Linux in the news

Risky business: Keeping security a secret (ZDNet)

ZDNet is running a column by Whitfield Diffie on open source and security. "As for the notion that open source's usefulness to opponents outweighs the advantages to users, that argument flies in the face of one of the most important principles in security: A secret that cannot be readily changed should be regarded as a vulnerability."

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Gartner: Customers Shouldn't Worry as MandrakeSoft Seeks Creditor Protection

Here's a Gartner Group pronouncement on MandrakeSoft's bankruptcy filing. "However, MandrakeSoft customers should not worry as the high portability of Linux distributions should make it easy to transition to a new supplier. Nevertheless, MandrakeSoft's woes underline the challenge of selecting Linux distributors in a consolidating market. To reduce their risk, enterprises should use distributions and features that align with the Linux Standards Base, one industry effort at coalescing around standard application programming interfaces." Gartner is figuring out that the relative vendor independence provided by Linux is a good thing.

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LinuxWorld articles

Here are a few of the LinuxWorld inspired articles we have seen today.

• It's a LinuxWorld, after all (News.com) "Linux advocates will convene at a trade show in New York this week to promote their wares, tout customers, swap business cards and make their case that the operating system is growing up."

• Open-Source Crowd Hits New York For LinuxWorld (TechWeb) "When lovers of Linux take to the Javits Center next week in New York for LinuxWorld, scores of companies will be touting their newest hardware and software products, pitching them to crowds dissatisfied with Windows and enamored of open-source ideals."

• MS bids to intercept Unix defectors at LinuxWorld (The Register) "Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft will deploy 15 staff at the New York-based event in an attempt to spread the Windows mantra. The company will demonstrate four products and its gotdotnet.com online service for developers."

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Dust-up hits desktop Linux confab (News.com)

News.com reports on the troubles with the Desktop Linux Summit. "An HP representative confirmed Friday that the company had withdrawn from the conference. Sun Microsystems, another big-name exhibitor, appeared on an earlier exhibitor list, but its name isn't on the current lineup. A Sun representative couldn't immediately confirm that it had withdrawn."

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Commentary: IBM's open-source stance (News.com)

News.com is carrying a Forrester Research pronouncement on IBM's open source strategy. "IBM has earned the trust of the open source community. As vendors like HP and Sun step up their involvement, the risk that hypercompetitive IBMers will overstep the community boundaries increases. IBM can't let that happen. It must maintain the trust by keeping its agenda in its proper, democratic place."

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Desktop Dreams in the Wake of MandrakeSoft's Bankruptcy (OfB.biz)

Open for Business has this take on MandrakeSoft's bankruptcy announcement. "Other great GNU/Linux companies have come and gone, and each time the Linux desktop "dies." Somehow, mysteriously enough -- and if anyone can explain this to me, please do -- this dead desktop seems to be able to keep dying and dying and dying. It's almost like the Energizer Bunny, or if it isn't, the critics most certainly are."

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Linux Makes Mainstream Moves (TechWeb)

TechWeb says 2003 will be the year that Linux becomes a mainstream operating system used for mission-critical business processes, thanks to strong vendor support and the growing availability of apps ported to Linux. "Linux already is mainstream at Cendant Corp. The real-estate, travel-services, and hospitality holding company has 7,000 hotels, and there's nothing more mission critical than efficiently managing check-ins, departures, payments, and reservations. About 60% of the hotels use a property-management system from Hotel Software Systems Ltd. that runs on a Linux distribution from SCO Group, even though Cendant offers Windows-based property-management software."

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Could Linux dethrone the software king? (Financial Times)

The Finanical Times has a lengthy article on the business of Linux. "While HP leads in the Linux business, claiming the free software drove sales of computer systems worth $2bn last year, IBM is probably the best-placed to benefit from this trend - hence its enthusiastic embrace of Linux. With the world's biggest IT services arm and a software business based on middleware - programs that sit between an operating system and the different software applications - Big Blue has ample incentive to reshape the corporate computing business in its own image." (Thanks to Richard Jones).

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WSIS delegates fail to agree on open-source 'support' (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld covers U.S. opposition to a declaration for open source. "A three-day meeting that brought together Asian governments, organizations, companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) ended Wednesday morning with the approval of a declaration that, among other things, calls for encouraging the development of open-source software. A draft of the declaration had called for open source to be "supported" but was changed after objections from the U.S. government delegation late Tuesday night." Thanks to Magnus Lycka

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A Double Chance for DMCA Reform (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at two DMCA reform bills to be considered by the US Congress. "Again this Congress, we'll have two similar DMCA reform bills. Why two? Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is planning to reintroduce the Digital Choice and Freedom Act of 2002, a bill that would reform the controversial anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The bill would allow users to bypass copy restriction systems for fair use purposes, much like the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, cosponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), John Doolittle (R-CA), Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), proposes."

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Jon Johansen faces appeal

The word is out; Norwegian prosecutors will appeal the recent acquittal of Jon Johansen on DVD piracy charges. Covered in articles from CNN, Wired, and The Register.

