Linux in the news

Senate bill bans P2P networks (News.com)

According to this News.com article, Senator Hatch's "INDUCE" act has been renamed the "Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act," but has not otherwise been changed. "Foes of the IICA, including civil liberties groups and file-swapping network operators, are alarmed that the measure enjoys strong support from prominent politicians of both major parties. Its supporters include Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif."

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EFF Publishes Patent Hit List (Wired)

Wired covers the EFF's top ten list of patents to challenge. Number one: "Acacia Technologies' digital media transmission patent, which the company defines as covering 'the transmission and receipt of digital content via the Internet, cable, satellite and other means.' The EFF is worried that Acacia, which has already sued several large communications companies, is unfairly targeting small audio- and video-streaming websites."

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Looking for Indemnification While Linux Sales Double (O'ReillyNet)

Tom Adelstein examines issues related to Linux use in the enterprise while copyright infringement claims exist, on O'ReillyNet. "Realists consider Linux adoption remarkable. The word on the street and in the foxholes of the IT community has created a swell of adoption from small businesses to the entire Fortune 500. The marketing of Linux by HP, IBM, Sun, Dell, Oracle, and Novell demonstrates the commitment of industry to Linux. With all the agreement in the market, most observers do not give SCO much of a chance of winning its cases."

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The Open Source Paradigm Shift (O'Reilly)

Tim O'Reilly examines the paradigm-shift characteristics of open-source code. "My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them."

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Preview on kNX Client and FreeNX Server for LinuxTag Visitors (KDE.News)

KDE.News reports that a team of KDE and Knoppix hackers are showing two programs at LinuxTag. The FreeNX Server and kNX Client are not officially released yet, but several presentations have shown a well working preview of the KDE version for the speed boosting NX Terminal Server technology, developed by NoMachine.com.

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SCO's Memo in Opposition to DC's Motion to Dismiss (Groklaw)

Groklaw has SCO's memo trying to keep the DaimlerChrysler suit alive, along with extensive commentary. "And why do they do this elaborate verbal dance with all the mock horror at DC's dillydallying? Because on a motion to dismiss, if there is even one fact in dispute, you can't grant the motion. We just saw that in the Novell hearing, and here SCO stands on its head to present facts 'in dispute' and to present issues that they claim are not clear in the contract. The underlying common sense truth is that there is no damage and nothing to sue about in any rational universe. But if they get a stickler judge with no common sense, they might just prevent the motion to dismiss from being granted."

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Singapore to be 'port of call' for Linux (ZDNet)

Oracle and Red Hat are working together to build a Linux applications centre in Singapore, according to this article on ZDNet. "The two firms today announced they will invest $11.6m in a new Linux applications centre on the island-state to ramp up Linux certification among independent software vendors (ISVs) in the ASEAN region. The move is expected to expand the range of third-party software available on the Linux operating system, widely-viewed as a pre-requisite for it to gain greater commercial uptake."

See this press release for more information on the project.

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Iraqis get a taste for Linux (BBC)

The BBC looks at efforts to promote Linux use in Iraq. "Inside the country, the Iraqi Linux User Group is thinking big. Their ambitious goal is to see every server in the country running Linux a year from now. Getting there, they face numerous obstacles."

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Linux in Government: Open Source Innovation within the DoD (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal looks at open source adoption by the US Department of Defense. "The Program Management Office (PMO) for DMLSS [Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support] is located in Falls Church, Virginia. Continuing development and support facilities exist at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, at the Joint Medical Logistics Functional Development Center. At Ft. Detrick, programmers support open-source components in applications that require cryptography. They open-source components include Stunnel, Apache, ModSSL and OpenSSL."

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Cisco the target of wireless lawsuit (News.com)

News.com reports that WI-LAN is suing Cisco in Canada for alleged infringement of patents associated with the wireless networking standards. "'Without our OFDM patents, there would be no 802.11a/g,' [WI-LAN VP Ken Wetherell] said. 'We didn't enforce these patents sooner, because we didn't want to slow down development in the market. But now that the technologies are firmly established, we feel we must protect our intellectual property.'" This looks like the SCO school of IP enforcement.

