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Leading items and editorialsThe GPL and Qt collide again. At the Atlanta Linux Showcase, Debian developer Branden Robinson shared with us something that he discovered while checking out Corel's beta version of Corel Linux at their booth: Corel had developed a GUI packaging utility called get_it which linked against both libqt and libapt-pkg. libqt is the Qt development library and libapt-pkg is licensed under the GPL. Anyone remember the long furor over KDE due to licensing? We did not mention the issue at the time, to give Branden an opportunity to notify the libapt-pkg author and maintainer Jason Gunthorpe and give him a chance to respond, as well as to notify Corel officially, since they were likely unaware of the problem. We are pleased to report, from conversations on the debian-legal mailing list and from reports back from Branden, that Debian and Corel have come to an amicable agreement: Jason will place a specific exception into the license for libapt-pkg to allow Corel to link against both it and the Qt library. Meanwhile, Corel has been sensitized to the potential side-effect of their choice to combine the Debian GNU/Linux base with the Qt development libraries. Problem solved? Not exactly. This is a heads-up as to potential difficulties ahead as more and more commercial companies start developing using existing code bases licensed under the GPL. The *BSD camp is likely to point their fingers at the GPL as the cause of this. The GPL camp is just as likely to point their fingers at Qt, for choosing to work out their own license instead of the GPL. Qt's license for 2.0 has been declared to be open source and compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, yes, but not compatible with code released under the GPL. This is one reason why proliferation of licenses is bad. If the difficulties are hard to spot and avoid when dealing with the BSD license, the GPL and, in this case, the QPL, add the MPL, the ZPL, and every other license that each corporation feels impelled to create and the problem becomes more and more difficult. The results can be dealt with individually, with authors examining the intent of the people using code based on multiple licenses, when only two licenses are involved. If twenty different licenses become involved, or twenty different authors, the problems become monumentally difficult. Even worse, the licenses involved make look good at first glance but may contain clauses that make them anything but "free". A couple of recent examples might include Apple's initial version of APSL and Sun's SCSL. Please think seriously before you create a unique license for your software product. Please use the GPL or the BSD style license if you can. If you don't like them, consider the Artistic license or the modified BSD style license. Whatever you choose will be better than the results of "rolling your own". Age became an issue in this Wired article on Comdex. "Persons under the age of 18 (including infants in strollers and backpacks) are not permitted at this event and will not be allowed on the exhibit floor. " We saw a similar placard up at the Embedded Systems Conference last week. It strikes a jarring note, though, in the Linux community, where many creative and productive projects testify to the achievements of people young and old alike and most interactions happen in forums where you don't even know the age of the people to whom you speak. What happens when a meritocracy meets an autocracy? In this case, 17-year-old Mike Lavers, who also happens to be company founder and CTO for Matrixcubed Internet Services, was denied entrance to this year's Comdex. Slashdot heard about it, of course, and garnered close to 300 comments, ranging from outrage about the restriction to comments on fears of lawsuits to general condemnation of the treatment of people under the age of 18 in the US. Not too surprisingly, the next Slashdot mention indicated that an exception had been made and Mike would be allowed to attend, according to an updated Wired article. However, Comdex isn't changing its general policy. Anyone under the age of 18 is going to have to ask for an exception to the rule. That leaves a bad taste. If anyone wonders why teenagers turn to drugs and violence, ask them how much "freedom" they have to involve themselves in more creative projects that will bring them praise and recognition. Hopefully Linux-based conferences will refuse to buckle under to this industry trend and continue to hold their doors open to anyone not likely to be bored silly by the proceedings ... Two more critical commercial applications come over: First, Allaire is expected to announce Monday the planned shipment of Cold Fusion 4.5 for Linux next month. Second, this press release from Lotus has buried in it, several paragraphs down, the notice of the imminent availability of Domino Release 5 for Linux. Both announcements have been about a year in coming. In the case of Allaire, it was just over a year ago that they mentioned their plans to bring Cold Fusion to the Linux platform. Their user community has been waiting, not so patiently, since. In the case of Lotus, a year ago in this ZDNet UK story, Jeff Papows, president and CEO of IBM's Lotus development corp. stated, "... I just cannot say Linux offers a viable proposition...". Well, that was primarily in reference to Lotus Notes, not Domino, whose Linux port has been spoken of since January, but it was fun to point out. Now if we can get Framemaker and Quicken over ... seriously, open source software will eventually catch up with these commercial giants, but that doesn't change the fact that having good quality commercial software as an option, as soon as possible, will make life better in the short-term. Slides from Liz's talk at ALS. A bit belatedly, the slides from Liz's talk at the Atlanta Linux Showcase, "Linux Distributions: Well-known through Unknown", have been made available. This talk has been updated from the original draft posted in November, with the addition of a few more slides and some corrections. Note, for those of you who don't like the GIF pages that Star Office produces, try clicking on "text" on the top menu to view the talk in text format. That makes it possible to drag off the URLs and also makes the speaker notes visible. Next: Alternative Linux. Coming next week, November 1st, 2nd and 3rd, is Alternative Linux 1999 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Tutorials, conference talks, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond in the same room together ... just about any amusement you could ask for from a Linux conference. If any of you make it there, be sure to send a report and maybe some pictures! Linux system admin training in November. Eklektix Inc., publisher of LWN, is offering a public version of its Linux System Administration course the second week in November. Some seats remain open in this course; now is your chance to learn about Linux administration from the people who bring you LWN. (End of word from our sponsor). Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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October 28, 1999
