Linux in the news

Why GPLv3 Will Supplant GPLv2 (Linux Journal)

Glyn Moody muses on GPLv3 adoption in a Linux Journal article. He looks at the history of licensing and concludes that GPLv3 adoption is inevitable. "The interesting point here is that it was not legal issues that prompted the adoption of the GPL, but simply a desire to make it easier for MySQL to be included in distributions by simplifying the legal wrapping. MySQL is not alone in making the move to the GNU GPL for this reason."

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Finland's Summer Coders to Open their Minds (by Paul Sladen)

Paul Sladen covers [click below] the Finnish Summer of Code. "Google's Summer of Code may have taken the limelight, but in the north-east corner of Europe there has been another smaller (near) namesake taking place. Since 2006, Finland has had its very own Summer of Code—"Kesäkoodi", "summer code" in Finnish—organised and backed with the help of Finnish companies wanting to contribute to the community at a local level."

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HP: Linux ready for mission-critical applications (ZDNet UK)

HP's Randy Hergett speaks at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo in Singapore. ""[Linux] is ready for most applications," he said, noting that there are telecommunications companies running mission-critical databases on Linux, and overall adoption levels are ramping up."

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Announcing the KDE 4.0 Release Event (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks forward to the KDE 4.0 release media event, happening January 17 to 19 in Mountain View, California. "There will be plenty of time and opportunity for interaction between all attendees; but there will also be many interesting presentations, involving both technical and non-technical topics. We have invited over 200 members of the media, I.T. business, distributions and other Free Software groups, completed of course with many members from the North-American KDE community. Further, several international KDE hackers will attend to give talks or help organise the event."

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Red Hat Rises After New Linux Products Fuel Sales (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg covers the latest financial results from Red Hat, Inc. "Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5 software, released in March, sold faster than expected last quarter, increasing cash flow. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company also persuaded existing customers to use Red Hat software on more of their computers. ``Cash flow from operations was very solid compared to last quarter, and the revenue beat expectations,'' said Denny Fish, an analyst at JMP Securities in San Francisco. He has a ``market perform'' rating on the stock. Cash flow from operations rose 43 percent to $63.7 million last quarter from a year earlier. In the previous quarter, it declined 4 percent."

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Red Hat faces stiff challenges to move beyond its core technology (LinuxWorld)

John Fontana writes about Red Hat. ""The big challenge for Red Hat is moving from an [operating system] distributor to becoming a distributor of an application platform, a virtualization platform, an SOA platform. Moving into those spaces is not an easy transition," says Denny Fish, senior analyst for infrastructure software and services for financial services firm JMP Securities. "They are selling to different people within an organization. The [operating system] is often an indirect sale, but with the middleware platform, for instance, you are selling to application developers and systems architects.""

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Kubuntu Takes Over the Canary Islands (Ubuntu Fridge)

The Ubuntu Fridge team reports that Kubuntu in taking over the Canary Islands. "The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university's Software Libre Office (OSL)." (Found on KDE.News)

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Microsoft, antitrust and innovation, by Georg Greve (Groklaw)

Free Software Foundation Europe president Georg Greve discusses the fallout from the recent EC antitrust ruling against Microsoft. "If one were to believe Microsoft, antitrust law is for sore losers who are too lazy to innovate, and the decision of the European Court of Justice against Microsoft was to the detriment of consumers around the world. One might even believe that any company with large enough market share would now have to fear the wrath of the European Commission and its anti-innovation bloodhounds. At first the notion seemed ludicrous, but then more and more blogs repeated it and serious media started picking it up. Even representatives of the US government spoke out on behalf of Microsoft, to the annoyance of Neelie Kroes, the European Union's antitrust commissioner."

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Community interview: Novell answers 10 questions (BR-Linux.org)

BR-Linux.org presents a community interview with Novell, here's a summary of the responses: "One of the questions, sent by the reader semente, wasn't answered at all, other answers look evasive, some of them repeat known company policy without adding much more meat to it (the deal was about interoperability, you know), but most of them may reveal more than a glimpse of unfiltered opinion: “Novell believes there should be one open standard and that standard is ODF”, “We do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents”, “We welcome GPLv3”, and so forth." (Thanks to Augusto Campos).

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An Interview with ECIS's Thomas Vinje on the EU Microsoft Decision, by Sean Daly (Groklaw)

Sean Daly talks with Thomas Vinje about the EU Microsoft Decision and OOXML. "When the EU Court of First Instance announced its verdict on September 17, upholding the EU Commission's findings that Microsoft abused its market dominance, the media flocked to the lawyers representing the various parties for reactions to the ruling, Brad Smith for Microsoft, Carlo Piana for FSFE and Samba, and Thomas Vinje, who represented ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems."

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Linux Gazette #143

The October 2007 edition of Linux Gazette is out. Articles in this issue include An Ongoing Discussion of Open Source Licensing Issues, Linux Console Scrollback, Securing Apache Web Server with mod_security, Introducing Python Pickling, and more.

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Loop-based Music Composition With Linux, Pt. 2 (Linux Journal)

In this Linux Journal article, Dave Phillips completes his look at using Linux for loop-based composition. He looks at Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity to create and edit music from sampled sources. "Drummers are pattern-playing creatures, but to keep things interesting they vary those patterns from time to time. We can liven up our example by replacing every fourth loop with a variation of the groove or a fill taken from the same source loop collection. Simply load the new set of audio files as new tracks, edit as desired, then mix and match until you find the right combination of patterns (i.e. what pleases your ears)."

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High-performance network programming, Part 1 (developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks looks at squeezing the maximum usage out of your network resources. "Though bandwidth available to a particular protocol is limited by Shannon's law and other factors, such as network usage patterns, most of the time it is shoddy programming or naive coding that causes suboptimal utilization of network resources. Performance enhancement is also an art as much as it is a science. To get the best end-to-end throughput, you have to employ various tools to measure performance, identify bottlenecks, and eliminate them or minimize their impact. You can quickly get a huge performance boost by simple and straightforward scientific methods."

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GNOME 2.22 planning: Empathy messaging client and toolkit proposed for inclusion (ArsTechnica)

ArsTechnica looks at the instant messaging client Empathy, which has been proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.22. "Empathy is rapidly becoming an important part of the GNOME software ecosystem and is already packaged in several mainstream distributions, including the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 release. Empathy integration features for Nautilus, Totem, Epiphany, and Jokosher and others are currently being developed. The Empathy toolkit is also being used by Intel as part of its new Linux-based mobile platform. Telepathy could eventually provide pervasive messaging and presence functionality throughout the entire desktop environment." (Found on GnomeDesktop)

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The Mono Project: You Might Expect the Unexpected (Linux Journal)

Tom Adelstein looks at the Mono project. "Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight."

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To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

In this article from O'Reilly's Women in Technology series Selena Deckelmann shares some suggestions for how to get more women involved in open source. "We can learn from research about increasing diversity. I'm sure smart people have summarized, put together lists of bullet points, and made handbooks to show how to do it. Certainly, organizations dedicated to fixing inequalities will be touchstones for change. But we need more than leadership to change our culture. We each can take steps now to make women feel like there is a place for them in our communities."

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