Linux in the news

U.N. report says open source produces better software (OpenSector)

The United Nations has concluded that better software comes from the open-source development model. "The report says that OSS software is better for four primary reasons: More people looking for defects means more defects are found and fixed. Free from marketing considerations, developers release more fixes and improvements, more often. Proprietary software does not guarantee quality, in order to avoid legal liability. Source code availability allows users to fix, customize or improve on their own."

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Why Run Free Software on a PDA? (O'ReillyNet)

Guylhem Aznar investigates the use of Linux on PDA platforms. "Now that more and more people are familiar with the idea of a GNU/Linux PDA, you may wonder why free software on a PDA may be important to you as a consumer or a manufacturer, and why the choice of a full, free software solution is progressing on the end-user devices market."

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Groklaw Takes A Closer Look at the ABI Files

Worth a read: this lengthy investigation on Groklaw into the provenance of the Linux kernel ABI. "This indicates that representatives of SCO/Caldera were the ones who collected, developed, tested, and maintained the source code to implement the ABI functionality, then placed the GPL notice on it, packaged it, and provided it to the entire Linux community. Given that SCO themselves did so much of the work to provide this functionality, and placed the GPL notice on it themselves, judging from these files, it seems hard to avoid concluding that SCO explicitly released the System V ABI under the GPL and that they did so knowingly and because they wanted to."

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Report: KDE at LWE NY, 2004 (KDE.News)

KDE.News has published a write-up from the Linux World Expo. "For three days, 10 KDE developers and a few others helped deal with a huge amount of interest from the crowd, showing off the latest and greatest in KDE 3.2. This year's show was thought to be at least twice as good as last year's, and a great time was had by all."

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EclipseCon from 30,000 feet (NewsForge)

Joe Barr jets to EclipseCon. "What interests me most about Eclipse.org is that it is a consortium of proprietary software and hardware firms who are developing a world-class, cross-platform, open source development environment. It's a bizarre twist to the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner story line."

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EclipseCon on the ground (NewsForge)

Joe Barr continues coverage from EclipseCon. "Eclipse went open source in 2001 and today has more than 50 member companies. The goal of Eclipse today -- since IBM has made it a completely separate and independent organization -- remains the same as it has always been, [IBM's John] Wiegand said: to make a fun and profitable framework for developing software that can be used by anyone."

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Eclipse State of the Union

Coverage of the first day of EclipseCon is available. "Today marked the major kickoff of EclipseCon 2004, the first Eclipse Conference, at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. The keynote speech was delivered by John Wiegand (IBM) and Erich Gamma. There were over 600 attendees at the conference and people were lined up around the walls to listen to the opening speech. There are over 50 companies who belong to Eclipse and the session opened with Eclipse company and board members filling the entire stage."

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Decatur Jones' Dion Cornett on SCO (Groklaw)

Groklaw now has the full Decatur Jones report on SCO. Any corporate manager who is considering paying off SCO should definitely be given a copy. "Now with the potential for legal costs to be borne by OSDL, whose defense fund contributors include heavyweight Intel, we now believe it may be difficult for SCO to win any settlement. Furthermore the 'safe' action appears to have switched sides. Before, many organizations may have been willing to write a five-figure check to avoid legal risks and move on with business. We suspect anyone currently considering such an expenditure may now worry that they will be taken to task for wasting corporate funds. As a consequence, we have reduced our expectation for FY04 SCOSource revenue by 90%."

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Interview With Darl McBride (CNN.com)

CNN.com interviews Darl McBride, president and CEO of the SCO Group. "This is a new digital frontier. We came out, we found that key parts of our code -- we owned the Unix operating system -- was showing up in this new upstart program called Linux. These new programmers working with IBM. We found that things were violated against our copyrights. And so we filed a $3 billion lawsuit against IBM. We've been working through a judicial system here. But now you have people going outside the system, trying to attack us, to try and shut us down before we have a court verdict." Thanks to Murry.

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Australian firm again asks SCO to show proof of IP violations (SMH)

The Sydney Morning Herald follows up with Leon Brooks's continuing effort to get SCO to back up its claims in Australia. "Brooks said SCO had not responded to his last communication. He said this was odd, given that The SCO Group's lawyers rushed to include accusations of attack from the MyDoom virus in their most recent 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission."

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SCO Sets Up Alternative Address - Finally (Groklaw)

Groklaw notes that SCO has set up a new web address, and wonders why they waited for the Mydoom DDoS attack to bring down the old one first. "It will be interesting to find out if there are some disappearing documents as a result of this whole incident. Bob Mims has some interesting details. Stowell says they have a number of backup tricks they can try: "We have had a good four to five days' notice of this," Stowell said, noting Mydoom's Jan. 26 launch. "We have a lot of backup plans in place.""