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNews and editorialsThe Internet is to blame ..., or so this APBnews.com article would have you believe. They talk about the "hacker" sites on the Internet and blame them for the escalation in security problems out there."The Internet has always been a haven for computer criminals," said research analyst Adam Harriss. "The technologically savvy hackers have been online swapping tips and programming for decades, but now the information is being posted and sold at low cost in a form that even the techno-illiterate can understand. Causing damage to machines and infiltrating systems has become as easy as putting together a child's Christmas toy."What are the problems with this type of commentary? Here are two examples. First, with a few exceptions, most of the sites they are talking about do not blatantly encourage criminal acts. Most of them exist to share knowledge so that people responsible for preventing security incidents can have access to all the information they need to find problems fix them and test their network security, as Robert G. Ferrell comments in his reaction to this article on the ISN mailing list. "Those of us who choose to defend the infrastructure, rather than attack it, need the information contained in most of these sites desperately. " Second, by focusing on the people who illegally try to hack sites, the true issue, creating secure applications and making it easier for people to find fixes and keep their systems secure, is totally overlooked. "That's too hard!" they might say, or perhaps companies are making too much money off of tools like anti-virus software to want to see the underlying problems addressed. "The problem is not the availability of data on how to breach a system; the problem is that the system can be breached in the first place", commented Jay D. Dyson. OpenSSH officially released. The OpenBSD folks have put out an official press release announcing the availability of OpenSSH, a new package based on an earlier version of ssh in which all proprietary code has been replaced (along with "libraries burdened with the restrictive GNU Public License (GPL)"). Familial bickering aside, this is a very good thing. The availability of a truly free version of ssh which can be packaged up with OpenBSD, Linux or any other operating system benefits all of us. Security Reportscdwtools: Suse reported problems in the cdwtools package, including some buffer overflows. They provide updated packages and indicate that other Linux distributions may be impacted. No updates for other distributions have been seen as of yet. Updateslpd: File permission problems with lpr and lpd can allow a user to print a file which they are not allowed to read.
screen: A package problem with Red Hat Linux 6.1 where ptys are created with insecure permissions. Non-Red Hat 6.1 based distributions and earlier versions of Red Hat are not affected. wu-ftpd: Several new vulnerabilities were reported last week, including nasty buffer overflows and a remotely-exploitable root vulnerability. If you are running the wu-ftpd daemon, you need to upgrade immediately.
ypserv: ypserv prior to 1.3.9 had a variety of security problems. An upgrade to 1.3.9 is recommended. ResourcesMaximum Security Linux. Maximum Security Linux, recently announced by Macmillan USA, in association with SecurityPortal.com, combines documentation with GPL'd security tools, everything currently bundled under SecurityPortal.com's Linux Security Suite. Obviously, you can probably get everything in this package for free if you want to look for it. However, like a Linux distribution, the value here is in having someone else choose and put together a combination of tools for you.The first public version of dosfw 0.1 was announced this week. It is a simple Linux netfilter firewall module, used to drop denial-of-service packets during an attack. "The current version supports only two attacks and TCP Fingerprint scan, but you may expect other attacks in the (hopefully near) future. Contributions are welcome." Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
October 28, 1999
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentStable kernel version: 2.2.13. That will probably be true for some time to come. Note, however, that 2.2.14pre2 has been released, so 2.2.14 is hovering out there. The fun stuff is now going into Alan's ac patches, of which we are now up to 2.2.13ac2. Here are the release notes for the ac patches released this week: Part of the goodies in the ac patches will eventually make it into the stable tree, presuming it shakes out okay. Other portions are not expected to do so. Check the patch announcements for more details.Development kernel version: 2.3.23. This was apparently released on Saturday, October 23rd. It appears to have slipped out without any fanfare. Several pre-patches for 2.3.24 have shown up since then. Why is the Tulip ethernet driver in the kernel so old? And why are Linus and Donald Becker yelling at each other? A disagreement over how kernel development should happen is creating difficulties between two of our most productive developers and has resulted in very old code running in the kernel. The driver for ethernet cards based on the Digital "Tulip" chip is widely used - many such cards are deployed out there. 2.2.13 currently contains version 0.89H of this driver, dated 5/23/98. This driver was written, like so many Linux network drivers, by Donald Becker; a look on his Tulip page shows that the current stable version is 0.91; there is also 0.91g for those who want to live on the edge. So why is the mainline Tulip driver so old? It turns out there is a major disagreement over how pieces of the kernel should be developed:
However, for someone else to become the kernel maintainer for Donald's drivers, Donald will have to open up some of his development process, such as his CVS archives. Hopefully, he will be amenable to this. In the end, one way or another, Linus has a way of winning these battles. Hopefully the resolution, whatever it is, can come about without alienating a crucial Linux kernel hacker (any one around who could get Donald onto the list for one of the upcoming Linux-related IPOs?). Other patches and updates released this week include:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
