Linux in the news

SCO readies new Linux licensing program (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld speculates on SCO's new Linux licensing scheme which may or may not be announced at Monday's press conference. "While the majority of Linux customers probably would not participate in a SCO licensing program, [analyst Gordon] Haff predicted some companies might be willing to pay SCO for the security of knowing they would not be sued. SCO is 'hoping that even if 99 percent of Linux customers laugh in their face, that there will be sufficient large companies who, for what is presumably going to be a relative drop in the bucket of their IT budgets, can potentially eliminate a cloud over their heads,' he said."

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Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register)

The Register has a reasonable look at the recent "embedded Linux costs more" study. "Essentially, innovation, differentiation and building on new platforms ought to cost more, and we should not be surprised when they do. Krasner's figures are certainly interesting, and flag some areas of concern (the tools issue being one of the more obvious of these), but they do not provide adequate reason for Linux developers to flee the battlefield and sign on with Satan instead."

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Saving the Net (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at how to get past the intellectual and political logjams that threaten Linux and the Net. "Who Owns What? That's the fundamental question, and it's going to get more fundamental as we roll toward the next presidential election here in the US. Much is at stake, including Linux and its natural habitat: the Net. Both have been extraordinarily good for business. Its perceived "threat" to Microsoft and the dot-com crash are both red herrings. Take away Linux and the Net, and both technology and the economy would be a whole lot worse."

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No glass ceiling to Linux, says Torvalds (vnunet)

Vnunet covers a panel debate at Computer Associates' CA World in Las Vegas. "Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president of CA's Linux technology group, felt too many companies approached Linux as a novel operating system rather than as a serious business tool."

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OSCON 2003 Impressions

Python creator Guido van Rossum has posted his impressions on the OSCON 2003 convention. "Tim O'Reilly's keynote pointed out a new class of "desktop applications" that run as well on Linux as on Windows: Google, Amazon, Ebay. Think about it. What these have in common is not just that they are websites that use open source and dynamic languages to access a huge database: As Tim points out, their success in a large part comes from how they track what *people* do."

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LinuxTag 2003: A Great Success

KDE.News looks at LinuxTag from a KDE perspective. "As usual, the KDE booth in the exhibition area was crowded. There, both KDE 3.1 and CVS HEAD were shown on four machines. As a special feature, KDE was shown on an Opteron which was made available by AMD. There were almost no problems getting it to compile, and it worked great. Many people dropped by to see the latest developments and were fascinated by the whole range of promising new features and applications such as Kontact, KDE's future Groupware suite and Kexi, a database management system for office users. Many users also used the opportunity to talk directly to the developers in order to provide feedback and suggestions. KDE developers used the hacking area to jointly develop new ideas and hack on KDE."

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USENIX 2003

Dustin Puryear covers this year's USENIX Annual Technical Conference on O'Reilly. "The USENIX ATC offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world."

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The Truth Behind The Curtain (use Perl)

Use Perl mentions a movie on Open-Source Software that is now available online. "Ask (via Robrt) writes "The OSCON 2003 movie, The Truth Behind The Curtain -- What happens behind the curtain in Open Source? What do they really think? -- is now available online. It has been slightly updated from the version we showed before the last keynote in Portland. We also added an explanation of the jokes.""

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Linux reaches Afghanistan (BBC News)

The BBC News reports that Linux is helping to rebuild Afghanistan. "The United Nations is training civil servants in the intricacies of the software to help them get government computer systems up and running. The first civil servants to complete their training in Linux went back to work earlier this month." (Thanks to miah)

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Europe picks Penguin to link government IT (vnunet)

Vnunet covers a working paper from the European Commission on linking national government IT systems across Europe. "The paper, Linking up Europe: the Importance of Interoperability for E-government Services, stressed that the planned European interoperability framework should be "based on open standards and encourage the use of open source software"."

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Koha is taking off in France

Koha Labs has posted a report on the adoption of the Koha open-source library system in France. "Serge Renaux, an IT engineer at Group ESIEE, thinks that Koha is a good fit for them. "All of our servers run on FreeBSD or Linux and we've been using free software like Apache, Samba, and OpenLDAP for several years, so a free library system seemed right.", said Serge. They were having problems with their existing library system, a commercial system, so they started looking for a replacement." The article is also available in German and French. Thanks to Pat Eyler.

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Open Asia: Japan and Korea embrace open source (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at Free Software in Asia. "Niibe Yutaka, who works for the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, says, "There are many domestic Linux users groups (I think more than 20). The central one is Japan Linux Association.""

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Python and the Tipping Point (Artima.com)

Artima.com has an interview with Bruce Eckel on typing efficiency and Python. "Bruce Eckel talks with Bill Venners about how Python's minimal finger typing allows programmers to focus on the task, not the tool, generating a productivity that makes more projects feasible."

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Graphics tricks from the Linux command line (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks shows how to perform image manipulation using command-line tools. "The command line tools discussed in this article are part of the excellent ImageMagick suite, which ships with Red Hat Linux and is freely available online. ImageMagick can also be accessed via C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and several other languages, which Linux programmers will appreciate."

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Linux IPSec Overview

Nico Schottelius has assembled an overview of a number of IPSec implementations that run on Linux.

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SVG: A Sure Bet

Paul Prescod has written an article on Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) that was derived from his keynote address at SVG Open 2003. "If you mention Scalable Vector Graphics language (SVG) in a crowd of web developers they will immediately gravitate to the question of whether it can "beat" Flash. Recently SVG Print has focused attention on the question of whether SVG can compete with PDF and Postscript. These are exciting possibilities: it would be great to unify these domains under a standardized, XML-based syntax. But it is ultimately quite limiting to define SVG by its success in replacing these existing technologies. SVG is much more than a Flash and PDF-killer."

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ZopeMag Issue 5 is now out! (ZopeMembers)

Zope Members News has the announcement for Issue #5 of ZopeMag. "Coming this quarter we have even more Zope Documentation you can't find anywhere else -- including an 18 page article on how the State of Hawaii Governor’s Website was converted to Plone, Zope and SOAP, and lots more!"

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4-in-1: Mini Book Reviews (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal has mini reviews of Linux TCP/IP Network Administration, Open Source Web Development with LAMP, A Practical Guide to Red Hat 8 and The Practice of System and Network Administration".

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