Linux in the news

Copyrights: A radical rethink (Economist)

The Economist has posted a column on copyright inspired by the Eldred v. Ashcroft ruling. "Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier. Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death, now the norm in the developed world." They argue for much shorter copyrights, but for giving copyright holders "legal backing" for copy protection technologies.

Also in this week's Economist: an article on the BSA/CSPP/RIAA deal and a lengthy survey on the Internet society, with articles in privacy, copyright protection, direct democracy, and more.

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Commentary: The way of Linux (News.com)

Here's a lengthy Forrester Research pronouncement on News.com "CIOs making a commitment to open source should also commit to a team that can demystify licensing issues, manage code rollouts and check a project's sanity level. Staffing the center with skeptics--not gurus--will keep corporate technology policy far away from the open-source socialist fringe." Despite such language, it is actually a very positive report.

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CEO Visions: Kinder, Gentler Software (TechWeb)

Oracle's Larry Ellison on Linux (covered by TechWeb). "Our database operates on clusters of low-cost Linux machines. We've bet extremely heavily on Linux. We think Linux is a winner. If it's not, it's a bit of a problem for us. If it is, it's a huge win for us. ... In 25 years at Oracle, I've never seen movement like this toward an operating system. I've never seen anything with this much uptake. We're seeing Linux absolutely go over the moon."

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Linux infiltrates Homeland Security, and other conspiracies (Register)

The Register plants tongue firmly in cheek for this article about the US Department of Homeland Security's newly-launched web site. "Still, it's nice to see Linux defending the homeland, and to know that the Department of Homeland Security doesn't hold with this stuff about the GPL being communism. Unless... Now, there's another good conspiracy theory.."

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LinuxWorld: Baby It's Cold Inside (Wired)

Wired attends LinuxWorld. "It's interesting to watch as new users of Linux, including reps from Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and VeriSign, are trotted out to explain how great Linux is to people who have probably spent the last decade elbow deep in kernel code. "It's like watching a baby discover its toes," said New Jersey coder Nick Nardine. "Not only does the baby think its toes are the coolest thing in the world, it insists you must discover your toes too. Watching these guys push Linux on us is endearing and annoying at the same time.""

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Sun Hits Stride At LinuxWorld (TechWeb)

TechWeb covers LinuxWorld announcements from Sun. "And Mad Hatter, the codename for Sun's Linux desktop, will roll into beta this spring, followed by general availability summer of 2003."

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LinuxWorld Is Wall-to-Wall Good News (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal wraps up LinuxWorld. "On the AMD side of the struggle, several vendors offered Opteron-based evaluation and development hardware. A running 1U system at the Angstrom booth had processors that were cool to the touch, with two small fans per processor. Although Angstrom can't release numbers and Linux Journal didn't have a thermometer, the Opterons feel cooler than current Athlons."

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Microsoft wins Linux award (vnunet)

Vnunet notices that the winner of LinuxWorld's best system integration software in the Open Source Product Excellence Awards is not exactly an open soure product. "But [Microsoft's Services for Unix 3.0] is still a Windows-based product, with the user needing to run Windows NT4, 2000 or XP Professional. The Unix/Linux element is needed in order to access the Unix operating systems. A purist might therefore argue that it is not open source at all."

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IBM Touts New Enterprise Linux Customers At LinuxWorld (TechWeb)

This TechWeb article list some of IBM's big Linux customers. "Sales are the supreme test of a technology's value, and IBM is highlighting that point by parading nearly a dozen new Linux customers. The Armonk, N.Y., computer giant, which dove into the Linux market three years ago, said at LinuxWorld in New York on Wednesday that the PGA Tour was among the converts to the open-source operating system."

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Intel gets 'big iron' partner (vnunet)

Vnunet covers a deal between Intel and Fujitsu to develop high-end servers. "Fujitsu has reorganised its 300-strong Linux development team and it is expected that they will be concentrating on using open source for its server management software."