October 28, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsPlease note that security updates from the various distributions are covered in the security section. Out of Thailand: Linux-SIS and Linux-TLE. Linux-SIS and Linux-TLE are two Linux distributions out of Thailand. Linux-SIS was developed to serve as an Internet Server for schools in Thailand, particularly those involved in the SchoolNet Thailand Project. Linux-TLE, on the other hand, is targeted at Thai desktop users. It is based on Linux-Mandrake, but adds Thai language extensions. Check this message from Pattara Kiatisevi for more details. Many thanks to them for their web site, which, although understandably primarily in Thai, was clear enough for us to navigate, get some information and register for regular updates on their work. Best of luck to them. Don't forget Phat Linux! Phat Linux isn't new; it has been around since 1998. This week, F. Odenkirchen in Germany dropped us a note to point out that it was missing from our list. Simultaneously, it also popped up in the press releases, with this announcement from TUCOWS about the availability of a special download of Phat Linux v3.2. Phat Linux is another distribution built to run on a Window 95/98 partition, so people can run Linux without having to repartition an existing Windows disk. Armed LinuxComments on Armed Linux. Someone took a look at Armed Linux and wrote a column on it for osOpinion. "MIKE" seemed pretty impressed. "I took the CD home, unzipped the 'ARMED.ZIP' file, read the README.TXT file, rebooted as instructed, and 10 minutes later I was net surfing. I was stunned. It found all my hardware and configured everything correctly except my proxy server. All I could say was, 'Wowser, this is how it oughta be.'"Caldera OpenLinuxLone Wolf. Quietly, without any official announcement, Caldera has made Lone Wolf, a Pentium-optimized version of OpenLinux, available in as ISO CD image form as part of an open beta project. It is already in its final few weeks of testing and available to download and play. Besides the pentium-optimization, there are apparently some other subtle differences for which we have no exact details to report.Corel LinuxComputer Currents on Corel Linux. Computer Currents follows up their review of TurboLinux with a look at Corel's beta. "But the company that brought you CorelDraw is set to give TurboLinux (and perhaps Windows) a run for its money. My tests with a prerelease Corel Linux show that it's even easier to set up and use than TurboLinux, and it closely matches Windows' intuitive interface." Of course, not everyone around would agree that Windows' interface is "intuitive" ...Debian GNU/LinuxDebian Weekly News. The Debian Weekly News for October 26th mentions that activity is heating up in preparation for the freeze. A BugSquash will be held this weekend, Saturday, October 30th, and work is progressing on both the boot-floppies and on apt. More generic discussion topics covered this week include the size of Debian and a call for vote on package pools.Looking for information on Debian GNU/Hurd? The latest Kernel Cousin debian-hurd has been released. Ports of the Hurd to the Alpha platform and the development of Hurd users groups are a couple of the topics covered. Definite LinuxDefinite Linux ships IPSEC-enabled kernel. Definite Linux announced that it will be the first Linux distribution to ship a kernel that has IPSEC enabled. This kernel includes the International crypto patches, as well as the recent FreeS/WAN 1.1 release.Linux-MandrakeCPUReview on Mandrake 6.1 Powerpack. William Henning at CPUReview took a long look at Mandrake 6.1 and gave it an "A". "You can't go wrong buying Mandrake 6.1; it is an excellent Linux distribution, and it has found a permanent home here at CPUReview."LinuxPPCLinuxPPC News. In what we hope will be the first of many reports, Jason Haas at LinuxPPC has provided us with news on current developments, including progress on an iBook, a new mailing list for users of the Apple Network Server (ANS), upcoming plans to help people transitioning from AIX to Linux and 128-bit Netscape, from LinuxPPC within the United States or Fortify for people outside the United States.The iBook boots LinuxPPC. Progress is reported by Benhamin Herrenschmidt, LinuxPPC developer, on the project to port Linux to the iBook. Two test kernels with iBook support have been put out so far, which boot up to the LinuxPPC installer, though clearly more work still needs to be done. Another day, another platform on the way to World Domination ... Red Hat LinuxRed Hat responds to 6.1 installer problems. Red Hat released two sets of updates to their boot disks to address some of the installation difficulties that have been reported in Red Hat 6.1 The first update apparently did not correctly fix the problems, so a second update"refixed" them and also fixed a problem where the choice of a KDE desktop still installs a Gnome desktop. This can't be a happy time back at Red Hat. This much sloppiness in a point release of what is expected to be a fairly stable product does not look good.Geeknews on Red Hat 6.1. Geeknews.org has put out a review of Red Hat 6.1. They mention Red Hat's new interactive startup, "you can detect and modify hardware as you boot the box. This is their first review, so they'd love to get some feedback. [From Linux Today] Linux.Netnerve reports on another Red Hat 6.1 problem. Problems with cdrecord under Red Hat 6.1 are discussed and an unofficial workaround suggested. Note, you may also want to check the Red Hat Bugzilla Database to report or look for known bugs with a distribution. This particular problem is not an installation problem. Rock LinuxRock Linux 1.3.4. Rock Linux is a distribution aimed at the highly skilled and experienced. It is always built on the latest sourcecode for each package and provides support for easily downloading only source and compiling the entire distribution on your own hardware. They have announced version 1.3.4, with kernel 2.3.22 and other package upgrades.Rock is a fun installation, in many ways. After giving talks on Linux Distributions, I now pick up occasional mail with requests for specialized distributions. A recent one requested a distribution that was really built to allow you to recompile everything from scratch, rather than install binary packages. Of course, Slackware was one