO of the open-source services company SpikeSource.

"Q: Is the idea of SpikeSource to make it look like there's a commercial outfit like an IBM or Microsoft behind a set of open-source products?"

"A: Yeah. What is sort of interesting right now is that IT developers, architects and chief information officers are aggressively adopting open source. The problem has become how to manage the abundance. There are more than 85,000 different open-source projects today. All the things that IT is used to, like support documentation, reliability, road maps--none of that exists for open source when you start moving beyond a single component. When you start talking about actually integrating the components into applications, there is no sort of product management for open source. That is where we see an opportunity."

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Koders.com: Find (open) source code fast (NewsForge)

NewsForge talks with Darren Rush of Koders.com. "Rush: Koders is essentially a search engine for source code. It was initially developed as an internal tool, for our team. We were looking for a better way to leverage all of our past project work. So we created a search engine that would allow us to easily find code snippets from our previous code and integrate them into our current projects."

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Advanced Linux Installations and Upgrades with Kickstart (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet discusses Kickstart customization, scalability, and security. "Most Kickstart experiments begin with a single ks.cfg file, though this approach is less suitable for large deployments. Even a farm of cloned hardware will require some settings unique to each host. That means you have either several one-use ks.cfgs, or one file to tweak for each Kickstart target. These methods are brittle because they bind two elements that may vary independently of one another: host-specific data (the IP address) and build-specific data (packages to install). When either one changes, the ad hoc edits to resync the two may introduce errors."

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The MJPEG tools (NewsForge)

NewsForge uses MJPEG tools for video processing. "The original intent of the MJPEG Tools was to provide a package which would enable Linux users to capture and play back video through a PCI card based around the Zoran ZR36067 MJPEG chip. Wrapped in the standard Audio/Video Interleaved (AVI) container format, MJPEG -- properly known as Motion JPEG -- is essentially a sequence of JPEG still images which, when played back fast enough, show as a movie."

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The Open Gaming License (O'Reilly)

Andrew M. St. Laurent examines the Open Gaming License in part three of an O'Reilly series on licenses. "This, the third and final article of the series, describes the Open Gaming License (OGL), a license designed to open source license certain parts of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, and two related documents, the d20 System Trademark License and the d20 System Trademark Guide Version 5.0."

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Application of the Month: KAddressBook

KDE.News mentions a review of KAddressBook. "This time we take look at the underadvertised addressbook application within KDE, KAddressBook which is currently maintained and developed by Tobias Koenig."

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Novell launches an enterprise Linux desktop (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at Novell's new desktop. "Novell describes NLD-9 as a complete "desktop productivity environment." It includes a complete set of the basic applications enterprise workers need: an office suite, a mail suite, and browser. Novell has tweaked OpenOffice.org to fill the office suite chores, Evolution as its mail suite, and Mozilla Firefox for the browser. That's not all that's included, of course, but those are the big three items required for basic desktop chores. It's called NLD version 9 because it is built atop SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. That gives it a degree of hardening, reliability, and performance that is hard for other distributions to match."

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Which Open Source Wiki Works For You? (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet looks at several wiki implementations. "The purpose of this article is to give an overview of several popular Wiki implementations and see how they fare. It is not trivial to switch from one Wiki implementation to the other, because this will usually require translating all of the pages from the old syntax to the new one. Thus, choosing a Wiki engine requires some care, taking possible future developments into account. This article will hopefully help you make that choice if the need arises."

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Komodo 3.0 Review (O'Reilly)

Jason Purdy reviews Komodo 3.0, a commercial IDE for Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and XSLT, on O'Reilly. "I'm a GUI IDE kind of guy, and I've been through quite a few of them to find the one that best suits me as a Perl Web Developer. ActiveState's Komodo (version 3.0.1) fits the bill, though there remains room for improvement. Let's start with the positive, and then I'll address where Komodo can improve."

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To Evil! of October 2004 (O'ReillyNet)

Danny O'Brien's To Evil! column for October is out. "Despite previous polls, it appears that the Ubuntu Nude Man has sneaked ahead of Voting Machines in the final count. It seems that, in the evilness stakes this month, moral values beat the invasion of a self-electing junta of semi-sentient tabulating machines. Ubuttnaked Guy wears the Evil crown, and not much else, and invites us all back to his pad for some Twister and a toast... to evil!" (Thanks to Steve Mallett).

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PHPSurveyor Plays Key Role In US Elections (SourceForge)

SourceForge.net reports on the use of PHPSurveyor in tracking election irregularities. "PHPSurveyor, a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software."

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