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Leading items and editorialsBreaking news: On April 4 we announced that LWN has been acquired by Tucows.com. Please read the announcement for all the details; suffice to say that we think it is going to be a good arrangement that, among other things, insures complete editorial freedom for LWN. Mattel and cphack. Well, we printed a lot of links to articles about Mattel's cphack lawsuit today, after this Wired article claimed that cphack had been released under the GPL. This was false, as can now be verified from Matthew Skala's homepage and Eddy's posting to Slashdot. Matthew and Eddy are the authors of the three programs, cndecode, cph1_rev and cphack, which were the subjects of the lawsuit with Mattel. They came to a settlement and assigned the copyright and ownership of their software over to Mattel. Mattel is still legally pursuing mirror sites that hold copies of this software, even though they've closed the security hole that cphack exploited. This essay describes the issue in detail and is also apparently threatened by the lawsuit. The media frenzy today, though, turned up lawyers who were willing to state that they felt the GPL could have been challenged on two counts. The first was the issue of whether or not the authors of a piece of software actually create a written instrument, "using paper and pen and a signature", to assign over their rights. Without such an instrument, the authors may be able sell their rights to someone else, who can then revoke the earlier license. In this article, Eben Moglen, FSF general counsel and a law professor at Columbia University, urged authors to create a written instrument, signing over their rights to the Free Software Foundation, if they really want to make sure their software remains under the GPL. This would presumably be sufficient to prevent a challenge on these grounds. The second challenge, though, is more disturbing. In the same article, Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, indicated that he felt the GPL could be challenged because no money changed hands. "'Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable,' Volokh said. 'Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright.'" This challenge would be based on the idea that, if no consideration changes hands, then there is no contract between the author and the person using the software, just a free gift which is therefore revokable. It could be argued that, under the GPL, the person using the software does give something of consideration, as ToLu the Happy Furby commented, "when you are the liscensee of a GPL'ed program you most certainly do give the liscensor something: you agree not to use their code in any proprietary programs. That can be quite a large restriction--certainly worth more than giving a dollar as you suggest--without taking away your rights to use the software as you wish for your own personal use--" Note that the above are just "potential" reasons for totally theoretical challenges. Because the cphack software was not released under the GPL, they will not be put to the test in this court case. This is possibly a bad thing, because the fear that they might be effective might be more damaging than finding out they are or are not effective. If they were proven ineffective, they could be forgotten. If they were proven effective, then actions could be taken to prevent their effect in future situations, such as by getting authors to sign over their rights to the FSF or by finding a way to include some form of consideration in the GPL that would make it enforceable. (Many thanks to the following posters and others on Slashdot: blakestah, Spud Zeppelin, Anomalous Canard, for information and comments provided in their postings.) UCITA update. UCITA is an issue that we've almost burned into the ground, so we won't go over the gory details again. For those of you that have been following it, you know that UCITA passed in the state of Virginia. The next battle is being fought in Maryland. UCITA passed the full House of Delegates on Tuesday, March 28th, with a vote of 83 for, 50 against, 8 abstaining. That is an improvement over Virginia, where it was passed almost unanimously. This may be particularly encouraging because the Maryland UCITA bill has actually been watered down slightly, compared to the original that passed in Virginia. This article in the Baltimore Sun claims that the Maryland version does allow consumers to get their money back if the software "doesn't work" and prohibits "electronic reposession". That is to the good. On the other hand, House members also "exempt the banking and insurance industry from the measure, and included special provisions for the movie industry." Talk about one big special interest group taking care of another ... such exemptions are clearly a way to pacify groups that have the money to fight this bill, while leaving the individual customer without equivalent protection. For example, no mention is made of the provision that makes reverse-engineering illegal, which is of most concern to the free software community. In addition, companies can still demand that lawsuits be tried in their own home state, where they may find the legal climate more favorable to their case. Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ). This will be our last update for the CLIQ, since the conference will be held only two days from now. Early registration is going well. However, we still may have to process a few hundred people the morning of April 1st, so if you want to get in to see the keynote, please register in advance via the website. If you make it to the event, be sure and stop by the LWN booth and say hello! Jonathan Corbet, Rebecca Sobol, Denney Tenney and Forrest Cook will all be there, at least for some portion of the day. If you're looking for Liz, though, you'll have to watch the halls ... she'll be out making sure the talks, BOFs and demos are moving smoothly. Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
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March 30, 2000
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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 editorialsA Secure and Open Society (ComputerWorld Canada). An interview with OpenBSD developer and recognized security guru Theo de Raadt, entitled A Secure and Open Society, takes a look at what OpenBSD has done differently to make itself possibly the most secure operating system available today. " The secret is straightforward. de Raadt and his peers assume that every single bug found in the code occurs elsewhere. de Raadt admits it sounds simple, but just rooting security bugs out of the entire source tree took 10 full-time developers one and a half years to complete."A simple concept, but one that requires a tremendous amount of effort to implement. Another view of the effort required was produced by this interaction on BugTraq. First, H D Moore complained about buffer overflows in applications shipped with SuSE Linux that had been previously reported, but continued to persist. Note that these applications were not installed with enhanced privileges, but could potentially be run by a more privileged process. Marc Heuse responded, bringing to light the problem caused when such bugs are fixed, but the fixes are not incorporated into the developer tree, due to lack of time or interest on the part of the developer/maintainer. The bugfixes produced by OpenBSD, for example, are all made available, but do not generally get incorporated into the developer's tree, leaving versions of the software for other free operating systems vulnerable. So blame the developers? Bad policy. Encourage the developers. Pay the developers. After all, without them the software wouldn't exist at all. Best of all, educate the developers, just as much as the end user, the system administrator and the distributor, to care about security, even when the immediate risk level seems small. We are all only as safe as the weakest link in this chain. Security ReportsLinux kernel-related vulnerabilities. The latest stable kernel prepatch, 2.2.15pre16, contains two security fixes that will make the update to 2.2.15, once released, more imperative. In addition, if a fix comes out quickly enough for the reported UDP masquerading vulnerability, that will be included in 2.2.15 before it is released as well.
gpm-root improper permissions handling. SuSE: IMAP vulnerability. SuSE has published an advisory for a vulnerability in the IMAP server that could allow an attacker to create or delete mail folders. Few details are included, but a fix has been made available. Subtle data corruption of TCP streams. Wietse Venema posted an analysis of a problem with data corruption of TCP streams when TCP-level options are turned on. Eventually, the problem was traced down to an unnamed bandwidth management system. Updatesmh/nmh. See discussion in the March 9th, 2000 LWN Security Summary.
usermode. See discussion in the January 6th, 2000 LWN Security Summary.
Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
March 30, 2000
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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 developmentThe current development kernel release is 2.3.99-pre3. This patch is made up mostly of a lot of little fixes. There is also a new "hotplug" master configuration option (which controls PCMCIA and other such technologies), 3Dfx Banshee/Voodoo3 frame buffer support, nVidia Riva framebuffer support, a master configuration option for WAN devices, a USB Mustek MDC800 digital camera driver, Sun 3x support, an IEEE-1394 update, a PCMCIA Xircom Tulip ethernet driver, IDE layer tweaks, an ISDN update, ATM networking tweaks, and a partial merge of NFSv3 client support. We mentioned last week the new sequence of "pre" pre-patches. The first 2.3.99pre-4 prepatch contains a number of architecture-specific updates, a new CPiA video camera driver (which relocates and adds to the existing USB support for this device), many changes to the eepro100 