option, but Rock Linux was definitely another. Just download the 1MB Rock Linux source package, extract it and run three commands to download, test and compile all the source packages. Slackware LinuxKernel 2.2.13 has been added and work started on new boot disks based on the latest stable kernel. wu-ftpd, elvis, imap, bind and ypserv have also been updated as well. The wu-ftpd and ypserv updates are security-related, so upgrading your packages is recommended.Small LinuxSteven Gibson sent us a development report for Small Linux that was mistakenly left out of last week's Distributions Summary. Our apologies! The report mentions that version version 0.7.2 is now available. It uses the 2.0.0 kernel and the binaries for free, vi and more have been added. Small Linux is especially designed for people that need a Linux distribution to run on small memory machines, as small as 2MB.Storm LinuxStorm Linux Beta released. Stormix has announced the official beta release of Storm Linux, a Debian GNU/Linux-based enhanced for ease of installation, particularly with auto-detection for hardware and containing several GUI modules for systems administration tasks like networking. New mailing lists for Storm Linux. Stormix Technologies has announced three new mailing lists for users of the Storm Linux distribution. SuSE LinuxBeta Versions of SuSE Linux 6.3 have been sent to the beta testers, who are all very busy ironing out the last bugs. No details on what has been added to 6.3 are yet available.Lenz Grimmer confessed that he's been unable to keep up with the regular SuSE lists as much as usual while working in North Carolina on a project for the past few weeks. However, if you head over to irc.linux.com, channel #SuSE, you just might run into him and a few other SuSE folks ... TomsrtbtLast week, we mentioned a problem between Red Hat 6.1 and Tomsrtbt: "The Tomsrtbt rescue disk may have problems with ext2 file systems created under Red Hat 6.1. This week, Tom Oehser dropped us a note to mention that Tomsrtbt-1.7.185 fixes this problem and to provide more details on what the problem was.The problem is that ext2fs-1.16 creates filesystems by default that cannot be used with 2.0.x kernels which don't support the sparse-super option. 1.7.185 has a patch applied to 2.0.37 to add sparse-super support. The patch to retrofit sparse-super support to 2.0.x is available at http://www.toms.net/rb/add-ons/sparse-patch.bz2 if anyone else is interested in it. Many thanks to Ted Ts'o for whipping this patch together in record time.This new version also contains new programs for assisting in the rescue operation, including rescuept, findsuper and undeb. See Tom's note for more details. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
October 28, 1999
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Lists of Distributions |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development projectsMutt finally graduates. Many people who've been using mutt for years may be surprised to note that they have been using beta versions of the package. Now Mutt 1.0 has finally been announced. [Slashdot] Linux Systems Administrator Guide. Joanna Oja is the new maintainer for the Linux Systems Administrator Guide, taking over from Lars Wirzenius, who has been maintaining this resource since late 1992/early 1993. Many thanks to Lars for all his work and best of luck to Joanna. VAX porting project revived. Kenn Humborg dropped us a note to mention that the Linux/VAX project, to port Linux to the VAX architecture, has been revived. The website listed is new and if you wish to be subscribed to the new mailing list, check that site for information on re-subscribing (the original subscriber list has been lost). Note that if you want Unix on your VAX right now, he recommends trying out NetBSD, since the Linux project is still in the early stages. BSD Driver Database. Apparently the FreeBSD Driver Database has been expanded to encompass drivers from all the BSD operating systems. The new BSD Driver Database wants to "help individuals with hardware that needs supporting get in touch with driver developers with the knowledge to write the support for the hardware." [From Slashdot] Help out the LPI. The Linux Professional Institute still needs some people to help them out by submitting test questions for its Linux administration certification exams. If you know a lot about some aspect of running a Linux system, why not show it off by coming up with a few gnarly test questions? See the LPI web page for information on how to help. Embedded LinuxLinux, Real-Time Linux, and IPC. An article in the November issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal takes a look at the formalized structures in Linux for IPC, particularly FIFOs and shared memory. In it, Linux processes and real-time Linux processes are compared and their interaction is examined. [Linux Net News]GnomeMiguel de Icaza is US bound. Miguel de Icaza is quitting his day job and moving to the US. To answer your first question, no, it does not appear that he has taken a job with Red Hat. From his activity log, "We got a secret investor firm to invest in our supper-dupper free software company to develop free software and provide kick-ass applications for users all around the globe". Congratulations, both Miguel and Nat! Gnome Summary for October 20th-26th. Here is this week's Gnome Summary from Havoc Pennington, including news from Japan, the documentation front and the usual hacking activity reports. EnlightenmentEnlightenment DR0.16 reviewed. A review of the 0.16 development release of Enlightenment has been written by Christian Schaller over at LinuxPower. It sounds like he's been converted: "I have to admit it took some days before I bothered to download it, due to some problems I had with the co-existence between Gnome and Enlightenment DR0.15 as mentioned in my Gnome on Ice article. After having used it now for a little while I have to beg Mandrake and Rasterman my humble forgiveness for not downloading it on the day of its release. This is truly wonderful. "Christian also noted that he wrote the article with Abiword, which he commented was becoming really useable. Abiword is licensed under the GPL. KDEKDE 2.0 Technology Overview. The KDE 2.0 Technology Overview has been made available. It describes some of the new technology being adopted in KDE 2.0, including DCOP (lightweight IPC), KParts (Kanossa), KSycoca (data caching), Java and more.The KDE Development News. This week's KDE Development News is part 1 of two parts. It includes pointers to recent articles on KDE and more information about the new technology mentioned