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Darl Goes to Harvard - My First Quick Impressions (Groklaw)

Groklaw reports on Darl McBride's talk at Harvard. "The big news is that they say they will start to sue copyright end users by February 18. The other news is that he asked the audience if they had gotten infected by MyDoom, and he pointed to one guy who beautifully answered, 'No, I use Linux, so I wasn't affected,' and the room laughed. Darl wasn't happy about that and it was clear he didn't like the questions about the ABI files." There are also some pictures available.

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Microsoft Offers Bounty For Mydoom Author (TechWeb)

TechWeb reports that Microsoft is offering a $250,000 reward for the arrest of the Mydoom author. The negative Linux press is included, of course. "While not proven, SCO may be the target of such attacks because of its legal challenge of the open-source operating system Linux, which the company claims contains its copyrighted code. SCO's lawsuits have angered the Linux community and its supporters."

SCO has also put a bounty of the same amount on the virus writer's head.

Comments (8 posted)

An open letter to Eclipse membership from Sun (NewsForge)

NewsForge covers the independence of the Eclipse organization. "Sun would like to congratulate the Eclipse organization on the eve of the transition to independence. This move proves again that the Java technology ecosystem is capable of spawning new value and continued technical diversity. Given this noteworthy accomplishment, and the recent creation of javatools.org, Sun would like to reflect on what we hope the future has in store for Java technology-based tools and the enduring Java platform."

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Europe's tug of war over software patents (Herald Tribune)

The International Herald Tribune reports on the European software patent issue. "A European Parliament bill that would have made all software subject to patenting is the focal point of the outrage among technology activists. Opponents of the bill succeeded in adding amendments in September that would essentially prevent patents from being issued for most types of software. The proposal is due back in Parliament in the next few months, and the outcome is far from certain."

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Conversation with the Linux kernel keeper (InfoWorld)

Here's an InfoWorld interview with Andrew Morton. "AM: 2.6 will scale significantly further than 2.4 on large machines. More CPUs, more memory, more disks, larger disks, more threads, etc. Also, it is smoother and more responsive on the desktop. The merge of uCLinux is nice for very small embedded systems."

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KDE integrates OpenOffice.org (KDE.News)

KDE.News interviews Jan Holesovsky, author and leader of the KDE.OpenOffice.org project. "The search for work resulted in a contract with SUSE. I became their employee the last week, and now I am paid to continue the KDE OpenOffice.org integration. Here I want to thank Holger Schroeder once more. He donated the money that covered the first part of my Native Widget Framework development. All the work on cuckooo and KDE vclplug (OOo Qt port) I did as a volunteer."

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Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 Personal Mobile Tool (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA, a cool new tech-toy. "The Zaurus is not like any other PDA on the market. What really differentiates it from other PDAs is what's inside: Linux. This OS choice allows development on many different platforms. Libraries are available for Python, PyQt and Java. There also is version of Xfree86 for the Zaurus."

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The Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews the Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer. "The Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer is a portable digital music player that includes an FM tuner. For penguin users, however, the most interesting capabilities probably are its support for music encoded in the Ogg Vorbis format and its compatibility with Linux computers."

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Easy personal video recording for Linux? It's a myth (NewsForge)

Lee Schlesinger writes about the trials and tribulations of getting video recording running on a Linux box. "I just spent several weeks installing and configuring MythTV, an open source application that gives a computer TiVo-like personal video recorder capabilities. I learned a lot of lessons along the way that I'll share here. The biggest one is... Don't do it! Unless you can view the process as an intellectual challenge, spending the money for an actual TiVo will save you dozens of hours you could spend on more pleasurable activities."

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The Role of Linux in Grid Computing (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at Linux and grid computing. "Linux has gained a reputation for being a highly efficient operating system in simpler application environments running on smaller hardware configurations, the type that will be enabled by the grid architecture. In such experimentation-based systems, the free nature of Linux will play a crucial important role due to lower investments."

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Building A Better Browser (Forbes)

Forbes tries out Mozilla Firebird. "If, in its unfinished state, Firebird is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried." (Thanks to Bernard Bencic).

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DARPA-funded Linux security hub withers (Security Focus)

Security Focus covers the demise of the Sardonix project. "Initially funded by a research grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Sardonix project aspired to replace the loosely-structured Linux security review process with a public website that meticulously tracks which code has been audited for security holes, and by whom."

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