Linux in the news

Mainstream means more malicious code for Linux (SearchSecurity.com)

SearchSecurity.com warns that as Linux becomes more mainstream it will become more of a target for malicious hackers. "On Windows, most of the viruses are e-mail borne. On the Linux side, today and in the future, viruses are network-aware, and [they] take advantage of vulnerabilities in networks or systems to infect machines. The Slapper worm, for example, attacked vulnerabilities in OpenSSL and Apache."

Comments (34 posted)

MySQL lifts restrictive licensing terms (Silicon.com)

Silicon.com looks at new licensing terms for the MySQL database. "On Thursday night, MySQL published a licence exception that, the company said, permits PHP to resume its previous practice of bundling MySQL components called libraries, said Zack Urlocker, MySQL's vice president of marketing."

Comments (11 posted)

The Morality of Open Source (Internet Week)

Internet Week asks whether free software is morally correct. "SCO has argued that open-source supporters are hell-bent on putting for-profit companies out of business. Nonsense! What ails SCO and other proprietary software vendors is nothing more than a changing business environment. Wake up to the real world, folks."

Comments (16 posted)

Hunting Penguins in the Desert: The CES Report (Linux Journal)

Doc Searls has posted another in a series of reports from the Consumer Electronics Show over at the Linux Journal. "So here's a question. Out of 2,300+ exhibitors, how many do you think mentioned 'Linux' in their descriptions of what they were up to at the show? A couple hundred? Fifty? Try eleven."

Comments (3 posted)

Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet)

This O'ReillyNet article covers a talk by Daniel Robbins, Gentoo's chief architect. "Robbins acknowledged twice in his talk that Gentoo users have a reputation for pestering upstream open source developers with bug reports. Some have been legitimate -- the idiosyncratic configurations permitted by Gentoo often shook out obscure problems in the most stable packages. There's a general feeling among some developers that Gentoo users are identifying problems caused not by upstream bugs, but by aggressive optimization or other poor configuration choices that the users themselves have made."

Comments (6 posted)

Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet)

Edd Dumbill examines the growth of Mono, and reports on a recent Mono developer meeting. "The Mono project has a clear goal: to become the first-choice platform for Linux software development. Considering that Mono is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, that goal might sound particularly audacious to many Linux fans."

Comments (32 posted)

Matt Asay introduces Open Source Business Conference (NewsForge)

NewsForge takes a look at the first Open Source Business Conference, which will take place in San Francisco this week. " The renowned legal scholar Lawrence Lessig will give a keynote entitled "The Creators' Dilemma: Open Source, Open Society, Open Innovation." Other keynoters include Chris Stone, the driving force behind Novell's acquisition of SUSE Linux; Scott Handy, IBM's VP for Worldwide Linux Strategy and Market Development; and HP's VP for Linux, Martin Fink. Another renowned legal scholar, Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, was originally slated to speak, but has had to withdraw for personal reasons."

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SCO's Suit: A Match Made in Redmond? (BusinessWeek)

BusinessWeek has read the Anderer memo and investigated further. "Lawrence Goldfarb, managing partner of BayStar, says that senior executives at the software giant [Microsoft] had telephoned him about two months before the investment. Would he be interested in investing in SCO, they asked?" This would appear to be a different story than what we have been hearing so far.

Comments (11 posted)

S2 'mystery man' Anderer speaks on MS, SCO, and licensing (NewsForge)

NewsForge has published a statement by Mike Anderer, CEO of S2 and author of the Halloween X memo. "I think one real issue, that people are skirting, is who will be the ultimate guarantor of IP-related issues in a world that is governed by the GPL and GPL-like licenses. I could easily see IBM, HP, Sun, and many of the other large hardware players solving this problem tomorrow by settling the dispute with SCO and maybe even taking the entire code base and donating it into the public domain. I know this is what I originally thought would happen, at least the settlement part. I am not certain what people who paid tens of millions for licenses would say if what they paid for was now free, but that is a different issue."