in the roadmap above (with some unintentional overlap). Part 2, when available, will contain the usual overviews from the mailing lists. MidgardMidgard 1.2.4 released. Version 1.2.4 of the Midgard web development suite has been released and now supports multiple Midgard databases on a single Apache server.Midgard Weekly Summary This week's Midgard Weekly Summary covers the release of Midgard 1.2.4, the latest stable release of this web application development suite, a Russian version of Midgard, and the second Midgard Workshop, to be held in January 2000 in Karlskrona, Sweden. PHPSlides from Jim Winstead's talk, "Introduction to PHP", at the Atlanta Linux Showcase have been posted. Note there is a warning on the site that the slides require Netscape for display.YAMSYAMS (Yet Another Merchant System) Roadmap. The YAMS project has put up a roadmap for their planned development and is looking for public comment.WineThe Wine Weekly News. This week's Wine Weekly News mentions that Mainsoft, a commercial company that sells a proprietary competitor to winelib, will be porting its product to Linux.The anonymous struct and unions patches have made it into the main CVS tree for gcc. This is heralded by the Wine community, since it will "greatly help porting existing Windows code with WineLib without having to change the code". ZopeZope Weekly News. The Zope Weekly News for October 27th is out. It includes pointers to a growing mass of community-developed documentation and products.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
October 28, 1999
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Development toolsCobolThe Tiny Cobol Project released a new development snapshot on October 27th. Updates to the project news list seem to be happening quite frequently.JavaTritonus 0.2. Version 0.2 of the tritonus library has been announced. The tritonus library is an implementation of the JavaSound API.No updates on the Blackdown JDK port. The status pages on blackdown.org have not been changed since September. Apparently the progress made on the issue of native threads was not sufficient to shake loose the development process. PerlThis week on p5p is a weekly summary of happenings on the perl5-porters development list, started last week as a feature on O'Reilly's new Perl.com site. Here is the inaugural issue from last week and this week's issue.The reports are long and detailed. They are a welcome addition to other weekly reports and fill a needed gap. Have fun poking through them! Tom Christiansen on Perl and Y2K. Tom has written an article on Perl and the Y2K issue which recently showed up in LinuxPlanet (but may have been written a while ago). "Remember this: if someone asks you to warrant that your software is free of year 2000 bugs, they're really just looking for an excuse to sue you if they misuse your software, even if it should happen to be their own fault. " Perl and MySql. Perl News also pointed out The Perl You Need to Know: Part 7, which focuses on MySql. " Solid as MySQL is, it can be a tough nut to crack for starters; those without extensive summer days holed up inside a Unix box may find the supporting documentation a bit, well ... is there such a language as programmerese? " Perl Trainers mailing list. A mailing list for people who train others in perl has been created. PythonThe Python Consortium. Guido officially introduced the launch of the Python Consortium. Originally conceived of a year ago as a way to to further and promote Python and JPython development, the Consortium has two full members, Lawrence Livermore National Library and HP, and three associate members, Digital Creations, Interet Corporation and Foretec Seminars.HP joins the Python Consortium. This note mentions the move, indicates that it is prompted by "the extensive use of Python in development of pilot applications for Espeak" and mentions that they've got positions open for experienced object-oriented developers who want to work with Python. Python HOWTOs updated. Changes to the Python HOWTOs include the addition of HOWTOs on configuring your editor for writing Python code and Python advocacy, O'Reilly interviews Guido. O'Reilly published an interview with Guido van Rossum. It crosses over a lot of topics, Python with Java, versus Javascript and the Computer Programming for Everybody project. Python jobs. A Python Jobs Board has been started. Tcl/tkDr. Dobbs' TCL-URL!. This week's Tcl-URL! is now available.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessTurboLinux has launched TurboCluster Server with a flurry of deals. Announced as "the world's first software Linux clustering solution", TurboCluster is the focus of deals announced in press releases with: Compaq to support developers, Cubix to deliver an integrated solution to enterprise server farms, Giganet to include cLAN drivers to support virtual interface (VI) architecture and LinuxCare to ensure enterprise support. This is a well orchestrated product launch combining Open Source and proprietary technology with solid commercial partnerships. TurboLinux has orchestrated the important components of a successful product launch focused on commercial needs: big name partners, developer support, user support, bundled hardware solutions and an emphasis on performance LWN described the busy times at TurboLinux recently with a prediction of some big announcements when TurboCluster launched. In an interview for that article, TurboLinux North American Vice President Lonn Johnston claimed that the portions of their clustering solution which are currently proprietary will be released under an open source license after 6 to 9 months. Long enough to gain a market lead but quickly enough to nurture the Open Source model. Melding Open Source and commercial practices to build businesses that support the community and realize financial success is still a relatively new business model. As funds from IPOs, outside investors and profitable operations provide more working capital we can expect to see lots of attempts to strike the right balance between all iterests. For a not-optimistic viewpoint on TurboLinux' efforts, check out this ComputerWorld article and the resultant Slashdot commentary. "TurboLinux's approach could put the compatibility of the different brands or ``distributions'' of Linux at risk, Weiss said. " However, not a lot of people are showing fear and consternation. The changes to the kernel are all under the GPL as well, they have to be. TurboLinux is backed by investment from Intel Corp., August Capital and Broadview International, LLC. Here is some more detail on TurboLinux's recent alliances.
