Linux in the news

Call for Open Source Voting Hardware/Software (OpenSector)

OpenSector has published a call for open source voting machines. "I am currently seeking funding to start up a non-profit 501 c3 charitable organization to provide unique hardware and software solutions for the public good. Specifically, I would like to start by building free software and open source backed voting machines with specialized authentication and verification that would allow for ease in auditing and verifying the usage of such machines by the public. I believe it is a social imperative that we provide trustworthy and open systems that are not proprietary, nor so obscure that they cannot be widely adopted."

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SCO: IBM cannot enforce GPL (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld reports on SCO's response to IBM's counterclaims in Utah District Court. "'The Free Software Foundation is the only entity that can enforce the GPL so, in effect, IBM is barred from trying to enforce the GPL with SCO,' wrote Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman, in an e-mail response to questions. SCO's filings also assert that 'the GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws.'"

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Suing Your Customers: A Winning Business Strategy? (Wharton)

This Wharton "Strategic Management" article requires registration, but it is a worthwhile read on the pitfalls of the "sue your customers" business strategy, as seen 100 years ago when auto manufacturers tried to use patents to keep cheap cars out of the market. The article is mostly concerned with attacks on music traders, but it could be seen as equally applicable to the SCO case. "The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford's customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying 'unlicensed vehicles.' Most ordinary people of Ford's era had been content to stand by and watch the automobile makers slug it out over the Selden Patent. It was just an industry cat fight. But when the big 'money men' started suing ordinary people who were just trying to buy a cheap car, public sympathy shifted against the incumbents."

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Red Hat CTO says Fedora lets company 'Concentrate on the enterprise' (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers a keynote speech by Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann at the Enterprise Linux Forum. "Fedora, said Tiemann, will provide "the stimulus and the R&D" behind many future Red Hat innovations. And while Fedora explores the leading edge of Linux, Red Hat will concentrate on producing stable, mature enterprise products -- and, obviously, on marketing those products."

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Kapor: Why the old development model is history (IT Manager's Journal)

IT Manager's Journal covers Mitch Kapor's talk at the Software Development Forum. ""Open source software, like flowing water, will go everywhere it can go," said Kapor. And that's not a bad thing; it may be harder to get ultra-rich developing software, he said, but it's easier to start a software company, thanks to the rich base of existing open source projects."

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Enterprise Linux Forum: Small but important event (NewsForge)

Here's a NewsForge report from Enterprise Linux Forum. " Sometimes it's not the size of the audience that matters, but the quality. It may seem wasteful to have a high-end speaker such as Ximian's Nat Friedman talking about desktop Linux advances to a room with only 30 or 40 people in it, but when half of those people are highly-placed IT executives or government agency CIOs, and many of them are taking notes and asking cogent questions, Nat is probably doing more good in a "Let's spread the Linux word" sense than he'd do in front of 200 LUG members who already run Linux all day."

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SCO attacks open-source foundation (News.com)

News.com reports on SCO's attacks on the GPL - and the fact that SCO continues to ship GPL-licensed software. "SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said SCO doesn't offer indemnification, or legal protection, for use of Samba. As a hypothetical example, if Microsoft were to decide Samba violated its file system intellectual property and start suing companies that use the software, SCO would stop including Samba but wouldn't offer customers using the software legal protection, Stowell said."

Comments (23 posted)

Linux Is the Enterprise Operating System (eWeek)

eWeek has decided that Linux will succeed. "Amazon.com runs its shopping carts off Oracle on Linux. You want to talk mission-critical? What could be more business mission-critical? If Amazon's shopping carts stop working, not only are thousands of customers inconvenienced but the entire world knows that the biggest Internet retailer of all has had a major foul-up."

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South Africa launches OSS center (OpenSector)

OpenSector reports that South Africa has launched a government-backed Open Source Centre "to foster industrial and scientific development, either by itself, or in partnership with public and private sectors to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of the people of South Africa."

Comments (1 posted)

Senate Votes for Tough Limits on Spam (eWeek)

eWeek reports that the US Senate has approved the "Can Spam" bill, by a 97-0 vote. ""The odds of us defeating spam by legislation alone are extremely low, but that does not mean we should stand idly by and do nothing about it," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee."

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The C++ Style Sweet Spot (artima.com)

Artima.com is running part 1 of an interview with C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup. "A lot of people see C++ as C with a few bits and pieces added. They write code with a lot of arrays and pointers. They tend to use new the way they used malloc. Basically, the abstraction level is low. Writing C-style code is one way to get into C++, but it's not using C++ really well. I think a better way of approaching C++ is to use some of the standard library facilities. For example, use a vector rather than an array."

Comments (1 posted)

Using the Hammerfall HDSP on Linux (Linux Journal)

Here is HOWTO article on Linux Journal about using RME's Hammerfall HDSP sound card on Linux. "This article focuses on using the Multiface module with the PCI host card. If you have different hardware, most of this article still should be applicable, and wherever possible, I've included information on the differences."

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System recovery with Knoppix (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks looks at Knoppix as a system recovery tool. "This is the most common scenario. Something goes haywire, and boom, no boot. No problem: boot up Knoppix and find all your local partitions nicely iconicized on the KDE desktop. (Or cruise the file tree to /mnt.) Click on the correct icon, and there are all your files. But they are wisely mounted read-only. Again, no problem: right-click the desktop icon to bring up a nice menu with a "Change read/write mode" option. This mounts the filesystem on the partition as read/write. Now you can edit any file."

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A Comparison of Snort Books (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal compares Intrusion Detection with Snort: Advanced IDS Techniques with Snort, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID by Rafeed Ur Rehman and Intrusion Detection with Snort by Jack Koziol. "One indication that an idea's time has come is when two publications on the topic arrive at the same time. Based on the two titles reviewed here, it's apparent that Snort is going mainstream. These two books plus Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection and Snort: The Complete Guide to Intrusion Detection all have been released this year."

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Looking into Zend Studio 3.0 (O'ReillyNet)

John Coggeshall reviews Zend Studio 3.0 on O'ReillyNet. "I've been a PHP developer for a long time, using many different development environments in my PHP projects. When I was asked to do a review of the new Zend Studio, I decided that the best way to really judge it was to actually use it in my day-to-day development. So for a week, I set aside my trusted ActiveState Komodo 2.5 and sat down with Zend Studio 3.0. Here is what I found, what I liked, and how it compared to what I was expecting."

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IBM should take care of software risks (ZDNet)

ZDNet is running an impressive piece of indemnification FUD from Forrester Research. "IBM is giving its customers the blues by asking them to assume financial and legal risk with its open-source software--that's after those same customers have already shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the code."

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A Web of Rules (O'Reilly)

Kendall Grant Clark predicts the development process of the Semantic Web on O'Reilly. "My view, sustained by an admittedly simplistic analogy to the way the Web itself developed, is that if the Semantic Web is to happen, it will be because of a loosely coupled collaboration between three communities: the academics, the industrialists, and the hackers. This view gives me some pain, however, since the hacker community (by which I mean people who develop open source software for fun and for profit) is perhaps the one least engaged in the Semantic Web effort."

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If I could re-write Linux (NewsForge)

In this NewsForge article the author speculates on building a next-generation operating system aimed at 64-bit hardware. "Linux is a pure 32-bit operating system written from scratch for 32-bit processors. It doesn't suffer from any 16-bit baggage code. Now Linux is being ported to various 64-bit processors. It will be a while before all the code is compiled and optimised to take advantage of 64-bit platforms."

Comments (22 posted)