ethernet driver, a number of USB serial changes, a StrongARM 1100 LCD frame buffer driver, NFS updates, and some networking fixes. Alan posted an updated version of his 2.3.x job list. The current stable kernel release is still 2.2.14. The latest prepatch, 2.2.15pre16, includes two security fixes, for the exec and ELF loader problems and for the "ftp back masquerade" vulnerability. Another prepatch will be released if a fix for a recently announced UDP masquerading bug comes out quickly enough. POSIX threads. The issue of support in the Linux kernel for POSIX threads came up again this week. Many people who are looking for a clean, cross-platform implementation of threads get frustrated that they are not fully supported by the Linux kernel. The final answer is that they won't be implemented. The concensus among the primary kernel developers appears to be that doing a POSIX threads implementation is impossible to do both correctly and efficiently. Here's a sample of some of the opinions: "posix threads is a braindamaged pile of crap". "although a lot of the POSIX threads are reasonable, things like requiring uid/gid updates to be instantly effective across all threads in the process are just insane". "Note that the reason the kernel is not POSIX-compliant is:For those people in a pickle as to what to do as a result, Linus suggested they take a look at the netscape/mozilla threading library. Local Denial of Service against the Linux kernel. Jay Fenlason posted a note to Bugtraq covering a local denial-of-service attack that impacted both the 2.2.14 and the 2.3.99-pre2 kernels. Alexey Kuznetsov responded with a patch for 2.3for the problem. Support for large disks (>32GB). A discussion was initiated by David Elliott this week on how to support disks larger than 32GB on systems with older BIOS. It provided an interesting example of the complexity introduced into an operating system in order to handle essentially broken hardware. H. Peter Anvin commented, "Remember... most hardware/firmware is broken. Part of what makes a good OS is to work with broken hardware without sacrificing working with properly working hardware." In the end, Andre Hedrick outlined his preferred solutions for the problem, to which most people seemed to agree. kswapd fix. Russell King reported a problem with kswapd where it looped unnecessarily, chewing up unneeded CPU cycles. Rik Van Riel took Russell's first effort at a patch and cleaned it up for inclusion in an upcoming 2.3.x prepatch. Timpanogas NetWare filesystem releases. The Timpanogas Research Group has announced the release of its NWFS 2.2 NetWare file system. NWFS is released under the GPL. They have also announced the forthcoming release of the M2CS clustered storage system and M2FS distributed filesystem. The endless overcommit thread .... The endless linux-kernel thread discussing overcommit lived up to its name this week. We won't touch upon the issues again, continuing to redirect you to the March 9 discussion of this, since nothing new and wonderful has been added to the discussion since. However, we couldn't resist a pointer to this note from Richard Johnson on the topic, if only for the amusement value. Other patches and updates released this week include:
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet |
March 30, 2000
For other kernel news, see: Other resources: |
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. Deeplinux: A Deeper Look. deepLinux author Rick Collette took the time to fill out our new distributions survey. That gives us more information to use in our reporting. We can now state that deepLinux is based on Red Hat, but will not be tied to future releases, it will support English, Spanish and Dutch initially, and will support the Intel x86/Pentium, IA64 and Sparc64 platforms. It will have versions targeted for a number of special purposes; check the survey for more details. Many thanks for your time, Rick! Review: Alphanet Linux 2000 (Linux News & Care). The Linux News & Care site has put up a review (in German) of Alphanet Linux 2000. Alphanet is a new, Red Hat-derived distribution from England; it can be found at alphanet-linux.com. English text is available via Babelfish, but it's rough going. (Thanks to Peter Kis). HispaFuentes. Another distribution new to our list (but not particularly new) is HispaFuentes, a Spanish distribution based on Red Hat 6.1 out of Madrid, Spain. (Thanks to Jesus Climent.) innominate bootable business card. A German Linux support company, innominate, has also produced a Bootable Business Card, a rescue disk on a small CD the size of a business card. This one is localized for German users. (Thanks to Helge Kreutzmann.) Another embedded Linux distribution. From a press release we mention on the commerce page, we found information on Royal Linux, another embedded Linux distribution, this one from ISDCorp. Black Lab LinuxTerra Soft adds Altivec to Black Lab Linux. Terra Soft Solutions has announced the addition of Altivec support to its Black Lab Linux distribution. Altivec