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Leading itemsMindcraft III. The folks at Mindcraft, in an attempt to polish up their reputation after the release their much-criticised comparison of server performance between Linux and Windows NT, have now announced an open Linux/NT benchmark. This will be their third try - the results from the second were never released after Mindcraft was criticised for not allowing anybody with Linux expertise near the test lab. The third time around looks better. Their announcement proclaims: "We call on Linus Torvalds to invite anyone he chooses to tune Linux, Samba, and Apache. We also invite Red Hat to send anyone they choose to participate in the benchmarking as a Linux Expert. In addition, we invite Microsoft to tune Windows NT Server. The Linux Experts, Microsoft, and Mindcraft will witness all tests."They also offer to conduct the test at "any mutually agreeable location." Interestingly, they volunteer the lab where the previous tests were run - this lab, of course, was hosted at Microsoft. So much for independence. The test as specified should produce more realistic results than what Mindcraft published before. Not everybody is happy yet, however. Jeremy Allison, Samba developer extraordinaire, dropped us a copy of his note to Mindcraft stating his insistence that Windows NT clients also be included in the test. The current plan is to use only Windows 95/98 systems, as was done in the original benchmark. As it happens, the use of Windows 9x clients tends to favor a Windows NT server, while the use of Windows NT clients will favor Samba. Jeremy's point is that, if the new benchmark is to be truly open, all sides should have a say in the design of the test as well. Not including Windows NT clients in the test gives a distorted picture. He is threatening to refuse to participate in a highly public manner if NT clients are not included. Hopefully a way to accommodate Jeremy's requirements will be found, so that he can participate in the new test. With or without, however, we should see a much more rational result. Note that NT might just still come out on top here - this test aims at a particular set of not entirely real-world conditions that will favor that system somewhat. Such is the way of benchmarks. But, even if NT comes out on top, it can be expected to be by a fairly small margin. For another view on the Mindcraft study have a look at Dan Kegel's essay, which looks at the Apache results in particular. According to Dan, Apache really does have problems when very high numbers of connections are being served. Red Hat 6.0 has been available for over a week now, which means that LWN's famous test laboratories have had a chance to do some installations and run it through some paces. Check out our review of this release. The executive summary? There are a few glitches to be found, but it is, overall, a stable and well-done distribution. Something for the boss. OS Opinion has published The Practical Manager's Guide to Linux by Ganesh Prasad. It is an extensive discussion of our favorite operating system from a business point of view. A good thing to hand to the boss, though it may prove rather long for a boss's attention span... The address for letters to the editor has changed. The old "editor@lwn.net" address created a certain amount of confusion, with people sending things there that they did not intend to have published. So now messages intended for the "letters to the editor" column should be sent to letters@lwn.net. We have seen a bit of a slowdown in letters traffic recently - if you have something to say, please send it our way! We generally publish more than half the letters we get. We also occasionally remind our readers that we have a mailing list for people who would like to be notified when a new edition of LWN is available. This list is used for announcements of new editions, and for no other purpose. To subscribe, simply send a blank note to lwn-notify-subscribe@eklektix.com. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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May 6, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsDejaNews is the focus of a privacy concern, according to this ZDnet article. Of course, in this case, DejaNews does not actually use any of the information it collects, but the existence of their data leaves them open to court subpoenas and more that can elicit information out of the databases that DejaNews has created. "Peter Neumann, moderator of the RISKS forum, which Smith first told of the problem, said the DejaNews story is a classic. "It's benign neglect, basically," he said."One of the author's of the RSA encryption technique, Adi Shamir, has put together a description of a machine that can reletively easily break the RSA code. For more information, check out this New York Times article. Of course, RSA with shorter (i.e. 512 bit) keys has been considered relatively insecure for a while, so this is not particularly surprising. SecurityPortal.com has a cover story this week on The Buffer Overflow Problem. It is a good introduction to what buffer flows are, how they happen, the potential consequences, etc. They also talk about the StackGuard product and provide links to articles from AlephOne on stack smashing and more. Security ReportsMore wu-ftpd exploits are being published. Bugtraq contains a thread about the latest report, affecting wuftp2.4.2academbeta12-18. In the thread, Gregory Newby posted an excellent note, which talks about ways to configure your ftpaccess file to foil many of these exploits. Chad Price also