Comments (15 posted)

Microsoft and SCO: FUD Brothers (eWeek)

eWeek has some strong words about the Microsoft/SCO connection. "Thanks to Microsoft's funding, both indirect and direct (in the case of the Unix license purchase), SCO probably has the cash to keep its head above water and its stock price in the $10 range. And, thanks to Microsoft's funding, we'll continue to see SCO spreading Linux FUD. The Evil Empire lives."

Comments (7 posted)

Darl McBride-Dan Farber ZDNet Interview - Transcript (Groklaw)

For anybody who hasn't had enough Darlspeak recently, Groklaw has put together a transcript of his interview with Dan Farber. "You have the drug, the biotech, companies. You go and put together a new drug formula, and because it's software and touches GPL, if you're not careful, that gets destroyed. So I think it's a very dangerous setting we're talking about."

Comments (5 posted)

HP expands Linux PC line to Asia (News.com)

News.com reports that HP will be selling Linux PCs in Asia. "HP's desktop models, the dx2000 and cd5000, were announced--barely--last week. In that news release, HP avoided touting the Linux option, saying that the systems were available with Microsoft Windows "or alternative operating systems." In interviews, though, HP said the models came with MandrakeSoft's version of Linux."

Comments (2 posted)

Microsoft Asks Court to Level Fine Against Lindows, Inc. (Newsalert)

Microsoft is making an attempt to levy a large fine from Lindows, Inc according to this press release. "Lindows, Inc. has received copies of papers filed against the company in the Netherlands by Microsoft Corporation asking the court to fine Lindows 100,000 euros per day for permitting its website to be reachable by visitors from the Benelux countries (Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg)."

Comments (10 posted)

XML guru joins Sun software (News.com)

News.com reports that Tim Bray will be working for Sun, in a project that will incorporate blogging software and content syndication based on the RSS format. "Although Bray does not have responsibility over any Sun products, he said Sun's Java Desktop System would be a likely recipient of his work in search and syndication. Java Desktop System is Sun's bundle of open-source desktop software, which includes Linux and the OpenOffice productivity applications."

Comments (2 posted)

Popularity Growing For Open-Source Databases (Information Week)

Information Week notes the growing popularity of free database systems. "Doug Heintzman, director of IBM software group technology strategy, disputes the notion that IBM is on the defensive about open-source databases. 'The marketplace decides which open-source projects are going to succeed,' not IBM or any other company, and IBM has a track record of heeding those decisions, he says. At the moment, it doesn't view open-source databases as competing for the same customers as IBM's DB2."

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Linux brings Mars Rover images to earth (vnunet)

Linux is being used to host a high volume web site that contains Mars imagery, according to this article on Vnunet. "The company said it has created the largest Linux-based distributed network to provide the resilience and scalability needed to deal with the huge traffic demands on the websites it hosts. According to Nasa, the number of hits on its website has exceeded 7.5 billion during the first two months of 2004, with traffic peaking at nearly 7Gb per second in January alone."

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VLANs on Linux (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal takes a look at using Virtual LANs on Linux. "Configuring VLANs under Linux is a process similar to configuring regular Ethernet interfaces. The main difference is you first must attach each VLAN to a physical device. This is accomplished with the vconfig utility. If the trunk device itself is configured, it is treated as native."

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Project of the month: GNU Mailman (SourceForge)

SourceForge has a look at GNU Mailman. "GNU Mailman has been with SF.net since the very beginning. SF.net now has (as of March 2004) over 75,000 projects; Mailman was registered when the site had just 102. The SF.net team is proud to make GNU Mailman the March 2004 SourceForge.net Project of the Month. We couldn't run the site without it."

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Network Administration Thermodynamics (Linux Journal)

Sean D. Conway presents an amusing user classifications system on Linux Journal. "I have developed three categories using my limited knowledge of physics and chemistry to classify the many masters that administrators are required to serve. The three categories are endothermic users, exothermic users and toxic users."

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