Linux in the news

Widenius: thoughts on dual-licensing

Michael "Monty" Widenius has posted an interesting article on the rather severe restrictions added to Sun's new commercial MySQL license [PDF] and how dual-licensed projects should really work. "I believe one should be very permissive when doing dual licenses with Open Source as otherwise you lose many of the business advantages you get from being Open Source. The Open Source community is a very effective ecosystem and if you allow it to participate with your business you have a better chance to succeed."

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Peters: The Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Battle?

GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters writes about her upcoming presentation at OpenSource World on her blog. She is concerned that moving applications into the browser is limiting users. "One of the things that has worried me is how people are living more and more in their browser. I myself am guilty of this. I use the browser to check my mail, calendar, read news, track my todo list, check my bank account, check on friends, upload pictures ... [...] People doing everything in their browser scares me not because I think everyone should use the desktop but rather because I don't think the browser is the best user tool for doing all those things."

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Free Desktop Communities come together at GCDS (KDEDot)

Sebastian Kügler reports on the success of the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. "KDE and GNOME benefit from shared technologies in multimedia, metadata storage, desktop search, application messaging and hardware integration. These shared technologies provide users with improved integration and a consistent user experience. Discussions during the summit resulted in agreements to continue to work on shared technologies, shared interfaces and shared code. In particular, several working sessions around the freedesktop.org initiative resulted in clearer processes for for sharing specifications and technologies which will accelerate the ability of both projects and the greater free desktop community to collaborate and communicate with other projects."

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Chapter 11 Trustee to be Appointed; SCO's Sale Motion Denied (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports the latest news from the SCO bankruptcy hearing. "The judge in the SCO bankruptcy has ruled at last. SCO's motion to let it sell to unXis is denied. There could be an auction later. The motions to convert to Chapter 7 by IBM, Novell and the US Trustee's Office are also denied, but alternative relief is granted, and there will be a Chapter 11 trustee appointed. IBM and Novell agreed that a Chapter 11 Trustee was appropriate if he did not convert to Chapter 7, and that is what he has done. That means presumably that SCO management no longer run this show."

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Red Hat pushes certification program amid Linux wave (Computerworld)

Computerworld talks to Red Hat's Max McLarenon about the company's expansion of its web-based training program in Australia. "The Academy program is currently available through just over 10 colleges that include TAFE NSW, Canberra Institute of Technology, the Burnie campus in Tasmania and Chisolm TAFE in Victoria. General manager for Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand, Max McLaren, said the internationally available certification is particularly popular in Australia. “We have more Red Hat Certified Engineers per capita then any where else in the world and one of the reasons the certification is so successful here is that we have so many colleges to help us offer it,” he said. McLaren said that the demand for training is still healthy despite the economic downturn.”"

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Red Hat's JBoss road less traveled (CNet)

Matt Asay looks at Red Hat's JBoss business. "Red Hat has announced its 2009 Innovation Awards, with some impressive finalists making the list. From Whole Foods to Harvard Business School Publishing, major organizations are doing impressive things with Red Hat technology. Interestingly, however, the real "innovation" revealed by these awards is just how much more money Red Hat makes in its JBoss deals than in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deals."

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National Vision chooses SUSE Linux (Reuters)

Reuters reports that National Vision will be deploying POS terminals loaded with SUSE Linux. "Novell today announced that National Vision Inc., one of the largest optical retailers in the United States, plans to use SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Point of Service to improve the performance, stability and uptime of the network of 5,000 point-of-sale devices within its stores. With more than 500 retail locations in 44 states, including America's Best Contacts & Eyeglasses and Vision Centers at select Wal-Mart stores, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service will provide National Vision with an agile, reliable and cost-effective operating system."

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Is Linux Irrelevant? (InformationWeek)

InformationWeek looks at the relevance of Linux as a "brand". The article is annoyingly broken into five pages, but offers a perspective that is somewhat different than what we normally see. "The end result is that Linux has become less of a developer or even programmer environment than a compilation environment -- a place for source code to be deployed rather than compiled code. A starting point, again, rather than an endpoint. The endpoint, as seen in products like Android, often has little to do with Linux as a distribution: It's a product unto itself with little connection to other things made from Linux, except in the sense you can probably compile the same software there."

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Python Python Python (aka Python 3) (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews the current state of Python 3. The article looks at the language a bit, but also at the state of support for Python 3 in several Python projects (Django, Twisted, and SciPy/NumPy). How and when to transition large Python projects to Python 3 is a problem that these projects (and lots of others) face. "Such an effort (maintaining a single code-base that supports Python 3 and previous versions) is something that the Python 3 developers disapprove of, but that hasn't stopped the Django developers having a go. It's still in the early days and progress has been slow, but it does bode well for the future. If efforts such as this are given more support within the Django world, perhaps a release 3 compatible version may arrive sooner than we think."

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Why can't local government and open source be friends? (guardian.co.uk)

Over at guardian.co.uk, there is a report on the failure of the Birmingham, UK government to even consider open source solutions for their new web site. Said web site is now late and 5x over budget. "The trouble is that the website never stood a chance. Nobody seems to have stood up in a meeting and said: 'You know, there's lots of very good open source content management systems (CMS) out there - there's one called Wordpress which is free and eminently customisable.' This is peculiar, as Wordpress was available (and as solid as any CMS) in 2005, runs on MySQL and PHP (which are both free products used by some of the largest companies in the world, such as airlines and Yahoo). And there are pots of programmers around with MySQL and PHP skills." Thanks to Eugene Markow.

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