Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
The Quiet War Over Open-Source (Washington Post)
The Washington Post reports (registration required) on the squelching of a meeting about free software in the World Intellectual Property Organization. "Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights. 'To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO,' she said." (Thanks to Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier).
Ed Felten on the Bunner ruling
Here is Ed Felten's take on the California Supreme Court's ruling that posting the DeCSS code is not protected by the first amendment. "Information about Enron's finances is of public concern, even though only accountants can interpret it in its raw form. Information about the Space Shuttle wing structure is of public concern, even though only a few engineers understand it fully. CSS is a controversial technology, and information about how it works is directly relevant to the debate about it. True, many people who are interested in the debate will have to rely on experts to explain the relevant parts of DeCSS to them; but the same is true of Enron's accounting or the Shuttle's engineering."
Companies
Novell posts loss, announces layoffs (News.com)
News.com covers Novell's third-quarter results. "[In] August, Novell acquired Ximian--a move designed to help its customers adopt Linux on the desktop. Although there was speculation Novell would nix its NetWare operating system in favor of Linux, Messman says that won't happen."
The patent nuclear weapon (ZDNet)
Here's a ZDNet column on IBM's use of software patents against SCO. "IBM is certainly justified in responding to SCOs challenge, given the threat that SCO poses to IBMs Unix business as well as the open source product upon which IBM is building its future. However, the fact that IBM is fully justified in defending itself doesnt change the fact that software developers should feel a bit queasy about the tactics it has chosen to use."
SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks (InfoWorld)
According to this InfoWorld article, SCO CEO Darl McBride sees the invisible hand of IBM behind the community's response to SCO's actions. "'We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM,' McBride said."
SCO's Evidence Raises Questions About Case (ECommerceTimes)
ECommerce Times has posted a story about the latest developments in the SCO case. "...Chris Sontag, SCO's senior vice president and general manager of SCO Source, told TechNewsWorld that the company has now unveiled the offending code and that it can be remedied. 'The vast majority of the code [in violation] is the derivative work from IBM, so that's a great place to start,' Sontag stated. 'We're talking about more than one million lines of code that can be remedied.'" This is actually an interesting thing for him to have said. It appears we now know the bulk of SCO's complaint. Even if SCO gets a court to agree that it owns everything that IBM allowed into the same room as Unix, and that IBM's release of that code was a breach of its contract with SCO, the fact remains that IBM released that code. It's not at all clear that SCO can call it back, or attack those who are making use of it.
SCO Defends Against Open Source Advocates (InternetWeek)
InternetWeek looks at SCO's difficulties. "But [SCOSource VP Chris] Sontag said the BPF routines were not intended to be an example of stolen code, but rather a demonstration of how SCO was able to detect 'obfuscated' code, or code that had been altered slightly to disguise its origins. The slide displaying the code should have been written differently to reflect that intention, he said." So SCO showed its resellers a demo of how Linux hackers were able to edit BSD-licensed source, and is no longer claiming that BPF was stolen.
Linux Adoption
Should the government adopt open-source technology? (Business Standard)
The (India) Business Standard is running a debate between Javed Tapia (Red Hat India) and Shailendra Kumar (Microsoft India) on whether the Indian government should use free software. "Additionally, security vulnerabilities in open-source software, which often go unnoticed with the limited scenarios that actually deploy open-source software, also often remain unaddressed for long periods of time because there is no central organisation driving development. Evaluating open-source software for security is a complex proposition."
Legal
DVD-copying code loses free speech shield (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports that the California Supreme Court has ruled (in the Bunner DVD case) that the "free speech" defense does not apply. "The ruling did say that software code like DeCSS should be afforded some strong First Amendment protection, even if trade secrets rights trumped free-speech shields in this particular case. However, the court cautioned that its decision was based on a very narrow reading of the earlier decisions, including the assumption that the original trial court had ruled correctly that the release of DeCSS had violated the industry coalition's trade secrets. The court ordered the case to be sent back to the appeals court level, where judges would review the trade secrets issue more closely."
