Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessNew HP Linux workstations. Hewlett-Packard has announced a couple of new workstations - with Linux installed. They are relatively high-end systems, apparently aimed at electronic design and similar applications. (Thanks to Christof Damian). New Linux administration course offered Eklektix, Inc., producer of the Linux Weekly News, is proud to announce a new addition to its line of Linux professional training courses. Linux System Administration for Unix Administrators is intended for students who already know how to work with Unix systems. By assuming familiarity with the basic material, this course is able to delve deeply into the issues which are truly Linux-specific in just two days. This course will be taught in Boulder, CO in September; it is also available on site. Userland Frontier moves to Linux - sort of. For the time being, Frontier will continue to run only on proprietary systems, but it is now possible to host Frontier-managed sites on Linux. Their Linux-side code is being released in source form, and the underlying platform will be Zope. See Linux.userland.com for the official story of the beginning of Frontier's move to Linux, and their adoption of Zope. "And Zope is open source, which made it easier to invest. After all, we own it just as much as anyone else does. So we asked the Zope people if they would include our code in the standard Zope distribution and they said yes. Excellent! This is more proof that collaboration is possible, not only across operating systems, but across economic systems." VA supports Linux Demo Day. VA Linux Systems announced a corporate sponsorship of Linux Demo Day, a volunteer oriented project in collaboration with local Linux user groups (LUGs) and corporate sponsors. The goal of the project is to hold an international demonstration of Linux which coincides with the anniversary of Linux, from September 12-18, 1999. Training materials released. Something that slipped through the cracks and didn't get into this week's newsletter: the folks at GBdirect in the UK have announced that they have released some of their Linux training materials under an open license. The materials released thus far make up the first part of a "how to use Linux" course. 800Linux.com announces Linux training. 800Linux has announced a pair of Linux training classes which are aimed at Windows users. Details on the courses may be found on their training page. Open source XML application server released. Planet7 Technologies has announced the release of its XML application server under an open source license. They present the server as a valuable tool in the creation of e-commerce (and other) sites using XML technology. Steve Ballmer on Linux Here's a transcript of Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's speech delivered to the Washington Software Assocition a couple of weeks ago. "I mean, it sounds dumb, but, you know, guys like Sun always missed the boat. They can?t beat us if they don?t ride on the PC platform, because the volume economics are on the side of the PC platform. And I don't know why nobody figured that out, but Linux is -- and SCO did a little bit, but Linux is the first sort of unit that always thought about itself as PC-based and as trying to be kind of -- and has gotten to a critical -- some kind of critical mass of share." (Toward the bottom, in the Q&A). There are also some scary comments about security and other things - an illuminating, if rambling and incoherent, read. (Thanks to Alexander Voinov). PLOC announced its existence this week. PLOC (per-line-of-code) is another attempt to arrange payment for developers of free software. The twist here is that they have set up a scheme (evidently intresting enough to have a patent applied for) wherein each contributor to an open source project will be paid according to how many lines of code they write. There are currently no active projects listed on the PLOC web page. It will be interesting to see if this works at all. The link between lines of code written and the true value of a programming effort is tenuous at best. It is very often the case that higher-quality code is more compact. Creating an incentive for programmers to inflate their line counts does not seem like the way to create quality software. And how should a patch which removes code - and improves the program - be compensated? Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
June 24, 1999 |