Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Ed Felten's 2006 predictions
Ed Felten has put up a set of 2006 predictions on the Freedom to Tinker site. "(19) A name-brand database vendor will go bust, unable to compete against open source."
Trends and Predictions for 2006 (IT-Director)
Robin Bloor has posted some 2006 predictions on IT-Director.com. "One thing to note about Open Source is that the vast majority of Open Source products fail commercially, just as the vast majority of proprietary products also fail. All Open Source business models that are viable depend upon widespread adoption - and for that, compelling software is a necessity. The Linux desktop is not yet compelling. The resurgence of Apple has taken the wind out of its sails and I now doubt whether it can prosper except as a thin client, an educational platform and a third-world computer platform. (These are significant markets but not ones that lead to dominance)."
Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)
Microsoft Certified Professional has put up an article on winning against Linux for Windows-based providers. "Some businesses view Linux as a way to reduce their dependence on Microsoft, but Hollinger reminds his clients that there are advantages to working with a company that has such deep pockets. 'Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D. There is nobody in the Linux world' that does that, he says."
Trade Shows and Conferences
EuroBSDCon 2005 (NewsForge)
NewsForge has this report from EuroBSDCon 2005. "One presentation that stood out from the crowd was on "Building Robust Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF," by Ryan McBride. McBride talked about how to use CARP between two OpenBSD PF firewalls. To show that no traffic was dropped when one of the firewalls was rebooted, he played a song from a PC outside of the firewall. After rebooting and pulling cables to show the redundancy, McBride took the demonstration one step further. He asked someone from the audience to select a numbers of cables. He then took an axe from under the table and started to hack the selected cables -- giving the word "hacking" a whole new meaning. The song didn't miss a single beat, and the 200+ audience members applauded loudly."
Companies
Linux firm MontaVista seeks new CEO (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports that embedded Linux provider MontaVista is looking for a new CEO. "Jim Ready, the founder of embedded Linux specialist MontaVista Software, will step down as chief executive to become the company's top technologist. Ready made the move for personal reasons, Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing, said Friday. He'll remain CEO until the company's board finds a replacement, Ulander said, at which point Ready will become chief technology officer."
Texas Instruments, MontaVista Linux promise device interoperability (NewsForge)
NewsForge investigates a recent partnership between Texas Instruments (TI) and MontaVista Software. "Texas Instruments (TI) and MontaVista Software announced in December they would pair TI's DaVinci technology-based products with embedded Linux, part of an attempt to more tightly integrate hardware and software in digital media, as the electronics industry looks to make the gadgets in users' lives more interoperable. The companies expect the series of products to provide a platform for companies to integrate more of the products they sell, so that users' desktop computers can communicate with their digital video recorder (DVR) set-top boxes, portable MP3 players, and other devices, said Huy Pham of TI's digital signal processor (DSP) system-on-chip (SOC) product marketing team."
Ingres: Is this the dark horse of the enterprise software pack? (ZDNet)
Here's a ZDNet weblog entry looking at the business case for free Ingres. "Another key factor that could favor Ingres is the integrity of its intellectual property, compared with MySQL. In October of 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, a Finnish company, whose technology is key to MySQL. That purchase provides Oracle with several business strategy options if MySQL starts to eat into Oracle sales. That would be an opportunity for Ingres to snag some of the MySQL market too."
Legal
3 Initiatives to Improve the Patent Mess Announced (Groklaw)
Groklaw covers new initiatives aimed at fixing the US patent system. "IBM, OSDL, the USPTO, Red Hat, Novell, New York Law School, Sourceforge, among others, have decided to do something about the software patent mess, particularly as it impacts on Linux and the FOSS community. They are asking for your input. There is a role you can play in the three initiatives being announced, if you wish to."
Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)
News.com reports that the U.S. patent office has reversed itself and ruled that Microsoft's FAT filesystem patents are valid. "In their latest action, filed last week, the examiners concluded that the company's File Allocation Table (FAT) file system is, in fact, 'novel and non-obvious,' entitling it to patentability."
Interviews
Interview with the team leader of the Ubuntu Server Project (Oss blog.it)
Oss blog.it interviews Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, team leader of the Ubuntu Server Project. "Q:Why an Ubuntu server version? Fabio Massimo Di Nitto: There's much confusion about it, and many rumors that don't have much to do with the reality of Ubuntu "Server". The first thing of note is that all Ubuntu-offered software comes from one repository. There are no desktop and server-specific repositories. For example, the desktop and server version share the installer."
