Linux in the news

The Free Software Act (Groklaw)

Groklaw has published a draft copy of the Free Software Act. "I noticed an article on something called the Free Software Act, which is currently being drafted by the Free Software Consortium Legal Governing Body. I was interested to note that some brain power is going into figuring out a way to prevent any future SCO-like events. There is an effort to create something internationally useful, stronger than the license-on-top-of-copyright GPL, a law specifically designed to protect free software. I especially noted the wording on warranty."

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The Interpretation of Dreams: An Explanation of the Electric Sheep Distributed Screen Saver (O'Reilly)

Scott Draves writes about a distributed computing project that generates animated fractal screen saver images. "The name Electric Sheep comes from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the Internet. Electric Sheep is a distributed screen saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life forms. The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears."

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KDE-NL at Linux-Bijeenkomst 2003

KDE.News has coverage of the Linux-Bijeenkomst 2003 event that was held in the Netherlands. "We have published a small bilingual impression of that ay and, included as a bonus, is a small IRC snippet where we discuss some usability issues with Aaron Seigo, chief commander of the KDE Usability Project."

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Ruby's Present and Future (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly's OnLamp looks at the Ruby programming language and the 2003 Ruby Conference. "Some of the major events of 2003 for Ruby were its tenth birthday, the release of Ruby 1.8.0 in August, and the first European Ruby Conference. Ruby 1.8.0 contains several improvements in the core language over 1.6.x, as well as the inclusion of some of the more popular packages available from the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Rubyforge, a site for hosting Ruby-based projects, was launched in July 2003."

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Creator of Linux defends its originality (News.com)

News.com is carrying the New York Times article on Linus's response to SCO. "Darl C. McBride, the chief executive of SCO, said he stood by the company's assertions. He said a Linux expert who will testify in the SCO suit against IBM, which was filed last March, went over the code closely." Certainly Darl's "Linux expert" can be expected to know more than Linus on this sort of topic.

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Red Hat reports a profit and a purchase (News.com)

News.com reports from Red Hat's quarterly conference call, where the company announced a $4 million profit and that it is acquiring Sistina. "Sistina programmers lead the development of Linux's logical volume manager, software that makes computers more flexible by insulating them from changes in storage hardware. In addition, Sistina creates file storage software that can be used to share data across a cluster of database servers."

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OpenOffice CDs live for lending in Scottish libraries (Register)

The Register reports that OpenOffice CDs are becoming available for lending public libraries throughout the UK. ""Librarians love this stuff," says Kerr. "Most don't know what it is or what they can do with it. They need a trusted source of CDs and cannot accept them from members of the public. It may be more cost efficient if they had a Kiosk that is not connected to the internet but could create CDs from images rather than CDs on shelves (they have photocopiers). A CD like the Gutenberg project, TheOpenCD is of more value to them than Linux distributions."

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EU site pushes open-source education (ZDNet)

ZDNet covers a the launch of a new EU web site site aimed at improving understanding of open-source software. "The EU has launched a number of open-source initiatives since 1998, and currently funds 20 research projects directly supporting open source, under the Fifth Framework Programme (1998-2002). In preparation for the Sixth Framework Programme, the EC has recommended that governments encourage the use of open source as a way of ensuring interoperability."

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DVD-Jon wins new legal victory (Aftenposten)

Aftenposten reports that Jon Johansen has been acquitted again. "A verdict in the case, which has caught international attention, wasn't expected until early January. But the appeals court (Borgarting lagmannsrett) apparently didn't see any need to wait with its decision." (Found on Slashdot).

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The Circuit Court of Appeals Trims the RIAA's DMCA Wings (Groklaw)

Groklaw has a detailed explanation of the RIAA v. Verizon ruling, which has made it much harder for the recording industry to force ISPs to identify customers. "It isn't every day you read a judge write that a party's argument 'borders upon the silly', but that is exactly how the judge here characterized one of the RIAA's arguments."

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Interview: Marcelo Tosatti (KernelTrap)

KernelTrap talks with Marcelo Tosatti, maintainer of the 2.4 Linux kernel. "I heard about Linux when I first had access to the Internet (around 1995/1996), and I bought "Linux FT" from some company in my hometown. At the time I was working on a local ISP, and I replaced some of the NT servers they used with Linux. Then I had the chance to work with development at Conectiva (where I worked for the next 6 years and got interested in kernel development)."

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Interview with Sodipodi Developer Lauris Kaplinski (KDE.News)

KDE.News interviews Sodipodi developer Lauris Kaplinski. "Lauris Kaplinski: Sodipodi is quite usable as generic vector drawing application and more specifically, as SVG creation tool. It is nothing near in quality or feature set to big commercial programs, but people have used it to design icon themes, posters, business cards and much more. Most expected features are there - basic shapes, bezier paths, gradients, bitmaps, transformations, transparency, grouping and so on. One interesting feature is direct access to the SVG document tree, so users can hand-tune elements if the UI does not support certain feature." (Thanks to Navindra Umanee)

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Mini Interview with Ximian's Robert Love (OSNews)

OSNews talks with Robert Love about what he will be working on at Ximian. "There is no specific definition of what I want to accomplish, because it is my mandate to do whatever is necessary at the kernel and system-level to improve the quality of desktop Linux and thereby take Linux on the desktop to new levels." (Found on Footnotes)

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Interview with GNU TLS developer Nikos Mavroyanopoulos (GNU-Friends)

GNU-Friends.org interviews Nikos Mavroyanopoulos, one of the main developers of the GNU TLS transport layer security library. "Nikos Mavroyanopoulos: GNUTLS is a library implementation of the SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 protocols. Its purpose is to provide applications an authentication and encryption layer over an existing transport layer such as TCP/IP. The authentication part includes implementation of the X.509 certificate authentication framework, the OpenPGP framework as well as password authentication with SRP." (Thanks to Ciaran O'Riordan)

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Red Hat's Owen Taylor on GTK+ (OSNews)

OSNews interviews Owen Taylor, Red Hat engineer and project leader of the GTK+ multi-platform toolkit. "It's hard to say exactly what will make GTK+-2.6, though I think dock, toolbar editor, and wizard (druid) widgets are likely. An exciting future direction for GTK+ is switching to Cairo as our primary rendering API, but that's more likely a GTK+-2.8 feature, than a GTK+-2.6 feature." (Found on Footnotes)

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Trouw: Snowflake Becomes Avalanche

KDE.News has an English translation of an interview with several KDE contributors that appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw. "Fabrice Mous, "There is not one person who has a final say in this, like Linus Torvalds has with Linux. Everybody is equal and every contribution is equal. Although we have the concept that we have people with an account when they want to touch the code themselves, and people without these accounts. This is because not everybody is going to be involved for a long time. When it looks like somebody is going to stick around for a while then it is useful to get write access. It is a also meant as some form of security. You don't want outsiders to do a lot of damage to a program.""

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New FOSDEM interviews

Two new FOSDEM interviews are now available. The first is from Dominique Colnet who will be speaking about SmartEiffel. The second one is with Robert Love who will be speaking about the Linux kernel and the desktop.

The organizers of FOSDEM have also announced the FOSDEM background contest. You must be registered at FOSDEM.org to participate.

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Rekall Revealed (KDE.News)

KDE.News has an interview with Mike Richardson and Shawn Gordon. "Some time ago there was an announcement on the Dot about the GPL'ing of Rekall. So the Dot editors decided to contact the two parties who are involved on this matter: Mike Richardson and Shawn Gordon. We compiled a nice interview for your reading pleasure." Rekall is a database front-end.

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