reminded people that the VR patches to the wuftp academic versionA serious security problem with Oracle 8.0.5 can crop up if you have installed and configured the Intelligent Agent option. If you do so, it will install the oratclsh binary setuid with an ownership of root, making it very easy for anyone with a knowledge of tcl to execute commands on your system with root privileges. From this Bugtraq thread, this problem has been confirmed with 8.0.5 on Linux, Solaris, and Digital Unix. Oracle has been updated and the problem will be fixed in 8.0.5. There are mixed reports on whether or not it was fixed with 8.0.5.1. Meanwhile, anyone using oracle should check for the oratclsh binary and make sure it is owned by the oracle install process and not setuid. UpdatesA recently reported bug in ICQ-WebServer (see this note was repaired with build 1701, according to this update.ResourcesEthereal version 0.61 has been released. Ethereal is a network packet analyzer, essentially a GUI that can either read information from a live network stream or from a captured tcpdump. For more information, check out the Ethereal website.Netxmon is a new, X-based, session sniffer. The announcement gives a bit of background on why it was written. Note that ttywatcher, a well-known tool that performs a similar function, also has an X interface. Anonymizing Unix Systems is the title of this new article from the The Hacker's Choice. It provides useful instructions for people with a very strong interest in privacy. NSORG is a new security-related website for which a request-for-comment was posted to the comp.security.unix mailing list this week. EventsSection Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 6, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current kernel release remains 2.2.7. It has been a relatively quiet week for kernel development. Linus kept a pretty low profile and Alan Cox has been off wandering around in Portugal, so not much has happened. Such is life in these stable kernel days. One of the more interesting things that did happen was the release of an alpha NFSv3 server for the 2.2 kernel series. This release fills in a longstanding gap in Linux's NFS capabilities, and will be highly welcome to a lot of users. Now all that remains is to get people testing the patch and get the inevitable problems ironed out. Even if it does not become an official part of the 2.2 series, there will eventually be a full NFSv3 implementation that can be used with the 2.2 kernel. Congratulations are due to G. Allen Morris and all the others who have worked on this code. See the announcement for a pointer to the patch. Sound drivers were a subject of conversation this week, spurred by Creative Laboratories' release of a beta driver for their SB Live! card. The presence of a driver is a nice thing, but it is currently a binary-only release, with all of the problems that can bring. There is currently no statement in place as to whether source will eventually be available. The driver can be found on the Creative Linux page. In response to requests for suggestions on a good Linux sound card, a few people suggested the use of Trident 4DWave-based cards. The word is that these are economical, capable cards with full support via the ALSA sound system. And, speaking of ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), the project has a new domain. ALSA's web pages (and other resources) are now available at www.alsa-project.org. There are now two separate sites dedicated to Linux performance tuning information. One has its own domain at tunelinux.com, the other is hosted out of nl.linux.org. Neither is all that long on information at this point. It seems like these folks should get together and make a single, coordinated site. Universal Serial Bus (USB) support. Last week we mentioned the Linux USB web page as the source for information on USB development for Linux. Two things ganged up on us with this one...
There is a new site devoted to Linux support for token ring networking at www.linuxtr.net. They have started things off with a new alpha driver for IBM PCI token ring cards. Various patches that came out this week:
A couple of critical articles in the press stirred up discussion this week. For those who have not seen them:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 6, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaA security problem with rsync is fixed by an upgrade to rsync-2.3.1, according to this Caldera security advisory.DebianThis week's Debian Weekly News is now available.Debian packages for Xfree86-1 3.3.3.1-1 have been uploaded to master. From the Debian Alpha folks, a recommendation comes to install and use apt if you want to upgrade your Alpha to glibc2.1 without breaking your machine. In addition, reports are that egcs will produce invalid code when compiled with -O2. From the Debian Sparc folks, new bootdisks will be released soon. Definite LinuxDefinite Linux 6.0has been released. This distribution, only available in the U.K. due to export restrictions, is based on Red Hat Linux 6.0 but with the addition of cryptography based applications such as SSH, Apache-SSL, SSLeay, OpenSSL and more. For more information, check out this note from Jason Clifford.LinuxGTNew for LinuxGT fans come a discussion forum and a LinuxGT FAQ.Red HatSparc users are reporting X crashes with the 6.0 release, there is evidently some sort of deep problem with the X server for Sparcs. The word is that people are working day and night on the problem. If you have a Sparc system, you may want to hold off until a new X package has been released