Linux in the news

The Linux Killer (Wired)

Wired is running a long article about SCO with an interesting emphasis on the history of the association between Darl McBride and Mike Anderer (who is the person who brokered the Microsoft license payments and BayStar investment). "At Silicon Stemcell, McBride and Anderer polished the strategy they'd repeat at SCO: turning intellectual property into a revenue stream. Anderer, McBride, and four managers who had served with them at Ikon's technology services division pooled their ideas for products, then attempted to patent them. It was 1999, and they were in the business vanguard, devising a new way to create wealth. Something as intangible as a claim to owning an idea, they realized, could be used to extract money from innovators in related fields. Even if Silicon Stemcell's patents weren't finalized, it might still be cheaper for startups to pay licensing fees to Anderer's group than to fight protracted legal battles. Silicon Stemcell wouldn't even have to create businesses, it could thrive just by collecting these fees."

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INDUCE Act is Free Speech Killer (Copyfight)

Here's a Copyfight column on Orrin Hatch's "INDUCE" act, apparently about to be introduced into the U.S. Senate. INDUCE stands for, believe it or not, "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act of 2004," but the intent of the law is to penalize any "inducement" to copyright infringement. As noted in the column, this is a rather large expansion of copyright law which would doubtless be used against those who develop tools which might be used for copyright infringement, or, conceivably, even those who are simply critical of current copyright law.

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Dutch Parliament Considers Revoking Support for Patent Directive (OSnews)

OSnews is carrying a lengthy article describing the process that has led the Dutch government to reconsider its position on software patents in Europe. "The Dutch parliament will make a final decision about the position the Minister will take in September. A debate about this issue will take place at Thursday, the 24th of June, 19:45-20:45 CET... They may also decide to require the European Presidency to open a new voting procedure, which would completely reopen the case for all member states." (Thanks to Daniel Mantione).

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A Report from the 5th International Free Software Forum (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal reports from the International Free Software Forum in Brazil. "With a GDP of around 493 billion USD and a population of 170 million, Brazil boasts the world's 15th largest economy, but it also is rated among the worst when it comes to distribution of wealth.... At the same time, the country is paying out 1.2 billion USD every year in software licensing fees. It therefore is essential to find some way of keeping these resources within the country. This idea led José Dirceu, the chief of staff, to affirm that free software is a fundamental issue here."

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Notice this Notice? ~ by Dr Stupid (Groklaw)

Groklaw tries to figure out whether Novell really sold the Unix copyrights by looking at the actions of the parties involved - and, in particular, what sort of copyright notices they put into the Unix code. "oldSCO's handling of the UnixWare source code in the years following the deal seem to me most consistent with those of a company that had obtained the right to freely derive from and sell products based on the code, but inconsistent with those of a company that had been granted, or believed they owned, the copyrights on that code."

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"Every Step You Take, Every Move You Make, I'll Be Watching You" (Groklaw)

Groklaw has the latest SCO filing in the DaimlerChrysler case - an affidavit from the company's "director of software licensing" William Broderick. "SCO had made good-faith attempts to contact over 750 of those licensees to secure assurances of their compliance with the terms of their licenses. If each licensee disregards the request or unilaterally determines that it may respond whenever it wants, SCO may have to spend extraordinary resources and potentially commence hundreds of court actions to enforce its rights. It would be impracticable and costly for SCO to have to sue each one to obtain basic assurances of performance."

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Eyewitness Account of Blepp's Speech in Germany (Groklaw)

Groklaw has an informal report from a speech made by SCO executive Gregory Blepp in Germany. "Someone needs to send Mr. Blepp the memo that mum's the new word at SCO. He spills the beans that SCO at the beginning just wanted IBM to pay them some millions for 'copyright infringement', and they are puzzled why that didn't happen."

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Nokia cash boosts Mozilla (News.com)

News.com has posted an article on Nokia's funding for the Mozilla Minimo project. "Sources described the Nokia deal, inked last year, as a potential model for Mozilla's financial self-sufficiency. The group hopes to land more development grants to meet the needs of particular clients and at the same time make the resulting code freely available to all-comers. The foundation also plans to announce the corporate members of a technical advisory board in coming weeks."

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Sun reveals tidbits of Solaris open source strategy (NewsForge)

Sun Microsystems releases a few more details on its plan to release its Solaris operating system as open-source software, according to this article on NewsForge. "Bryan Cantrill, senior kernel engineer for Solaris, said that he's excited about his and his team's work going public. "Technically, this is not a problem to do this," he said. "I can assure you, the engineers in this room write some of the cleanest code in the entire world. We're proud to open it. We feel we were born to do this work. But I'm also sure we'll be revisiting a few comments in the code here and there -- I just thought of a particularly disparaging one I might have left in having to do with C++ unions," Cantrill said with a laugh."

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France Challenges Microsoft in Software Re-Fit (Reuters)

Reuters reports that the French government is shopping for free software solutions. "Civil service minister Renaud Dutreil told Reuters France wanted to use 'open-source' software providers to resupply part of the almost one million state computers under a government cost-cutting drive designed to trim a bulging public deficit. 'We are not starting a war against Microsoft, or against American companies in the software sector,' Dutreil said in an interview. But he added that Microsoft 'must return to being one supplier to the state among others.'" Unfortunately, the story also says that open source software is "uncopyrighted."

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DMCA Foes Find Allies in House (Wired)

Wired looks at a new bill that would soften the DMCA anti-piracy act. "If some in Congress get their way, you may soon be able to hack DVDs and CDs to get around copy protections and make as many copies of albums and movies as you want -- with no fear of the feds breaking down the door. A bill in the House of Representatives, HR107, would overturn a major provision of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which bars consumers from circumventing encryption on digital media products, even if they only intend to make copies for personal use."

