Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Mozilla Trademark Policy Finalised (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine looks at the Mozilla Trademark Policy. "Last month, the Mozilla Foundation finalised its trademark usage rules. The Mozilla Trademark Policy sets out the terms and conditions under which the Mozilla Foundation's trademarks (terms like 'Mozilla' and 'Firefox' and their associated logos) can be used by third parties. In addition to the main trademark policy, there are also several related trademark documents, including the Localization Trademark Policy (sets out the rules for translated versions of Mozilla software) and the Mozilla Community Edition Policy (covering modified versions of Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird), though some of these are still at the draft stage."
US Patent Reform (Groklaw)
Groklaw looks at the patent reform bill currently before the US Congress. "This bill's for you, if you are a high-tech company. I guess Microsoft is sick of being sued for patent infringement and losing. IBM would like patent reform too. And Oracle, and the BSA. Everyone knows the system is broken. But what to do about it? This is a bill to address their concerns."
Pop-up vulnerability found in major browsers (News.com)
News.com reports on a new spoofing vulnerability which affects most browsers, free and proprietary. "To take advantage of the flaw, a cybercriminal would have to direct a Web user from a malicious site to a genuine, trusted site such as an online bank, in a new browser window. The malicious site would then open a JavaScript dialog box in front of the trusted Web site, and a user might then be fooled into sending personal information back to the malicious site."
Trade Shows and Conferences
David A. Wheeler's Travelogue: FISL 6.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil
David A. Wheeler has written a travelogue (with pictures) on his recent trip to the 6th International Free Software Conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil (FISL 6.0). "For many, OSS/FS was essentially an opportunity to regain national sovereignty or company control over their own infrastructure, instead of allowing an external company (and a foreign one at that) to maintain total control and visibility over their internal infrastructure. There also appeared to be significant concerns about transparency as a reason why OSS/FS was so strongly preferred -- one speaker said something like "Governments need to know what happens in their networks, so they need to audit their code, so it [must?] be public source.""
KDE at LinuxTag 2005 - First Day Impressions (KDE.News)
KDE.News reports from LinuxTag. "The booth was crowded as always. We were visited by politicians, entrepreneurs interested in deploying the Kiosk framework on Internet terminals, and for tomorrow a guided tour for pupils is planned so they can learn about how to effectively use their new desktop in school - which is KDE."
Companies
eBay launches developer Web site (News.com)
News.com covers eBay's new developer Web site. "At the Web site, dubbed eBay Community Codebase, developers will have access to source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and sample applications, as well as provide a way to more easily collaborate on projects with others. "We are dipping our toe, so to speak, in the pond of the open-source world," said Greg Isaacs, director of eBay's Developer Program."
Is Linux moving to HP's NonStop (Tandem) platform? (LinuxWorld)
LinuxWorld.com.au considers the possibility of Linux being ported to HP's NonStop platform. "Speaking at a recent Red Hat customer/partner event, Martin Fink, the general manager of Linux and open source business at HP, said: "Maybe one day you'll actually see Red Hat Linux running native on NonStop" He stopped short of saying the move would definitely happen. HP has not formally committed to porting Linux to the NonStop platform, which runs on RISC-based CPUs made by Silicon Graphics. However, the vendor appears interested in running Linux on NonStop servers along the same line that IBM has moved its Linux operating system to run natively and as a virtual partition on the Big Iron."
Gentoo Linux founder to 'educate' Microsoft (News.com)
News.com looks into Microsoft's hiring of Daniel Robbins. "Daniel Robbins, the founder and former chief architect of the Gentoo project, began working for Microsoft in late May, according to a posting this week on the Gentoo Web site. According to Gentoo, Robbins is "helping Microsoft to understand open source and community-based projects." Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that Robbins will have an educational role at the company."
Sun Delays Linux on Solaris Feature (GeekInformed)
GeekInformed looks into a missing feature in Sun's newly released OpenSolaris operating system. "Sun Microsystems had scheduled to release a feature in Solaris 10 - codenamed Project Janus - that would allow consumers to run Linux applications unmodified on Sun's operating system, but the feature is missing in OpenSolaris. Instead of bringing attention to the missing feature, Sun is emphasizing a related open-source project - named Xen - as an alternative."