before upgrading. (Sparc users are reporting that the rest of the release works great).Development on Rawhide will take a breather, now that Red Hat 6.0 is out, notes Matt Wilson in this message. Only a few problem reports with Red Hat 6.0 were seen on the general lists, certainly a first for a "major" release from Red Hat. SlackwareThe new Slackware Forum is now on-line from Slackware.com. David Cantrell comments in his announcement, "The new PHP3+SQL forum is in place and seems to be running fine. I hope the improvements are liked by all. The new system will automatically keep the page to a resonable [sic] size. We also have some nice archival features and search capabilities. I am currently working on merging all 8500+ messages from the old forum to the new database. Should take a few days to complete that. "SuSESuSE 6.1 is now shipping in the English-speaking world. It includes the 2.2 kernel, of course, as well as both KDE and GNOME.Information on SuSE's new VAR and ISV program is available here. TrinuxFor the very brave Alpha user, an experimental Alpha version of Trinux is available.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 6, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Known Distributions:
Caldera OpenLinux |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsJavaAn updated Java 1.2 Status Page is now available at http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/jdk1.2-status/. The new page is "a one-stop collection of all of the information about what's going on with the Blackdown Java 2 ports." Spartan in nature, more updates are promised. Links from the new page include one to a list of known bugs and workarounds.The JCK Status page shows no new information on the x86 port, but clear progress is being reported for the PowerPC and 68K ports. In addition, the page has been extended to report on progress working with or without the JIT and with green or native threads, presumably in preparation for updating us on those areas as success is reported. The Blackdown team has been licensed to have access to the Java Advanged Imaging source code according to the Java Advanced Imaging Port Status, but they have not yet received the source code. PerlThe Perl Journal on-line, available at http://www.tpj.com, is now controlled by EarthWeb, a company that calls itself the "business-to-business IT hub of the IT industry". A press release to explain the site transition was promised for this week but has not yet been seen. Meanwhile, the new site provides access articles from the Perl Journal only to subscribers. Other information previously available from the site, such as back issues, the jobs board, contributor information, and sample code, are, at least currently, not available.A comment on the closure of the Perl Institute has come from Brian D. Foy, representing the Perl Mongers, to whom the Perl Institute has left their legacy of projects and the perl.org domain. No major changes are planned in the near future and comments and concerns are being requested. The posting drew little comment on comp.lang.perl.misc, other than this note from Uri Guttman, which encourages the Perl Mongers to make the perl.org site a dynamic portal for the Perl community. The Perl-XML FAQ version 1.1 contains information on using and manipulating XML with Perl and is available at this address. The Perl Index Project seeks to provide a place where someone can look up a language construct or concept and get references linked to many different resources across the Internet. This announcement provides a large amount of detailed information and a link to the Perl Index homepage. PythonThe JPython Website has been redesigned and is now located at http://www.jpython.org, using the newly registered domain name. Here is the official announcement for the new domain and page. It also contains a collection of other tidbits about JPython.From this new page, we also heard about JPython's new license, which they believe is Open Source Definition compliant, though it is not officially certified as such. There are actually two new JPython distributions, one of which is released under the above-mentioned free license, and the other, containing a proprietary regular expression library, under a restricted license. Tcl/tkTcl 8.1 has been released. The announcement mentions three key new features in 8.1: full unicode support and a message catalog for internationalization, thread-safety for Tcl and Tk and a new regular expression package from Henry Spencer.This week's Tcl-URL! is now available. This is the first edition from their new team member, Matt Newman. It looks like an excellent start! Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 6, 1999 |
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Development projectsQt, Harmony or wxWindows? If you've been debating the relative merits of these cross-platform development libraries, you might want to take a gander at this analysis from Matt Heck. He provides insight on the process his company went through as they looked first at Qt, then Harmony and finally wxWindows, on which they've happily settled. "The reality is that if you are choosing between Qt and wxWindows, I don't see how you can make a bad choice if you don't care about the license and you're only working under Linux. They're both wonderful libraries with hundreds-- maybe thousands-- of enthusiastic supporters. If you have the time, you should try looking at some of the sample applications of both. wxWindows probably has a steeper learning curve than Qt, but it's pretty short once you get used to the event system. Both