Linux in the news

Interview: Aaron Seigo, KDE Project Lead (Sirius)

Tom Callway interviews KDE's Aaron Seigo. "Aaron: In a nutshell: KDE has grown up in just about every way imaginable in the years I've had the pleasure and privelege of being a contributor. The successful maturation of the project is certainly one indicator of its success, and the fact that it has done this while the active leadership has gone through a couple of generations shows that this likely to continue on. If anything defines KDE, it is the deep internalization of the values and goals of the group within every corner and sub-project." (Found on KDE.News)

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Linux Unhackable At TippingPoint Contest (eFluxMedia)

While it is certainly not proof that Linux is hacker-proof, as some have reported it, the news that Linux was the only survivor of a hacking contest is a nice indication of lots of hard work that has been done to secure the OS. "The contest was in Vancouver, Canada and it had three phases: during the first day, only network attacks were allowed, but none of the laptops could be broken into remotely. In the second day, rules stated that the hacker could give instructions to a staff member. During the third day, the rules of the contest allow the installation of popular 3rd party client applications on the notebooks."

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Asian Linux user groups aim wide (ZDNet Asia)

ZDNet Asia covers Linux user group activities in Beijing and Singapore. "The six year-old group [BLUG] which started with some 80 members, now has a membership of over 500. Its president, Frederic Muller, said he is expecting this number to double or even triple by the end of 2008, boosted in large by the group members' infectious enthusiasm."

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UK embedded conference features hands-on Linux workshop (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices looks forward to the sixth-annual Embedded Masterclass 2008 conference (May 8, 2008 in London and May 13, 2008 in Bristol, UK). "Aimed at professional engineers interested in real-time and embedded Linux, the workshop covers theory and hands-on practice on topics such as cross-development tools, root file systems, and kernel configuration and compilation. Other lessons include booting with u-boot, working with Busybox and Tinylogin, the separation between user and kernel space, and writing a driver to access the target board's LEDs."

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OSBC Panel Looks at the Future of the OS (eWeek)

eWeek covers an Open Source Business Conference panel discussion on the future of the operating system. "James Hughes, a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems, said operating systems do nothing without applications. The choice of operating systems is done by developers on the basis of how long it takes them to get their job done using that system. "So, the future of the operating system is to enable application developers to get their work done. They also want true and real support for their operating system, where someone actually answers the phone rather than just sending out e-mails to the community.""

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Adobe joins Linux Foundation, develops Air for Linux (LinuxWorld)

LinuxWorld is reporting that Adobe has joined the Linux Foundation and released an alpha version of the Air framework for Linux. "Although the Linux Foundation hailed Adobe's arrival as 'a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source,' that commitment stops short of publishing source code for the Linux version of Air. Adobe's end-user license for the code explicitly forbids any attempt to 'reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the software.'"

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With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

SearchEnterpriseLinux reports on Oracle's move to give away clustering software for its Unbreakable Linux distribution. "In an apparent competitive swipe at Red Hat Inc., Oracle Corp.announced on Wednesday, March 26, at InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference that it would add Clusterware to its year-old Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program for all basic and premium-package customers -- and for free. By harnessing the collective processing power and storage capacity of multiple servers into a single system, Clusterware enables this system to be centrally monitored and managed."

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Red Hat posts great 2008 fiscal year earnings (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch takes a look at Red Hat's 2008 fiscal year. "Anyone under the delusion that you can't make money from open source and Linux should have been on Red Hat's 2008 fiscal year earnings call on March 27. If they had been, they would have heard Red Hat executives report that the Linux giant posted net income of $76.7 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, for the year, compared with $59.9 million, or $.29 per diluted share, in the prior year."

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One step forward: a review of GNOME 2.22 (ars technica)

ars technica reviews GNOME 2.22. "The notion of a GNOME Developer Suite was initially conceived during the GNOME 2.20 development cycle, but Anjuta 2 was not quite robust enough for inclusion at the time. Anjuta now joins Devhelp and Glade 3, adding a much-needed IDE to the suite. Although most experienced GNOME developers prefer to use text-based programmable editors like Vim and Emacs, Anjuta is very important because it reduces barriers to entry for new contributors and automates away much of the complexity associated with configuring Autotools for GNOME development."

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Ten Years Ago Today: Netscape Releases Communicator Source Code (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine takes a look at ten years of browsing. "Today marks ten years since Netscape Communications Corporation released the Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code. The source code was managed by Netscape-backed mozilla.org until 2003, and is now managed by Mozilla Foundation."

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Another Reason Microsoft's OSP Isn't Good Enough (Groklaw)

Groklaw examines some issues with Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. "Here's an issue that affects everyone, not just FOSS developers, as explained by the Free Software Foundation South America in a long discussion of OOXML and why NBs should not approve it: It carries a number of dependencies on earlier Microsoft decisions, not all of which are part of the already-huge specification, and Microsoft's promise covers only fully-compliant implementations. But Microsoft Office isn't fully compliant with the OOXML (Office Open XML) specification, therefore those who seek interoperability with Microsoft's software won't be covered by its promise. Eek. I understand that to be saying that there are gaps in OSP coverage. You'll get documents you can't legally open unless you are using Microsoft's software, because the extensions found in Office but not in OOXML proper, so to speak, are not covered."

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