Tiny open source window manager catches a giant's eye (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at Matthew Allum's Matchbox Window Manager, which supports X11 on devices with small screens. "Allum became enamored with the idea of running Linux on a Compaq Ipaq in 2000 when he saw screenshots published by Compaq that showed the Ipaq happily running Linux. He bought one and installed Debian, but found that a lot of the Linux-based window managers didn't work with the small 240x320 display. Frustrated, he "bought a book on xlib," sat down, and in 2001 wrote Matchbox, a 50KB highly flexible window manager that depends only on xlib, which makes it lightweight enough to run on small devices without using too many resources."
Linux Adoption
Korea brings homegrown open source to schools (News.com)
News.com reports on South Korea's New Education Information System. "The project, called the New Education Information System, is built on a Korean-developed version of Linux that already services 190 schools in the heart of capital city Seoul. Jin Ko Hyun, president of the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency, or KIPA, which is behind the project, said it has taken schools two years to test Buyeo, the Korean version of Linux."
Legal
The BSA Sends A Letter Re EU SW Patents (Groklaw)
Groklaw has an update on the EU software patents debate. "The Dutch government, in a report presented to the Dutch parliament recently, and now being circulated to other EU member states, says the software patent directive should be put on hold for five years, while issues get defined and sorted out better. They also think there is no way to separate patentable and unpatentable software. It's all or nothing, in their view, and they'd like all, but with tweaks to the patent system to reform it so that stupid patents don't get granted." Update: The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has draft results of the JURI vote available.
Big software houses seen winners in EU patent vote (Reuters)
Reuters reports on Monday's JURI committee vote on the European software patent directive. "But the bill's sponsor in the legislature, French socialist Michel Rocard, suffered a string of defeats as key changes were made to his text. Rocard wanted a narrow definition of what sort of inventions could be patented, insisting that only a programmable piece of hardware could be covered, such as ABS brakes on a car or an insulin pump. Data processing and other inventions that are more pure software based should be excluded... But changes won by center-right and liberal opponents pushed the bill closer to a version adopted by the EU's 25 member states, which chose a far wider scope for patenting." Since this version now differs from the Council's version, it will have to be passed by a majority in the full session in July. That seems unlikely (nobody really likes this version), so the European Council may have its way in the end.
Interviews
Joseph Cheek speaks about Mandriva's acquisition of Lycoris (DesktopLinux)
DesktopLinux interviews Lycoris founder Joseph Cheek, Mandriva's acquisition of Lycoris is discussed. "Q: Do you expect Lycoris Desktop/LX to become merged with the Mandriva distro's, or will the Lycoris Linux desktop continue on as an independent distribution, for the foreseeable future? If they will be merged, how soon would you expect that to occur? A: They will be merged. The plan is to merge Desktop/LX Personal with Mandriva Discovery 2006, available this fall. Other bits of technology may show up in other Mandriva products, such as PowerPak and PowerPak+, Cooker, and so on, and some may take longer to integrate, but we expect to have a solid upgrade path available for purchase and/or download this fall."
Interview: Axmark and Behlendorf on OSS for India (NewsForge)
NewsForge has an interview with David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL AB, and Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO of CollabNet -- on the benefits of an open source IT economy for a country such as India. "NF: What does open source mean for India? Axmark: An opportunity to compete on equal footing with the developed nations. An opportunity to market company and personal skills without a big budget. An opportunity to be independent of the large software vendors and be in control of your own destiny."
Interviews on KPDF Usability Work (KDE.News)
KDE.News features two interviews. "During recent conversations with some of the members of the OpenUsability project, some of the usability work on one of the more exciting applications in KDE, KPDF, was brought to my attention. I managed to catch up with Florian, from OpenUsability, and Albert, one of the KPDF maintainers to talk a little about themselves and their work and about the usability review and followup in KPDF."
Resources
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, Chapter 12 (Groklaw)
Groklaw presents Chapter 12 of the online book "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter H. Salus. The chapter covers GNU, the GPL and Cygnus.Free Software Magazine Issue 4 is out
Free Software Magazine for May 2005 has been released. This issue looks at the next (r)evolution, Unix Power Tools 3rd edition reviewed, the risks of writing and using proprietary software, and more.Cooking with Python, Part 1 (O'ReillyNet)
O'ReillyNet presents an excerpt from Python Cookbook, Second Edition. "Unicode is easy to handle in Python, if you respect a few guidelines and learn to deal with common problems. This is not to say that an efficient implementation of Unicode is an easy task. Luckily, as with other hard problems, you don't have to care much: you can just use the efficient implementation of Unicode that Python provides."