Press Releases:
Section Editor: Dennis Tenney. |
October 28, 1999
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsRecommended Reading: This October interview with Jon "maddog" Hall ranges over a bunch of topics, but also mentions what he got out of speaking at a recent IBM Linux summit in Austin, Texas, USA. "What did I get out of it? I was particularly struck by the bullet on the slide that said something along the lines of "software inside IBM would now be considered to be Open Source unless there was some reason to make it closed." This was an awesome statement, more powerful than a lot of people might realize, and I used it at a meeting of scientists at Brookhaven National Labs the next week." (Thanks to Christof Damian) Inspired By Work is an article in November's issue of Fast Company featuring Eric Raymond. This is probably the start of a press blitz on Eric, to highlight attention on his new book. However, the focus of the article does remain on open source, not Eric. "One of the most powerful features of the open-source model is its capacity to hold down global complexity. The structure of work and communication in the hacker community is decentralized and distributed. Also, many different groups of people are working on many different software modules, each of which is relatively small and simple, and all of which have to be compatible in the end. That's a good way to write software." (Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell) Alan Cox writes about the risks of closed-source computing in this osOpinion piece. "No company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy. It would cost them more than using commodity components. Just as importantly, it would commit them to a single source for support and parts. Why then do they commit to a single software supplier? A closed source strategy exposes the company to serious business risk. As many telephony companies have discovered, your OS supplier might suddenly decide to be your competitor." Richard Brandt at UpsideToday.com has been following and reporting on Sun's recent moves with regards to Linux for a while. The latest indepth article takes a look at the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), with feedback from Sun's Bill Joy and comments from Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman. It is a long, but worth reading, article. The debate clearly wasn't settled and people seem unlikely to budge. "After considering the views of some people who actually know what they are talking about, including Joy's, I have changed my opinion a bit. Sun does "get" the open source movement. It is simply unwilling to embrace it. " Open Source: The Open Source mystique, written by Art Whitmann, takes a look at open source and then tells Microsoft, Sun and Apple to learn the real lesson: "So my advice is simple. Sun, Netscape, Apple, Microsoft: Forget about opening up your source code. No one gives a damn about seeing how your applications were built. You won't even offer any assurances that modifications made to any particular version or source code will even be possible in the next version, so why bother? Instead, take the time to talk to the people who love Open Source and figure out why they do. You aren't close enough to the users in the trenches and you certainly aren't responsive enough to their needs. That's why the vast majority love Open Source."
A second article on the role of academia in open source was recently
published by The Chronicle of Higher
Education. The Chronicle is a subscription only site, so we can't
provide a URL for the article on-line. However, we can quote a few
relevant paragraphs:
...
If our graduates are predominantly trained in open-source
tools, the world's open-source library will grow and improve.
If every grant from the National Science Foundation presumes
that the resulting programs will be open source (unless a case
is made against doing so), better resources will be developed.