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SCO casts wider net for infringers (News.com)

News.com has some more information on SCO's possible intellectual property moves against other vendors. "One particular area of concern is with companies that signed agreements to see proprietary SCO source code and whose programmers now are working on different projects that could use that proprietary code..." Access to proprietary code will always present a trap for free software developers, who could find themselves "contaminated" and subject to legal action if they contribute to free projects.

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Piracy: ISPs must pay up (Reuters)

Reuters covers a change in strategy in the RIAA's fight against online music piracy: "The music industry is in a tailspin with global sales of CDs expected to fall six percent in 2003, its fourth consecutive annual decline. A major culprit, industry watchers say, is online piracy. Now, the industry wants to hit the problem at its source - internet service providers. "We will hold ISPs more accountable," said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera."

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Bruce Perens and Eben Moglen on NPR

On Friday January 17, 2003 Bruce Perens will be interviewed on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation: Science Friday". The subject will be the philosophy and business of Open Source software. The interview will take place between 2:20 P.M. and 3:00 EST, that's 11:20 to 12:00 PST. Find your local NPR radio station here. For general information on the program, see http://www.sciencefriday.com/ .

Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, will appear in an interview on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers, Friday 17 January. The show will discuss the impact of Wednesday's ruling in the Eldred case and its implications for the way copyright legislation will impact us in the future. More information is available at http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/comingup.html.

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Interview with Shamyl Zakariya (tinyminds)

Tinyminds.org has an interview with Shamyl Zakariya, one of the SlicKer developers. "As the second victim in the TinyMinds interview series we have picked the SlicKer project as our target. SlicKer aims to someday replace Kicker in KDE (ed's note: Kicker is the taskbar at the bottom of the screen) with its own more taskoriented approach."

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Jaakko Peltonen on Falcon's Eye (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly has an interview with Jaakko Peltonen, author of the game Falcon's Eye, a graphical version of NetHack. "We're proud to present an interview with Jaakko Peltonen, creator of Falcon's Eye, who discusses some of the technical and social challenges his project has faced."

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FOSDEM Weekly Interviews

FOSDEM has published four new interviews with speakers giving talks at FOSDEM, February 8 - 9, 2003 in Brussels.

These four interviews are related to the "Education Track":

• Bruno Coudoin, author of GCompris
• Hilaire Fernandes, author of DrGenius
• Raphael Hertzog, author of Debian-Edu
• And a common interview

Don't forget to participate to the FOSDEM Support Operation if you like the event and want to help organizing it. More info here: http://www.fosdem.org/index/support/

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Microsoft's changing tune on Linux (News.com)

News.com talks with Microsoft's Peter Houston about Linux. "I still believe Linux is an extension of the Unix paradigm. It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly. The Windows approach is very different. I will say that the adoption of Linux is likely to be bounded by how many companies are happy with Unix."

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LinuxDevices.com Newsletter

The LinuxDevices.com Newsletter for January 16, 2003 is out. Get caught up on all the embedded Linux news for the past week.

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Improving Linux kernel performance and scalability (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks discusses the performance of the Linux kernel. "The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it, but how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year. The benchmarks provide coverage for a diverse set of workloads, including Web serving, database, and file serving. In addition, we show the various components of the kernel (disk I/O subsystem, for example) that are stressed by each benchmark."

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IBM Introducing Linux Mainframe In A Box, Other Linux Tools (TechWeb)

Here's a TechWeb article about IBM's newest Linux tools. "IBM plans on Monday to introduce new Linux tools for devices from the handheld to the mainframe, including a pre-configured and tested Linux on mainframe installation, and Lotus Notes client software for Linux."

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GNU/Linux Media Player Roundup (LinuxOrbit)

Linux Orbit compares several Linux friendly media players including Sinek, Totem, XINE_UI, Xmovie, and others.

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Review of Quanta+ and Quanta Gold (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews Quanta+ and Quanta Gold. The review involves: "A side-by-side comparison of (free GPL) Quanta+ and (commercial) Quanta Gold, two popular HTML editors from theKompany."

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SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet)

Vnunet takes a look at SuSE's new business desktop offering. "Dan Homolka, technical sales manager at SuSE, claimed that the vendor's Linux environment actually runs Microsoft Office faster than Windows "mainly because Linux is much better at context-switching"."

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EFF Pioneer Awards Call for Nominations (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal covers the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Awards. Nominations are open to both individuals and organizations from any country. The deadline for nominations for the 12th Annual International EFF Pioneer Awards is February 1, 2003. "All nominations are reviewed by a panel of judges chosen for their knowledge of the technical, legal and social issues associated with information technology."

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Spamtrap Race (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal is putting on a spamtrap race. Ladies and gentlemen, rev up those disposable email addresses. "Thought you'd never want to seek out spam intentionally? Think again! Are you sitting around with some extra time on your hands? Excellent. We've got the perfect meaningless task for you. If you're lucky, you could even win a prize ("Oooooh", the crowd roars.)"

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World's first robot brain surgeon developed (smh.com.au)

Smh.com.au has an article about a linux-based robotic system that is being used for brain surgery. "A six-legged robot has been developed by Singapore experts and programmed to drill through the skull during surgery to remove deep-seated brain tumours in sharply reduced operating time."

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