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Munich opens gates to Linux (vnunet)

Vnunet.com talks with Wilhelm Hoegner, Munich's City IT chief, about the city's switch to open-source software. "The key aspect was the ability to control the release policy ourselves; in other words to free ourselves from reliance on the product cycles of a small number of software companies. Another important point, of course, was licence costs, and security also plays an important part. We are switching directly from Windows NT to Linux, since NT, which is non-secure, was followed by a number of systems from the same manufacturer, which were also open to attack."

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GPL Freedom Has Limits (Groklaw)

Groklaw is carrying an English translation of this German-language interview with Harald Welte of the Netfilter team. The topic of interest is Netfilter's ongoing efforts to ensure that its GPL licensing is respected. "The idea is to publicly make known some high-profile cases in order to put the opposition, those thinking of violating the GPL, on notice that we are serious and that we mean what we say and will enforce the license in court if you violate its terms. The idea is that then it will prevent having to handle lots of little cases, once the word is out."

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The Pragmatic Programmers Interview (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet interviews Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the authors of The Pragmatic Programmers. "Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas are The Pragmatic Programmers, two experienced and intelligent software developers with impressive experience, including the authoring of the popular The Pragmatic Programmer and the well-regarded Programming Ruby. Recently, they launched their own small publishing company to produce books on agile and pragmatic software development. Andy and Dave recently agreed to an interview with the O'Reilly Network."

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Preventing Denial of Service Attacks (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet looks into DoS prevention on FreeBSD systems. "The first step to protecting yourself from an attack is to understand the nature of different types of attacks. As we said earlier, resource-consumption attacks target your system in places that can cause bottlenecks. The most popular targets are network bandwidth, system memory, network stack memory, disk I/O, operating system limitations such as a limit on the number of open file handles, and the CPU. These bottlenecks can be on your systems or in your network hardware."

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The Natural Language Toolkit (developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks covers a Python library for applying academic linguistic techniques to collections of textual data. "For this first article, I will present some relatively fleshed out examples from the lower-level capabilities, but simply describe abstractly most of the higher level capabilities. If I have the opportunity to return to NLTK in a later installment, I will give more detailed descriptions of parsing and graphing; for now, let us take the first steps past text processing, narrowly construed."

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A Look Back and a Look Forwards at KDE 3.3 (KDE.News)

KDE.News introduces this preview of KDE 3.3. "KDM looks better. No, it's not because it's gotten an GDM like makeover. Nor is it because MDM (from KDE-Look.org) has been adopted as the new DM. It's simply because we now have usable user icons now. Yup, you heard correct boys and girls. I said user icons. Courtesy of some kind soul who saw the need and had the talent KDM users now have a variety of faces to choose from in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/pics/users. As an added bonus there's also a simple way to choose those user icons, but we'll get to that when we chat about kcontrol."

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Book Review: Postfix: The Definitive Guide (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal reviews the book Postfix: The Definitive Guide. "Postfix: The Definitive Guide digs a little deeper into the hows and whys. I like that; I've never been much good at turning the crank on rote procedures. By explaining how Postfix's features reflect its architecture and how they relate to real world needs, debugging configurations and extending Postfix with third-party virus scanners and spam filter is a lot easier."

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gLabels: Ready for prime time (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews gLabels v1.93.3. "gLabels is a feature-packed label-printing application that's easy to use. It comes with an online manual that is current as of version 1.93.2. The manual is well laid out and seems to be nearly complete. For a beta (or developer version, if you prefer), gLabels is in great shape. I'm recommending it for usage today to friends and strangers alike. There are bugs to be squashed, I'm sure, but only a few, and I'm looking forward to the 2.0 release in the near future. Kudos to Jim Evins and the rest of the development crew for a job well done."

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Carrier Grade Linux moving to carriers and beyond (NewsForge)

NewsForge looks at the adoption of Carrier Grade Linux in the telecom industry. "Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) -- an open source software framework being developed by the Open Source Development Labs to support high-availability, fast-to-market solutions for major telecommunications and other companies -- is taking considerable time to penetrate the slow-moving carrier market, but it is also gaining ground in vertical segments such as financial services, according to analysts attending this week's SuperComm telecom conference in Chicago."

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