As our university programmers develop open-source solutions to
common problems (such as developing the underpinnings for a
data base of sound clips, or a self-teaching spell-checker, or
a content-mining software agent), then other people at other
institutions can see how it was done, be saved the expense of
reinventing the wheel, perhaps improve the code, and help to
create at least a slightly improved world.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Red Hat's upcoming Linux news site, called "Wide Open," which will debut sometime next month. "[Chief editor] Mitchell and Red Hat say the site -- to debut early next month at www.wideopen.com -- will be an independent look at all things open source. If that means writing something flattering about a Red Hat competitor, or negative about Red Hat, so be it." Reviews and Interviews: LinuxPlanet has a review of "The No B.S. Guide To Red Hat Linux". "This book will, of course, age quickly. It's full of references to Linux applications that are currently state of the art, so in a year's time it won't be as great a guide. But if you need to convert to Redhat 6 now, rush out and buy! " The latest in sendmail.net's flurry of interviews is this one with Kirk McKusick. "The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called 'copycenter,' which is 'take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.' You want to go off and do proprietary things with it? Fine, you can do that." Business: Mike Gerdts pointed out this article and, in particular, the quote, ""Gateway needs a service provider for low-cost Internet appliances, and AOL's confidence in Gateway, given the other PC makers they could've invested in," is probably due to whatever technology Amiga is developing, surmised Richard Doherty, president of consulting firm Envisioneering Group." Remember, Mike mentioned, the new Amiga is supposed to be running Linux ... This article in Computer Reseller News claims that Lotus will release Notes for Linux in November. "After initially snubbing the open-source-code operating system, Lotus President Jeff Papows said last January that the Cambridge-based company would ship a Linux version of the groupware/messaging system by year's end. This week's announcement at Lotusphere Berlin, and availability of the software next month, make good on that pledge." LinuxValley covers (in Italian) the presence of Linux at the huge SMAU technical conference in Milan, Italy. "Sicuramente la presenza di maggiore impatto 'scenografico' e stata quella di Red Hat Italia, con uno stand accattivamente, colorato, ricco di materiale pubblicitario (compresi i palloncini rossi e bianchi, che i meno distratti avranno potuto notare in giro per tutta la fiera)." ("Certainly the presence with the most 'scenic' impact was that of Red Hat Italia with an attention-grabbing, colored booth rich with publicity materials (including red and white balloons, which the more attentive will have noticed all around the event" - editor's translation). English text (sort of) available via Babelfish. Here's a Reuters article on Corel's stock price swings. "'The Linux sector was dead as a doornail for a while and it's coming back fairly strong today,' [fund manager] Stewart said." Finally: AboutLinux.com has published Mailbag #4. Mailbags are a collection of letters from readers and responses, cataloguing people's experience with Linux, their successes and their problems. Salon Magazine reports on the University of Michigan study. "It can't be very much longer before free-software hackers start regretting how high their media profile has become in these open-source software crazed days. How are they supposed to get any work done?" Here is a well-considered opinion (read sarcasm here) on Linux in Windows NT Magazine. "Finally, even if the software were free, I wouldn't revert from Windows 98 to DOS, so I can't imagine why Windows NT users would want to switch to Linux. This way of thinking is like saying, 'The latest, most advanced stone-age flint chips ever sold. Trade your gas furnace for one today!' I'm sure I'll see where Linux actually performs once I get it installed, but I doubt I'll find anything interesting or new." (Thanks to Joerg Danne). The Straw Man behind the Straw Poll takes a look at the recent resurgence in "slightly hazy, non-rigorous reportage and un-checked, un-verifiable opinion pieces". What's behind them? "In short, that the detractors are often clutching at straws, and that there are less and less issues of substance which can be invoked against Linux and Open Source. We can be comfortable (but not smug) in the knowledge that if this is the best that the competitors of the platform can muster, by way of obfuscation or FUD, we are slowly but surely pulling ahead. Let's keep at this in a steady, reasoned and confident manner. " Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
October 28, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesMichael Hammel at The Graphics Muse sent us an announcement of new features on the site, including "backend and MyNetscape support, updates Q and A and Reader Mail sections".David Lloyd has followed up his recent creation of a Linux C mailing list with the creation of a Linux C++ mailing list. Of course, other resources, such as comp.lang.c++, are also available. LinuxLinks.com has announced the Linux Package Guide, a freely available database of packages available in Red Hat, Debian, Caldera and SuSE.
EventsLinux India, the organization of Linux LUGS in India, will be hosting a Linux Pavilion at Bangalore IT.COM '99 in Bangalore, India, November 1st through the 5th. Check their press release for more details.Those of you who are going to be at SuperComputing '99 next month will want to pencil in the Beowulf Extreme Bash, happening on November 15.
Web sitesWeb sites for Children. Martin Skjöldebrand dropped us a note to mention that he has put up a website, called Children's Linux, on which to record Linux applications suitable for children. He's only got one entry up there now and there must be more ... Send him a note if you have suggestions.Note that LinuxForKids is another web site that was announced a while ago that is also trying to centralize information on software for Linux for children. The author of that site has dropped Martin a note, so hopefully they can get together to collaborate. Another place to look for similar information is seul-edu, the educational project partnered with Simple End User Linux (SEUL).