Creating desktop profiles with Sabayon (Red Hat Magazine)
Red Hat Magazine covers the use of Sabayon to create templates for user profiles. "Suppose that you are an administrator of a large network. Part of your job involves creating user accounts for new people. Every user has different needs. Technically, you can tailor a desktop for every one of these new users. However, that would quickly get very tedious." (Found on Footnotes)
The Linux /proc Filesystem as a Programmers' Tool (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal provides examples of the use of the /proc filesystem. "Before we begin to talk about the proc filesystem as a programming facility, we need need to establish what it actually is. The proc filesystem is a pseudo-filesystem rooted at /proc that contains user-accessible objects that pertain to the runtime state of the kernel and, by extension, the executing processes that run on top of it. "Pseudo" is used because the proc filesystem exists only as a reflection of the in-memory kernel data structures it displays. This is why most files and directories within /proc are 0 bytes in size."
TUX Magazine: iPod for KDE and K3b (KDE.News)
KDE.News mentions the KDE articles in the latest edition of TUX magazine. "In this month's TUX magazine KDE's Jes Hall explains how to get your iPod working with amaroK. It also includes a comprehensive guide to KDE's CD burning application K3b. Available in HTML is a review of Kubuntu. TUX is a magazine for new GNU/Linux users and available as free PDF download."
Integrate Firefox with other tools (NewsForge)
NewsForge presents an excerpt from the book "Firefox Hacks: Tips and Tools for Next-Generation Web Browsing" by Nigel McFarlane. "If you're moving over to Firefox from Mozilla, you've surely noticed how Firefox is built to be a sleeker, faster browsing engine. It accomplishes this in part by shedding all of its counterparts from the Mozilla Suite, including an email/news client, composer, and chat client. But that doesn't mean this functionality is no longer available. With a few extensions -- or with no work at all -- you can make Firefox integrate with your email client as though it were still part of a suite. You don't have to stop there, either; at least one valuable extension gives you the power to connect Firefox with virtually any program on your system."
OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word (NewsForge)
NewsForge is running a detailed comparison of OpenOffice.org Writer 2.0 and Microsoft Word 2003. "That is not to say that Writer is a perfect program. Its interface is wildly inconsistent. Some features, notably cross-references, can most kindly be described as lacking. And in version 2.0, the attempt to imitate Microsoft Word hides several useful features. Yet, despite these shortcomings, OOo Writer is not only as fully developed as Microsoft Word, but often superior in terms of features and stability."
Reviews
DShield - A community approach to intrusion detection (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at DShield. "DShield bills itself as a distributed intrusion detection system. It works by collecting statistics from firewalls all over the world. Just how many reports does DShield receive? Currently its Web site lists about 24 million records each day, with more than 840 million recorded last month."
A Festival of speech synthesis for Linux (NewsForge)
NewsForge takes a look at the Festival Speech Synthesis System. "Festival is a free, portable, extensible, language-independent, run-time speech synthesis engine for various platforms that has been under development since 1999. Primary authors of the C++ system include Alan W Black, Paul Taylor, and Richard Caley. Festival is a part of the Festvox project that aims to make the building of new synthetic voices more systematic and better documented, making it possible for anyone to build a new voice."
How to Talk About Jini, J2EE, and Web Services at a Cocktail Party (O'ReillyNet)
Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates explain Java distributed technologies on O'Reilly. "Heard about distributed technologies for Java, but not sure what they are or why they're important? Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, authors of Head First Java, 2nd Edition, present this cocktail-party overview. Hold your own in conversation with Java geeks."
Miscellaneous
Is Linux For Losers? (Forbes)
The world is pointing to this, so we might as well too: this article is what you get when you put Daniel Lyons and Theo de Raadt together. "There's also a difference in motivation. 'Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix,' De Raadt says." Despite the real competition between Linux and the BSD family, there have rarely been outright hostilities between the two camps. It would be a shame if that were to change now.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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