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Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

The Register takes a look at Red Hat's current "end-of-life" schedule. "Microsoft comes under regular fire for its apparent eagerness to end-of-life its products, making them more difficult and expensive to support, and hence forcing users to upgrade to the next version. But without fanfare Red Hat has quietly introduced its own approach to end-of-life, and compared to this, Microsoft's idea of an upgrade cycle looks pretty sedate. As of the release of Red Hat 8.0, the company is only guaranteeing errata maintenance for the 12 months following a product's release."

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SCO Group Readies New Platform (eWeek)

eWeek covers a new platform under development by the SCO Group. Known as SCOx, SCO hopes it will drive the next generation of applications on both the network and the server, across both Unix and Linux. "SCO Group chief executive Darl McBride told eWEEK in an interview here at LinuxWorld Wednesday that two of the company's core customer segments the replicated site customer and the small- to medium-sized business customer are looking for a platform that melds their server-based solutions and the Internet."

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Morgan Stanley aids Linux learning curve (News.com)

News.com looks at Red Hat customer Morgan Stanley. "Birnbaum wasn't just helpful in pushing Red Hat to build necessary features into Linux, Tiemann said. He also helped champion the cause of Linux among Wall Street companies."

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Tablets good for healthcare staff (NZ Herald)

The New Zealand Herald looks at a South Auckland Maori health provider that is carrying out the first local trials of Linux-based Tablet computers to gather health information at clients' homes and communicate wirelessly with base. Thanks to Kanchana Wickremasinghe

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Linus has an open view (The West Australian)

This year Linus went to Linux.conf.au instead of LinuxWorld. While there he spent some time talking with the press. Here is an interview with Linus in The West Australian. "Mr Torvalds appears to find Microsoft's angst over open source, and Linux in particular, more amusing than troubling overall. But he warns the battle could get serious."

You can find another interview in AustralianIT. Thanks to Leon Brooks

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Larry McVoy on BitKeeper, kernel development, Linus Torvalds and Bruce Perens (LinuxWorld)

Joe Barr talks with Larry McVoy in this LinuxWorld article. "McVoy's biggest contribution to free software may be BitKeeper, his proprietary source management system. The story of how BitKeeper has come to be Torvalds' (and many other kernel hackers) tool of choice in maintaining the Linux development tree is worthy of a book. It's not just an unlikely outcome, given the animosity that often flares up when proprietary and open source types gather in the same space, it has been a frustratingly painful one. McVoy tells me that it was his desire to help Linus that has resulted, to use his own words, in "a miserable last five years.""

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LinuxDevices.com Newsletter

Here is the LinuxDevices.com Newsletter for January 23, 2003. Get caught up on all that's new in embedded Linux.

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Spam filtering techniques (developerWorks)

developerWorks looks at six different ways to deal with spam. "At first blush, it would be reasonable to suppose that a set of hand-tuned and laboriously developed rules like those in SpamAssassin would predict spam more accurately than a scattershot automated approach. It turns out that this supposition is dead wrong. A statistical model basically just works better than a rule-based approach"

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Langa Letter: Linux Has Bugs: Get Over It (TechWeb)

Fred Langa revisits Linux bugs in this TechWeb article. "It's hard to imagine a less inflammatory or more obvious assertion--that all operating systems have bugs and security issues--but I won my bet: Linux and open-source fans thought I was attacking them or their preferred operating system. They deluged me with E-mails, many irate, claiming that CERT (and I) were dead wrong."

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Not Your Father's Encyclopedia (Wired)

Wired looks up Wikipedia, an open source encyclopedia. "In Wikipedia's second year, editors have added 80,000 entries to the English version and 33,000 more to the other language editions. The surge in growth has made it the world's largest and fastest growing open-content encyclopedia, according to its founders."

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Linux Australia votes in first female president (ZDNet Australia)

ZDNet Australia covers Linux Australia's new president, Pia Smith. "Asked why she wanted to be president, Smith said she wanted to invigorate the organisation, so as to raise the profile and scope of the Linux operating system in Australia."

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