of them will get you a professional looking application on at least two platforms. With wxWindows, though, I always know exactly what I can do: whatever I want to." (Thanks to Alexander V. Voinov). AbiSuiteAbiSource is developing an open-source office suite called AbiSuite, which will run on Linux systems, as well as Windows and other platforms.GNULibtool 1.3 has been released (at long last). The Libtool team announced the new version on Thursday, April 29th.ht://DigVersion 3.1.2 of ht://Dig was released last week. It apparently fixes a number of bugs and is highly recommended for production servers.KDEThe KDE folks have put out a press release announcing their 1.1.1 release.Navindra Umanee kindly provided us with the following KDE development reports: An exciting development this week came when Preston Brown reinitiateddiscussions on standardizing desktop entry files between the KDE and GNOME projects. A preliminary draft of the proposed standard is available. Now that KDE 1.1.1 has been released, many discussions are under way for what's in store for KDE 2.0. Waldo Bastian has drafted a new KDE roadmap and release schedule, whilst others are busy discussing current flaws and future improvements. Many core applications such as KWM, KFM and kpanel are being redesigned and rewritten based on the experience gained from the previous versions. Kurt Granroth pointed out that KDE is not multiple-session friendly for a single user and proposed a solution. Preston Brown announcedhis future plans for the next generation of KOrganizer and includes a call for developers. Preston also voiced concern on memory consumption in KDE 2.0 with the ensuing discussion leading to many ideas for improvements. Another thread concerning which mp3 player to include in kde-multimedia has lead to discussions of more generic ways of handling multimedia such as better use of kmedia and multimedia APIs. WineThe Wine HOWTO has been updated to version 0.7. It contains information on the new dll loading structure, changes to the wine.conf file and some more installation hints and tips.x86emuThe x86emu project has been revived. Leadership of the project has changed hands, according to Kendall Bennett, the new project leader. David Mosberger-Tang, the former project leader, will continue to be involved. The x86emu project is developing a GPL'ed x86 real mode emulator that can be compiled and used with the Linux MILO loader for DEC Alpha systems.ZopeA preview release of Zope-1.11 has been announced. Lots of new features have been added to the Zope platform, including WebDAV support, a new class extension structure, and the bundling of ZServer.The Zope Weekly News contains additional links to information about the new release. In addition, it points out a mention of Zope in an InfoWorld article about WebDAV. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessRed Hat goes upmarket. This TechWeb articlemakes an interesting point: Red Hat is alone in raising the price of its distribution. While Red Hat 6.0 costs more than its predecessors, the new releases from Caldera and SuSE have gotten cheaper. Red Hat seemingly sees its future market in the corporate arena, where an extra $20 or so makes little difference. It will be interesting to see if this move costs them the more cost-sensitive buyers - students and such - that have apparently made up much of their market thus far. Red Hat's Bob Young has written a book. According to this press release, Under The Radar: How the Open Source Sneak Attack is Transforming the Technology War will come out this September. "In a manner similar to the Pulitzer prize winner 'Soul of a New Machine' Under The Radar takes you inside the fascinating adventure behind the Open Source Movement." Linux hardware with attitude. Hardware Canada Computing, the company that bought the Netwinder division from Corel, has announced that it is changing its name to Rebel.com, having paid $5 million for the privilege of using that domain name. "Rebel.com is a distinctive brand identity that will allow our customers to clearly understand who we are, what we do and how we conduct our business." Small business accounting product for Linux. The folks at Proven Software, Inc. have announced the "small business edition" of their "Proven dk" accounting package. At $99, it is priced in line with small business needs, and may well be worth a look. Clustering product announced. Active Tools has announced a beta release of their "Clustor 2.0" product. This product is aimed at making it easy to develop and run parallel applications in clustered environments. It is available for free download. KeyLabs hardware testing program. KeyLabs has announced its Linux compatibility testing program. This is a hardware testing offering: they will be certifying hardware as being compatible with the Linux system. They have posted a set of requirements and tests on their web site; it all looks reasonably straightforward. Tape certification. A Tape Certification Program for Linux has been announced by EST, developers of the BRU backup software for Linux. This press release indicates that Hewlett Packard, Exabyte Corporation, Seagate, OnStream Technologies, Tecmar Technologies, Ecrix Corporation, and Aiwa Corporation have all committed to the program. "EST will work closely with the drive manufacturers and the Linux developer community to ensure that any modifications required for device compatibility are implemented successfully. Any resulting changes or new device drivers will be provided back to the Linux community under an Open Source License, such as the GPL. " The e-smith distribution. Another company has popped up with a new distribution: e-smith, inc. has announced its new "e-smith server and gateway distribution," which is aimed at routing and network services applications. Support packages are offered as well. It's official - egcs is the new gcc. Cygnus Solutions has put out a press release stating that the EGCS Steering Committee, hosted by Cygnus Solutions at http://egcs.cygnus.com, is now the official maintainer of the gcc compiler. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
