Linux in the news

How I Lost the Big One (Legal Affairs)

Legal Affairs is running a lengthy retrospective by Lawrence Lessig on the Eldred case. "This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can't help believing that my own mistake lost it."

Comments (7 posted)

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Eric S. Raymond writes about his frustration in configuring a popular open source software package. "I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to produce an accessible system -- but the best intentions and effort have led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit."

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IBM urges Sun to make Java open source (News.com)

News.com reports that IBM has sent an open letter to Sun Microsystems urging the company to make Java technology open source. "IBM is proposing that Sun, IBM and others choose which portions of the Java technology -- such as the Java Runtime environment, code libraries or even server software -- should be submitted to open source. Optimally, an official open-source version of Java would emerge to replace a "hodgepodge" of open-source Java technologies and efforts, Mr. Sutor said."

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Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech - Transcript (Groklaw)

Groklaw has posted a transcript of FSF attorney Eben Moglen's talk at Harvard. "The GPL has succeeded for the last decade, while I have been tending it, because it worked, not because it failed or was in doubt. Mr. McBride and his colleagues now face that very same difficulty, and the fellow on the other side is IBM. A big, rich, powerful company that has no intention of letting go."

Comments (9 posted)

USENIX Letter to Congress Refuting SCO's Letter (Groklaw)

Groklaw has gotten permission to reproduce a letter written by the Board of Directors of USENIX and sent to Congress, in reply to SCO's open letter to Congress. "SCO specifically argues that open source (free) licensing "undermines our basic system of intellectual property rights." This assertion lacks any legal justification and therefore appears to be merely self-serving. Nothing in our intellectual property laws requires inventors to charge substantial fees for access or use of their inventions. In fact, the laws of copyright and patents, which underlie the intellectual property rights that most often protect computer software programs, give their owners complete discretion in deciding how large their licensing fees should be, or, indeed, whether to impose fees at all."

Comments (6 posted)

The FUD Is Mighty Thick Today (Groklaw)

Groklaw responds to this LinuxInsider article. "LinuxInsider, whoever they are, goes along with the charade, which is a very big giveaway that while they may be insiders, they aren't likely *Linux* insiders. I had never heard of them. SCO's is a campaign of defamation in the press, not in the courts, despite Stowell's sanctimonious hypocrisy. If SCO would stop their defamatory PR, they might have a moral leg to stand on. This interview is a verbal attack on the Linux community. If you attack someone's mom, it doesn't matter that you used a polite tone of voice."

Comments (13 posted)

SCO files suit in Linux-using court (ZDNet)

A ZDNet UK reporter did some research on Netcraft with amusing results. "The Nevada court where SCO Group has filed a lawsuit against US retailer AutoZone could itself theoretically be subject to legal proceedings because the court is using Linux to run its Web site."

Comments (5 posted)

Judge Wells' Order - SCO Doesn't Get All AIX Files, IBM Doesn't Have to Go First (Groklaw)

Here is Groklaw's take on the order in the SCO/IBM case. "What it all means in practical terms is that the court didn't buy SCO's argument that it needed all of AIX and Dynix and it specifically rejected its request that IBM *first* provide AIX and Dynix, so that after that SCO could find what it needed."

Comments (2 posted)

Editor of 'The Inquirer' Mike Magee Switches to Mozilla (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine notices that the editor of The Inquirer has switched to Mozilla. "Magee, who also founded The Register, says that Mozilla 1.6 "is fast and has far better features than Internet Explorer, and far less drawbacks too."" We'd like to see him to switch the underlying OS platform as well.

Comments (none posted)

Court: DeCSS ban violated free speech (News.com)

News.com reports that a California appeals court has reversed an order barring the publication of DeCSS. "The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the Internet code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's encryption scheme for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the code was no longer a secret by the time he posted it on his Web site. On Friday, California's Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, reversing a trial judge's order first issued in 1999."

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The People Behind KDE: Aaron Seigo (KDE.News)

KDE.News mentions the availability of an interview with Aaron Seigo. "At The People Behind KDE this week an interview with the man who represents what working and contributing to a project like KDE stands for. He is outspoken, always helpful, has broad view of things that KDE needs and it's future, he is passionate about politics and social issues. He is from Cowtown, in The Great White North: Canada's own Aaron Seigo!"

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Linux wireless networking (developerWorks)

developerWorks is running a low-level look at Linux wireless networking support. "You'll first see how WLAN devices work on Linux by tracing the code flow for an example WLAN card. Then you'll see how several Bluetooth devices interface with the Linux Bluetooth stack and other kernel layers. Next, you'll learn how to get GPRS and GSM devices to work with Linux. The article ends with the examination of Linux IrDa support and a brief look at performance issues faced by wireless networking devices."

Comments (5 posted)

At the Sounding Edge: OpenMusic and SuperCollider3 (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal reviews a couple of new Linux sound utilities ported over from MacOS. "OM is similar to its IRCAM synthesis sibling jMax in its use of icons to represent its various classes and libraries. These icons are placed on the canvas and wired together to create a patch. An OM patch may be a note generator, a MIDI event processor or even a simple playback device. OM's icons include classes and functions for arithmetic, list manipulation, random number generation, various MIDI actions, program control and many others."

Comments (1 posted)

February Mini Book Reviews (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal has some mini book reveiws of Learning Perl Objects, Text Processing in Python, Core PHP Programming, 3rd Edition, and MySQL, 2nd Edition. "Part desktop reference and part programming guide, Core PHP Programming is a great book for both the beginning PHP programmer and those with more experience. It has been updated to include PHP 5, as well as new material covering XML, object techniques and design patterns."

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Toward a new kind of 'Linux distribution' (NewsForge)

NewsForge has an article by Ian Murdock on how Linux distributions are built. "For the commercial Linux-as-product distributors, it is a sensible strategy to portray their distributions as monolithic wholes, as this allows them to position the distributions as platforms unto themselves and, thus, pursue traditional OS business models based on locking users in to a platform (I've argued before this will be a losing strategy in the long run, but that's another topic)."

Comments (6 posted)

The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)

Eric S. Raymond has gotten some fallout on his CUPS rant. "This rant made it onto all the major open-source news channels, so I was expecting a fair amount of feedback (and maybe pushback). But the volume of community reaction that thundered into my mailbox far surpassed what I had been expecting -- and the dominant theme, too, was a bit of a surprise. Not the hundreds of iterations of "Tell it, brother!", nor the handful of people who excoriated me as an arrogant twerp; those are both normal features of the response when I fire a broadside. No, the really interesting part was how many of the letters said. in effect, "Gee. And all this time I thought it was just me...""

Comments (31 posted)