How to muzzle SCO (Inquirer)
The Inquirer calls for an injunction to shut up SCO. "Red Hat's first serious barrier to successfully requesting a Preliminary Injunction against SCO's disparagement and interference in its business is that it has not seen and therefore cannot show a significant decline in its sales since March 2003 -- when SCO initiated its lawsuit against IBM and started its public campaign to trash Linux and Open Source."
Interviews
Torvalds Slams SCO (eWeek)
eWeek interviews Linus Torvalds about the SCO case. "They are smoking crack. Their slides said there are [more than] 800,000 lines of SMP code that are 'infringing,' and they are just off their rocker. The SMP code was written by a number of Linux people I know well (I did a lot of the SMP IRQ scalability myself, personally), so their claims are just ludicrous."
SCO's big legal gun takes aim (ZDNet)
ZDNet interviews SCO lawyer Mark Heise. "Section 301 of the Copyright Act says the Copyright Act pre-empts any claims that are governed regarding use, distribution and copying. We believe that although the GPL is being tossed into the fray, it is pre-empted by federal copyright law." Should you be interested in pursuing this further, Section 301 can be found over here.
Resources
Is a Linux supercomputer in your future? (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at Linux clusters for small to medium businesses. "Modern clusters allow everything, including OS and application upgrades, to be scripted, so that the administration burdens are within the budget reach of mid-size universities and corporations. Intelligent queuing software is also starting to have an impact, because it allows jobs to be scheduled and dispatched to the right hardware at the right time without intercession by administrators. This also means that researchers and business people don't have to be computer scientists in order to figure out how to make their applications run efficiently."
Reviews
Bayonne bridges open source, telecom (NewsForge)
NewsForge has a detailed look at GNU Bayonne and the project behind it. "GNU Bayonne is a customizable telecommunications application server that can be used for a variety of telecom applications such as interactive voice response systems and telephone system administration tools. It facilitates the creation of telecom applications that can be directly integrated with traditional scripting languages and tools commonly found on free software platforms such as Linux."
The Concept of Security (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal reviews two books, Secrets of Computer Espionage: Tactics and Countermeasures and Linux Security Cookbook. "As I sat one morning working on some loose ends, my e-mail inbox signaled the arrival of some new message. Experience is the best teacher, and my experience told me this was a new worm or virus. The attachment was zipped, so I saved it to my Windows desktop and then FTPed it to one of my Linux boxes. Once there, I was safe to play with it the way a cat plays with a small mouse it caught."
What's new in GnuCash (NewsForge)
Joe Barr reviews GnuCash on NewsForge. "In addition to the nine standard reports and graphs having to do with income and expenses, there is now a separate menu listing six different business reports: customer, employee, and vendor reports, payables aging, receivables aging, and invoice printing. There are also ten reports on Assets and Liabilities, an Account Summary, a tax report, and a transaction listing. If that's not enough, you can write your own."
The need for speed (Tri-city Herald)
The Tri-city Herald (Washington state) covers a new Linux-cluster supercomputer. "The supercomputer from Hewlett-Packard uses nearly 2,000 of Intel's new Itanium-2 processors, code named Madison, which were introduced in June. It's the world's fastest supercomputer to depend on the Linux operating system, a system whose creators share their software blueprints so users can make extensive changes to meet different needs." (Thanks to Karl Agee)
Motorola launches first Linux smartphone (Register)
The Register looks at a Linux-powered smart phone from Motorola. "Announced last February, the A760 uses Linux as a core operating system, on top of which Java provides a multimedia application framework. Software that ships with the device includes a PDA-style personal information management suite, a video player, music player, an instant messaging tool and more." (Thanks to "Fuzzy Gorilla")
Miscellaneous
Germany's 'Der Spiegel' Magazine Records Increase in Use of Mozilla and Netscape (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine reports on the increasing use of the Mozilla browser. "According to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Mozilla's usage share may be rising (rough English translation courtesy of AltaVista's Babel Fish). In an article about the latest set of Internet Explorer security flaws, the German newsweekly reports that out of 125 million accesses to their website, 15.1% came from users of Mozilla and Netscape, a notable increase since the releases of Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1."
Analysis of 'Microsoft Windows or Linux?' pamphlet
Con Zymaris takes a look at a pamphlet prepared by Microsoft and aimed at corporate and government Information Technology executives, as part of the company's anti-Linux campaign.
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