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Tech heavies support challenge to copyright law (News.com)

News.com reports that attempts to fix the DMCA are gaining some support. "But members of the nascent coalition, including Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC, Qwest, Gateway and BellSouth, are lending their support to a proposal by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., to rewrite that part of the DMCA. Boucher's bill says that descrambling utilities can be distributed, and copy protection can be circumvented as long as no copyright infringement is taking place."

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The Hill's property rights showdown (News.com)

News.com talks with Representative Rick Boucher about his DMCA reform attempt and other topics. "I think that our legislation has a good chance of being approved, at least in the House of Representatives, this year. I think that the major push for passage probably will come during the course of the next Congress. There has been a tremendous change in public perception with respect to the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property over the course of the years since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1998."

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Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine (ZDNet)

ZDNet talks with Novell managers David Patrick and Alan Murray. "The first big global deployment of desktop Linux will be Novell. We are moving 6000 employees over to Linux. By 1 August, everyone in the company is going to be on Open Office and then, by this autumn, roughly half the company will be on Linux and the rest we are finishing off as soon as possible after that."

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Richard Stallman interviewed in La Repubblica

La Repubblica is carrying an interview (in Italian) with Richard Stallman. Regarding software patents in Europe: "I don't know the motives, but I tell you: pay attention, don't make this mistake. Copyrights and software patents worsen the digital divide and concentrate wealth in the hands of the few." (editor's translation).

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Interview with Jean Tourrilhes of HP (LinuxQuestions.org)

LinuxQuestions.org interviews Jean Tourrilhes. "In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org, Jean Tourrilhes discusses how he first got introduced to Linux, OS zealotry, the origins of his famous Wireless How-to page, Linux on the desktop, the state of Linux wireless device driver support, the best and worst wireless chipset manufacturers, the biggest limitations of the current 802.11 implementations and his opinion on the emerging wireless networking standards."

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OO.org Off the Wall: Paragraph Styles, Part II (Linux Journal)

Bruce Byfield continues his Linux Journal series on OpenOffice.org with part two. "So, you've chosen the fonts for your paragraph style and its positioning. What next? In many cases, nothing is next. Font and positioning choices are the basics of paragraph styles in OpenOffice.org Writer. Often, you need nothing more. But, when you do need more, Writer's paragraph styles have a grab bag of tricks waiting for you."

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Putting together PDF files (NewsForge)

Scott Nesbitt shows several ways to merge PDF files under Linux. "Sadly, Adobe hasn't deigned to put out a version of Acrobat for Linux, but there are a number of Linux utilities available that enable you to quickly and efficiently combine PDF files. This article looks at three command line utilities: Ghostscript, joinPDF, and pdfmeld. Each does a good job of combining PDF files, and they all pack some interesting features."

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A fast, free distributed method for C/C++ compilation (developerWorks)

developerWorks shows how to use distcc to speed up compilations. "Now, just having distcc on one machine is pointless; this won't really give us any benefit. I'm going to find three friends on my LAN who are running Linux and see if they're interested, since everyone who installs distcc can benefit from the 'pool.' It is also worth noting that apart from the version of gcc you are running, there doesn't need to be anything else common about the machines: they needn't share a filesystem, header files, or libraries, or even be running the same Linux kernel or distribution."

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Eclipse readies 'rich client' software (News.com)

News.com looks forward to the Eclipse 3.0 release. "Eclipse 3.0, which is freely available software aimed at Java programmers, includes tools for building and running so-called rich-client applications, which have more sophisticated graphics capabilities than standard Web browser-based applications."

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Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

KDE.News has a review of Kommander. "So the answer to the question many of you may be asking, "What is Kommander?", really has to be answered from each perspective. A simplified technical description is that Kommander is two programs, an editor and an executor, that produce dialogs that you can execute."

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A Day in the Life of #Apache (O'ReillyNet)

This O'ReillyNet article tries to answer the question on everybody's mind: should one be using Apache 1.3 or 2.0? "Most of the active Apache developers work on Apache 2.0. This means that, increasingly as time goes on, Apache 2.0 is likely to be the better product by greater margins. I expect that 1.3 will still be maintained for a long, long time. And there will always be security patches available for 1.3, as long as anyone is using it."

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Backdoor program gets backdoored (SecurityFocus)

SecurityFocus reports on the discovery of a "master password" in the Optix Pro backdoor program. "At least one security expert says there's a lesson to be learned from the whole affair. 'It obviously says you should always use open-source Trojans,' says Mark Loveless, a senior security analyst with Bindview Corporation. 'That's the moral. You can't even trust Windows malware.'" (Thanks to Rajesh Bhandari).

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The BlueSpace wall display project (IBM developerWorks)

Barry A. Feigenbaum describes the code behind the BlueSpace wall display on IBM's developerWorks. "The BlueSpace wall display is an exciting demonstration of the potential of multimedia development on the Java platform. In this project, first developed by the IBM Worldwide Accessibility Center in 2003 and presented this year at JavaOne, a large-scale, high-resolution visual screen is implemented as a grid of projected computer displays. The resulting display is infinitely malleable in size and form and has numerous multimedia and presentation capabilities. Regular developerWorks contributor and Worldwide Accessibility Center engineer Barry Feigenbaum summarizes the concept and implementation details behind this project, for which he was the development team leader."

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The Importance of Being Linux (ABC)

Here's a strange Dvorak column hosted on ABC News. "Other than Linux, all the other open-source projects move along at a rate best described as glacial. Even principals in the community are sometimes shocked at the slowness of open-source development. This probably is a function of how motivation and lack of fear work among open-source developers. Often they're motivated like hobbyists. And there is no fear to drive anyone to do anything -- no fear of getting fired or yelled at by a mean boss." That notwithstanding, it's actually a somewhat positive column.

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