Interview with Synfig's Robert Quattlebaum (OSnews)
OSnews interviews Robert Quattlebaum, the developer behind Synfig. "A powerful 2D animation product, Synfig, was open sourced recently under the GPL after the company behind it failed in the market place. The application is still actively maintained by its original author, Robert B. Quattlebaum..." (Found on GnomeDesktop)
Resources
Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal uses gd, an open source library, to create and manipulate images. "It lets you open images in formats such as JPEG, PNG, XPM and a few more. gd works something like this: it opens images in different formats and converts them to generic bit-mapped images in memory. It then lets you do graphical operations, such as drawing lines, arcs, ellipses or rectangles on that image, and stores the resulting image in any of the earlier-mentioned formats. For example, you could write a simple command-line program that converts a given file in JPEG format to PNG using gd. gd also can change colors in the image and copy, cut, merge or rotate it."
OOo Off the Wall: Find and Replace (Linux Journal)
Bruce Byfield explores the OpenOffice.org find and replace capabilities in a Linux Journal article. "In long documents, a strong search-and-replace tool is essential for editing duties. Although many users confine themselves to simple text searches, OpenOffice.org's various searches are a match for any rival's. They also are remarkably consistent throughout Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress, the four main OOo applications."
Alternative input devices under Linux (Linux.com)
Linux.com examines alternate input devices. "I tested the Handkey Twiddler 2, Monster Gecko's PistolMouse, KeyBowl's orbiTouch, and StreamZap's wireless computing remote. I tested each of the devices on Ubuntu Hoary and Ubuntu Breezy, and some also on Gentoo Linux."
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - Ch. 23, by Dr. Peter H. Salus (Groklaw)
Groklaw has another chapter from The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin. "When Gene Amdahl coined the word "FUD" (for fear, uncertainty and doubt) in the mid-1970s, his ire was aimed at Frank Cary, chairman of the Board at IBM, who was waging a no-holds-barred attack on Amdahl, Itel, Control Data, and the other small companies that were selling machines that competed with the IBM 360/168."
Discover Python, Part 8: Reading and writing data (developerWorks)
developerWorks presents another chapter of Discover Python. "In this article, you learn how to work with files. First, we review a simple way to output data in Python, using the print statement, then learn about the file object, which is used by Python programs to read and write data to a file. The different modes with which a file can be opened are demonstrated, and the article concludes by showing how to read and write a binary file."
Analyzing Web traffic with phpMyVisites (Linux.com)
Linux.com takes a look at phpMyVisites. "Any Web site owner knows the value of traffic statistics, but finding the right Web statistics package is not as easy as it may seem. Of course, there are excellent packages such as AWStats, Modlogan, and Webalizer, but these applications are overkill for people running smaller Web sites. Moreover, you can't install them if your Web hosting provider doesn't allow you to use custom scripts. If you are in the market for an easy-to-use program that provides essential Web traffic information, you might want to take a closer look at phpMyVisites."
Reviews
ISPConfig: A Hosting Control Panel (NewsForge)
NewsForge takes a look at ISPConfig. "After trying a few packages, I chose ISPConfig. I liked the system for a number of reasons, including the above-mentioned ones (such as the developers' knee-jerk recommendation for users to run Debian, even though ISPConfig supports many Linux distributions), but what really impressed me was its polished nature. ISPConfig is a free software version (Apache license) of the 42go commercial hosting control panel. This itself gives users the option of commercial support for ISPConfig from the developers."
Book Review of Karl Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software" (Groklaw)
Groklaw is running a review of the book Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. The book focuses on the social environment of open-source project development. "Groklaw regulars may feel some familiarity in the situation described in this quote from Chapter 6: The really difficult cases are people who are not overtly rude, but who manipulate or abuse the project's processes in a way that ends up costing other people time and energy, yet do not bring any benefit to the project. Such people often look for wedge points in the project's procedures, to give themselves more influence than they might otherwise have. This is much more insidious than mere rudeness, because neither the behavior nor the damage it causes is apparent to casual observers."
SeaMonkey Project picks up where halted Mozilla Suite left off (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at the upcoming SeaMonkey 1.0 release. "Although SeaMonkey version 1.0 will not deviate much from the last Mozilla supported version of the suite, the development team behind the project is looking to add many of the features currently available in Firefox and Thunderbird -- as well as some that are not. The council has rough plans for a version 1.1 later this year, and version 1.5 potentially sometime in 2007, said Christopher Thomas, release engineer for the project and a member of the Council. Like 1.0, version 1.1 will be based on Gecko 1.8.x, he said, with 1.5 expected to be based on Gecko 1.9, which is currently under development."
WordPress 2.0 is better than ever (NewsForge)
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews WordPress 2.0 on NewsForge. "WordPress 2.0 is out, and it brings a slew of improvements and new features, including WYSIWYG editing, user roles, easy database backups, and more. The WordPress home page describes the software as "state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform," but when you boil it down, WordPress is just damn good blogging software. WordPress is written in PHP, requires a MySQL database, and is available under the GPL. It's easy to use and fairly powerful."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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