Linux in the news

Samba, Soccer and Open Source (IT-Director)

Robin Bloor writes about free software in Brazil in this IT-Director column. "In 'The Road Ahead', Bill Gates himself wrote enthusiastically about the 'software ecosystem' that surrounded Microsoft in its early years. It made a huge contribution to the success of Windows, by creating an application-rich environment. The same kind of ecosystem now surrounds Open Source and it is growing quickly. I am amazed by its potential. It could completely undermine Microsoft's monopoly, and it probably will."

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Enlightenment DR17 is coming - eventually (NewsForge)

Remember the Enlightenment window manager? Here's a NewsForge article stating that it's Not Dead Yet; the article provides a rather uncritical look at the upcoming DR17 release. "Now, after years of work, and years of work yet to come, we can expect DR17 to be a fully functional desktop environment with fantastic eye candy to augment its configurable and user-friendly interface. It will be fit to run on the hardware of yesterday (and even PDAs), scalable to any resolution, and be unprecedentedly easy to develop for."

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No More Free BitKeeper (KernelTrap)

KernelTrap is reporting that the free version of BitKeeper, used heavily in kernel development, is being withdrawn. "In a post to the Linux Kernel mailing list in February of 2005, Larry [McVoy] discussed a 16 bit limitation of the existing free product. With nearly 64,000 changesets in the mainline kernel tree, future development will quickly exceed this limitation. For that reason, it is likely that BitMover will provide one final release of its free BitKeeper product, allowing kernel developers a graceful transition. By the end of July, the goal is to have completed the migration, therby [sic] terminating the free product and focusing fully on the commercial product."

BitMover's Larry McVoy has confirmed the story (he pointed us to it, actually) and says that an announcement is forthcoming.

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KDE at Latin America Free Software Install Festival Report (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the Latin America Free Software Install Fest. "Last Saturday saw the first Latin America Free Software Install Fest held simultaneously in 74 cities and 12 countries. KDE was present at the Santiago location for installation assistance and a talk by Maurucio Bahamonde on KDE 3.4. We offered Kubuntu Live CDs to try out the desktop and the team offered help to install."

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Sun criticizes popular open-source license (News.com)

News.com reports on Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's talk at the Open Source Business Conference. "The GPL purports to have freedom at its core, but it imposes on its users 'a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world,' the United States, where the GPL originated, Schwartz said. 'If you look at the difference between the license we elected to use and GPL, there are no obligations to economies or universities or manufacturers that take the source code and embed it in (their own) code.'"

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IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com)

IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger spoke at the Open Source Business Conference, and News.com was there. "'A big part of your power is to have your people work with the communities and donate some of your intellectual property to those communities so they can get better. Then you build proprietary offerings on top of the open-source platform,' he said. 'Those proprietary offerings at some point will lose their value as proprietary offerings. Then there probably will be more value donating it to an open-source community, and on and on and on.'"

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Highlights from SCO's 10K (Groklaw)

The SCO Group has finally caught up with its regulatory agency filings, and Groklaw picks out the highlights from the company's belated 10K. "Our Engagement Agreement with the Law Firms will require us to spend a significant amount of cash during fiscal year 2005 and could harm our liquidity position."

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Intel to stop using open source license (News.com)

News.com reports that Intel has told the Open Source Initiative to take its open source license out of the list of approved licenses. "Smith said that it does not want the "de-approval" of the license to be retroactive to past uses, as it does not want to force companies to re-license code. Intel's decision was praised by Martin Fink, the vice-president of HP's Linux division, who recently told ZDNet UK that the number of open source license needs to be reduced from the current figure of more than 50 to "something less than 10"."

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Deutsche Bahn dumps Intel, pumps SUSE onto IBM mainframe (Register)

The Register reports on a conversion to mainframe-based SUSE Linux by Deutsche Bahn. "Deutsche Bahn, Europe's biggest railway, is junking 300 Intel servers in favour of an IBM mainframe. But its OS of choice, SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server, has profited from the cull and will run business-critical apps such as Lotus Notes on the new IBM eServer zSeries 990 mainframe."

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Windows VistA Client Running on Linux (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews covers the use of Linux by the US Veterans Administration. "In a major advance for FOSS in medicine, Joseph Dal Molin of WorldVistA reports success in getting the VA Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) VistA client running on Linux using WINE and Crossover office. The CPRS client formerly ran only on the Microsoft Windows operating system and is widely deployed on thousands of workstations within the United States VA system."

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One-on-one with Miguel de Icaza (NewsForge)

Joe Barr talks with Miguel de Icaza. "Joe: Who started GNOME? Miguel: I did, with Federico Mena. Federico was already contributing to the GIMP, and I was busy with the Linux on the SGI, and I was trying to get Federico to do it, and Federico wouldn't do it. So then I said, I'll stop all the stuff on the SGI, let's do this thing together. So we launched GNOME in August, 1997. And it was the summer after, that I did Gnumeric."

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Stallman on the State of GNU/Linux (OfB)

Open for Business interviews Richard Stallman. "I can't be entirely happy with Novell as long as it distributes non-free software, and in particular, I can't entirely approve of SuSe as long as it distributes non-free software. However, Novell's changes go in the right direction. The Ximian and SuSe programs that were non-free are free now."

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Wind River's Linux transformation (News.com)

News.com talks with Wind River CEO Ken Klein about the company's Linux makeover. "We were taking a very adversarial approach toward Linux. We've turned 180 degrees. We're viewing Linux as incremental to our business. In set-top boxes, Linux is a great fit."

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Anatomy of an Attack: The Five Ps (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet presents an excerpt from Managing Security with Snort & IDS Tools. "A surprising amount of information can be gathered from information stores on the Internet. The goal of [the probe] phase is to map out your network and determine details about the systems on your network, permitting the attacker to tailor an attack to exploit known vulnerabilities in the software version running on your system, or perhaps to a configuration error."

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The good and bad of Linux LiveCDs (ComputerWorld)

ComputerWorld describes the benefits of live Linux CDs, but then finds something to worry about: "A PC booted from a Linux LiveCD is transformed. It no longer has any of the user accounts, logging and security controls of its original host operating system. It has become a Linux system, completely under the control of the end user and loaded with an arbitrary selection of open-source software -- yet it still has access to the same hard drives, network, servers and other resources as before. The security threat this poses is obvious."

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Securing your online privacy with Tor (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews the network privacy application Tor. "Tor tries to keep your packets private by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so there is no direct connection to your destination. As Tor's Web site puts it: "The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you -- and then periodically erasing your footprints.""

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Open source strategy - a sword that cuts both ways? (IT-Director)

Here's an IT-Director article which claims that the eventual winners in the open source database arena will not be MySQL or PostgreSQL. "This is bad news for open source enthusiasts. Fans of the open source movement would, not unnaturally, like to see open source products adopted as strategic. But who are the vendors that are most likely to be accepted as strategic partners by users? If you think about databases it is going to be IBM (Cloudscape) and CA (Ingres) at the top of the list."

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