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekOpenDesk.com comes on-line. OpenDesk.com burst onto the scene with quite a bit of hype. Imagine our surprise when we found substance behind the pre-announcements. For free, they offer you secured access to your own workspace, on which you can create documents, send mail, update your calendar, keep a contact management database and more, all accessible from anywhere on the Internet as long as you have access to a browser. In addition, you can join other people's workspaces or allow them to join yours. So what's the catch? Nothing. Well, the workspace has an area below with space for an ad banner that you can't make go away. In general, though, OpenDesk.com plans on making its money off of consulting work and add-on services, so the workspace they provided is truly free. And it is all based on open source software: Apache, mod_perl, perl, mysql, Linux and SmartWorker, a web application development platform. Worth checking out. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
October 28, 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: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 17:21:30 +0530 From: Anand Srivastava <anand@aplion.stpn.soft.net> To: aokrongly@galacticmarketing.com CC: letters@lwn.net, r2online@winntmag.com Subject: Thank You Microsoft Hi Anthony, I think the problem here is that you have no idea whatsoever of Unix. The frustration would be similar if you were to give a CD to a person who had not ever seen a computer. Or may be used only the terminal based applications of the VMS type OSs. There is a huge generational gap. There are some differences between Linux and NT, those should be understood before going into Linux. I believe you should have got a Linux pre-installed box. I also expect that you were trying to install dual boot system. Linux has its root in Unix. Unix is a very cleanly designed OS. It is extremely modular, and the design is simple. This is the reason why it persists so long when all the other OSs have died and have been replaced. The simple design and modularity and experience over the last 30 years has made it a very stable and efficient OS. Linux is mostly a complete rewrite of Unix so has inherited the simplicity and modularity in design. It has got the learning that was done over the last 30 years. It has also tried to move away from the topics that have been found to be better implementable in different ways. The efficiency and stability of Linux also derives from the immense manpower that it can muster. But thats the very basic OS. Linux is the King when it comes to automation through scripts, because it has inherited the 30 years SysAdmin culture. Linux seriously lacks in User Interfaces. This has happened due to the fact that for the past twenty years, Unix has been developed by the consortium of Unix Vendors. Unix had been in a very high margin segment. Where it matters how stable and scalable an OS is. But it gets very little points on the UI. These vendors had never been interested in the desktop or the commodity market which is driven by very small margins. So making a usable UI was very far from their minds. Due to this reason there were no developments in these fields. But this problem is being rectified, and efforts are being done by various people and Companies because they see volume in the desktop market. The companies are Gateway(Amiga) and Corel, and also other Linux vendors, who have a vested interest in seeing Linux grow popular. I agree that Linux's UI is still not very good (or rather they are not very consistent). But there are reasons for that. Linux's UI effort has been just three years, while Windows has been there for the Last 15 years. But still Linux's UI is improving as a much faster rate and I would expect that it would overtake Windows UI in another two years. I guess you don't have much more time to learn linux before getting outdated ;-). But if you want to see what things are in store go to http://www.enlightenment.org , http://www.gnome.org , http://www.kde.org , http://www.gnustep.org . These are the sites that are spearheading the development of the Linux GUI. You could be pardoned for thinking that having four GUIs would not give a consistent outlook. But this is the GNU (new :-)) way of working. You start with thoroughly incompatible designs then the market decides which feature of each is good then you incorporate good things of each merge them and make a new one or make all of the compatible so that they start looking consistent in each others domains. If somebody refuses to merge, it gets thrown out. Now lets look at NT. You think that its new technology, but when you dig deep into it you will see aspects of VMS, because thats what the original designers where familiar with. But that doesn't make it bad. Its good that the experience was taken to build a new thing. Then there is the aspect of MicroKernel. MicroKernels are known to be very modular, but pay the price of that modularity with efficiency. The only OS that tries to avoid this penalty by some genuine (and very complex) ideas is HURD. All the others just collocate the servers with the microkernel. This brings you back to square one. The robustness is gone. Because the User space OS modules are actually running in the kernel space. NT goes further than that it allows the drivers into the kernel space. Here I am just talking of NT as the kernel not as a GUI. As a GUI I said that its good having a full 15 years of Experience. But NT as a kernel is not good enough, its extremely new, and has made too many bad compromises, I believe collocating the graphics subsystem was another bad move. Too much of the code runs in the kernel space. The whole point of microkernel architecture was to reduce the amount of code that runs in the kernel space, so that it would be more stable. NT is still a very new technology and will take a lot more time to mature, and the way it is expanding its code base, it may take forever. NT still has a big lead in Applications, but thats because it has been the monopoly for the past 10years. That will change in the next couple of years. Actually as far as software engineers are considered they would be much more comfortable with Linux. At least for me and most engineers in my company, NT doesn't become usable unless we install Cygnus utilities which provide Unix utilities on NT. The one thing I hate about NT is that it tries to shield me from any problems that might arise. I had a problem with my disk which I only found out when I installed Linux on it. NT would not show that it was failing to write to the disk sometimes. It puts up artificial barriers, because the designers never thought that those things could be done. Lately it has been trying to learn from Unix, and you can see all sorts of scriptable text only programs. But the whole philosophy is restrictive. By far the biggest lead of NT is in the area of GUI based rapid application development environments. Linux has got very few and very basic ones because there had been no graphical environments on Linux, but I suppose that won't take more than a couple of years when software companies start porting them onto Linux. Free ones will only be available some three years later, that too I am little skeptic, but maybe something like mozilla (I love emacs, but I think it will be too slow if it did all that) might come to encompass everything. I hope this will put things into context. -anand | ||
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 21:11:15 -0200 (EDT) From: Augusto Campos <brain@matrix.com.br> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: reviews - technical books dear LWN people: I have just uploaded some linux book reviews. Reviewed titles include: "Apache - The definitive guide", "MySQL & mSQL", "Tcl/Tk in a Nutshell", "Learning Python" and "HTML - The definitive guide" - all from O'Reilly, which kindly sent us the books. Linux in Brazil published the reviews in portuguese only, but you can always rely on Babelfish to translate it (kind of) to other languages. All these books are important for anyone trying to do serious jobs with linux & the web, and the lack of foreign alternatives make O'Reilly's books some kind of international best sellers. Ah, the URL! Start at http://www.linux.trix.net/livros_adg.htm and keep clicking on to the other books Thank you for your time and attention Augusto Campos -- Augusto Cesar Campos - brain@matrix.com.br, augusto@tre-sc.gov.br A fe' remove montanhas, mas eu prefiro dinamite. | ||
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