May 6, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThis week's news coverage of Linux was all over the map - it defies classification. Nonetheless, we'll try, starting with this week's recommended reading:
A few articles came out about specific products, usually Red Hat 6.0:
Other business-related articles:
There were a couple of negative pieces out there (beyond those mentioned in the kernel section):
There were also a few introductory pieces this week:
Linus's talk in Berkeley drew a couple of articles:
And here's the rest of what we were able to come up with:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 6, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesA new version of the CD Writing HOWTO is available and contains major changes. Unfortunately, the version on Metalab (and thus many mirrors) is out of date, and getting that changed seems to be a problem. Meanwhile, head over to this site for the latest in CD burning wisdom.The Linux Administrator's Security Guide has been released. The author has chosen to put it out in PDF format only, under a restrictive (no modifications) license. Head over to his site to get a copy. EventsAlan Cox in Ottawa. The Ottawa Linux Symposium will be held July 22-24 in (surprisingly) Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Keynote speakers include Alan Cox and Jes Sorensen.ZD gets into open source. Ziff-Davis has put out an announcement for its upcoming "Open Source Forum," to be held in Austin, TX on June 30 and July 1, 1999. Speakers include Eric Raymond, Ransom Love, Tim O'Reilly, and Matthew Szulik. As one might expect, this will be a very business-oriented event. Results from Open Networks 99 Peter Toft sent us a summary of events at the Open Networks 99 gathering held in Copenhagen - a joint production of the Dansk Unix User Group and the Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group. RealVideo clips are available for many of the presentations, several of them are in English (the rest in Swedish or Danish). There is also a set of photos from Open Networks 99 available at gphoto.org. It looks like a good time was had by all. Web sitesThe Free Software Job Page is exactly that - a page dedicated to listings of jobs working on free software. It is hosted on the GNU project web site.User Group NewsThe Virtual Linux Users Group has no physical location. Instead they "meet" via IRC at 8:00 PM CST (GMT - 6) on Wednesdays and Sundays. |
May 6, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekCraig Knudsen's Linux Net News site has been recently revamped, updates are happening regularly again, and the whole thing looks sharper than ever. A good source for pointers to stories in the press. See also Les Nouvelles Neuves de Linux, run by Stéfane Fermigier and others in France. The site itself is in French, surprisingly enough, but the right-hand side bar contains interesting news links that point mostly to English-language sources. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 6, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 17:46:13 -0400 From: Joe Drew <hoserhead@bigfoot.com> To: drwho@xnet.com, editor@lwn.net Subject: Re: "Restrictively Unrestrictive: The GPL License in Software" I disagree strongly with your opinions, but they are your opinions and you're entitled to them. However, I have some nitpicks: 1) Your political views come through very strongly when you explain various parts of the GPL. If you were going to revise this document, one fo the first things you should do is make the entire document, excepting "My opinions" completely non-partisan - notably words such as 'infected', etc. 2) Communism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, and neither is 'right' or 'proper' any more than their suitability for a given situation. 3) Nowhere does the Free Software Foundation gain any rights to your code that others do not receive - your assertation that 'you are not the real owner of your code, the Free Software Foundation is' is completely false. You are the holder of copyright, and as such you can sublicense your code under any license you want. Just like most other licenses, though, you can't revoke rights already granted to other uses (ie, the rights given under the GPL.) 4) RMS does not wish GNU/Linux to be called GNU/Linux because its contents are, by and large, GPL'd - he wishes it to be called GNU/Linux because distributions of Linux - particularly Debian - are, for the most part, the finished product of the GNU project, using the Linux kernel. Now, my opinion: - The GPL protects your code from becoming proprietary. If you don't care about that, you wouldn't be using the GPL. - Nothing is inherently Communistic about the GPL. You're not required to give out your code or changes, but you ARE required to license any of those changes under the GPL if you do distribute them. - The GPL has, and continues to, protect Free Software; it has never, and will never be, concerned with political extremism. It's the reason most new Free Software exists. I hope that you take the time to try to understand why the GPL is so popular, and also that you will revise your document to remove your personal opinion from the section meant to simply explain the differences between the BSD license and the GPL. -- Joe Drew http://www.woot.net Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled. -- R.P. Feynman | ||
Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 11:57:05 +0100 From: Aaron.Trevena@msasglobal.com Subject: benchmark - not flame To: bruce@mindcraft.com, editor@lwn.net Bruce, I would like to add some comments to your open benchmark project. - Apache server is not designed to be fast - its designed to be versatile and reliable. There is a wide choice of web servers designed for speed, flexibility, etc for Unix, Linux and *BSD. You should include at least one alternative known for its speed. - NT is used as a client system in enterprise environments because, frankly, win 9x doesn't do the job. Therefore an pure 9x base is unrealistic because you wouldn't have a quad xeon server just for secretaries, who are the only staff with win9x on their desktop. - your hardware is known to be designed to work with NT - it is advertised Dell policy, this weighs the benchmark heavily in NT's favour regardless of any tuning. - the hardware being tested is unlikely to be used in a Linux environment because it is uneconomical - several mid-range servers clustered or loadshared would be more appropriate providing better performance and increased reliability, scalability and accessability. just because NT can't cluster (2 isn't a cluster, its a joke) doesn't mean that other system can't make better use of hardware. - the web serving environment is unrealistic, it bears no resemblance to a real world serving environment - be it internet or external. A machine with a fraction of the power used in your benchmarks would rapidly saturate even multinational companies networks, the only need for such hardware would be if there was heavy use of dynamic content or web applications. I hope you can address these problems, or at least make it clear in published results that the benchmark is in an unrealistic and contrived environment. Aaron Trevena, Intra/Internet Developer & Administrator. | ||
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 11:58:50 +0200 From: Hubert Tonneau <hubert.tonneau@easynet.fr> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Refer to history to get the truth > Now, of course, there are reasons for this behavior. One could > say, for example, that these companies are simply trying to > prevent the publication of something like the Mindcraft report > that has drawn so much scorn over the last couple of weeks. > There's probably some truth to that. Much bad behavior comes > as the result of good intentions. But, in the end, freedom is more > important. The sentence "There's probably some truth to that" is completely false: I have never seen any benchmark of both Oracle and SQL server in any review during the last years. Some reviews have been very serious, with tests run in relation with various database publishers. The true reason is that they have a powerfull and well organised marketing division and they prefer to rely on it to get the product sold. Your sentence is what they like to hear because the doubt about their true reasons is good for closed company, better than the crude reality. So please refer to history: facts are there. Regards, Hubert Tonneau | ||
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 04:41:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Jonathan Walther <krooger@debian.org> To: mhegarty@mit.edu Subject: freedom for ITS source? Dear Mr Hegarty, I have cc'd this message to Alan Bawden and Richard Stallman, who may have some comments of their own afterward, and I am sure, will correct me where I am wrong on historical details. What it is: ITS is an operating system, in the same way that GNU/Linux, VMS, and Windows NT are. More specifically, it is an operating system developed more than 20 years ago that ran on special hardware specific to MIT which no longer exists and which has not, to my knowledge, ever been used for commercial purposes. ITS has no license, and without one, cannot legally be redistributed in source or other form. In your role as the person in charge of source licensing in MIT's Technology Licensing department, we would like to ask that you continue the fine forward looking tradition of MIT in the field of computer science by licensing ITS under the GPL. From available facts, the GPL would be most appropriate. ITS was developed in response to some proprietary drivers which came without source, but didn't do what the AI lab researchers needed. Having an operating system with its source code open to all meant many researchers improved it, enhancing the computing experience. The whole source code of the operating system was completely open. It was this openness, and the culture that came with it, that inspired the GPL, the GNU system, and laid the foundation that vaulted Linux to fame. It's nice to be able to look at ones roots. ITS has never had a license: it never needed one. Its been available to whoever knew someone with the source code who was willing to give it to you. It would be a shame to make it any less open than its successors. If for some legal reasons we are not aware of, it is necessary to release the code under a more restricted license, I will still be interested in corresponding. This jargon file entry contains some detail on ITS: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/frames/ITS.html Yours truly, Jonathan Walther | ||