evidently provides access to vector processing capabilities in the PowerPC processor, leading to serious performance gains for certain types of applications.Caldera OpenLinuxCaldera Systems Ships OpenLinux eDeskTop 2.4. Caldera Systems Inc. announced the shipping of OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4. "It ships with the Citrix ICA client and is the first Linux high performance desktop platform -- and the only Linux product -- providing instant Internet access through preconfigured, preinstalled browser plug-ins and ISP phone numbers. OpenLinux eDesktop seamlessly bridges the gap between the LAN and the Internet as both an Internet and network client."Corel LinuxCorel Looks to Polish Linux (PC World). Here's a PC World article about Corel's plans. "Corel will soon announce several new Linux initiatives, according to [Corel VP Rene] Schmidt. Apart from ongoing upgrades to the Debian/GNU Linux core and the 'K' desktop environment user interface, Corel will look to improve Windows interoperability, add speech enablement to the OS, and provide closer Web integration into Corel Linux."Corel Linux Available in Russia. Russian software distributor CPS has announced Corel Linux Download special edition. The product is based upon the new Corel Linux distribution announced by Corel in late 1999. Al Fasoldt Reviews Corel Linux (Technofile). Al Fasoldt really likes Corel Linux. "It came with an easy-to-use display adjustment method that works just like the "Display Properties" function one in Windows. One of the worst problems in most other versions of Linux is the astoundingly dumb (and often unworkable) method they force users to resort to just to change display modes (from 640 X 480 resolution to 800 X 600, for example). Corel won my heart forever for knowing how important it is to do this kind of thing right." Debian GNU/LinuxDebian 2.1r5 released. Debian 2.1r5 was announced on March 23, 2000. This is another update of the slink version of Debian, still based on the 2.0.X kernel, containing security and Y2K updates.Debian Weekly News (Mar 29). This week's Debian Weekly News announces that Wichert Akkerman was re-elected Debian Project Leader. The partial success of the last Bug Horizon is also covered and the rumor that Transmeta's Mobile Linux is based on Debian is confirmed. Definite LinuxDefiniteLinux update. The primary website for the Definite Linux distribution, http://www.definitelinux.com, has been off-line for some time. We checked with Jason Clifford at Definite Linux, who assured us that the distribution and company are doing fine. The site problems are due to various ISP changes and name registration problems. Until these are resolved, the Definite Linux site can still be reached at http://www.definitelinux.net.Linux-MandrakeReview: Linux-Mandrake 7.0 (AboutLinux). AboutLinux reviews Linux-Mandrake 7.0. "I was very impressed with the addition of the Cryptographic step - this excellent addition gets around cryptographic export regulations by installing cryptographic modules from FTP servers around the world during the course of the installation."LinuxPPCLinuxPPC developer Jason Haas in car accident. We learn from Slashdot that LinuxPPC developer Jason Haas has been in a serious car accident and remains in the hospital. Updates on how he is doing can be found on the LinuxPPC.com site. Our thoughts are with you, Jason.Red Hat LinuxRed Hat 6.2 officially released. Jussi Torhonen dropped us a note very early this morning (Finnish time) mentioning that Red Hat 6.2 was in the process of being mirrored out to various mirror sites, indicating the official release of 6.2 was imminent. Later this morning, the release of Red Hat 6.2 was confirmed. Note that the ship date for the release is scheduled for April 10, 2000.Official Red Hat 6.2 announcement. Here is the official announcement of Red Hat 6.2. Red Hat eCos (embedded configurable operating system) 1.3 was also included in the announcement. eCos is an open source, non-Linux-based, small footprint operating system originally developed by Cygnus (before its acquisition by Red Hat), offered primarily for systems where even a stripped-down version of Linux is too large. "eCos 1.3 features a built-in TCP/IP stack that enables embedded devices to communicate with the Internet." Red Hat priority customers disappointed. Red Hat customers who have access to Red Hat's Priority Online Access are promised "when you purchase Priority Online Access, you gain access to priority.redhat.com -- the dedicated FTP server for Red Hat customers. From this server, Red Hat provides dedicated bandwidth for you to access updates and automated installation of packages via the Red Hat Update Agent." Unfortunately, just as the normal mirror sites are clogged with traffic, these same customers have been accessing priority.redhat.com -- and finding that Red Hat hasn't made Red Hat 6.2 available on that server as of yet. Slackware LinuxThe modutils package was upgraded to modutils-2.3.10 this week, build scripts submitted by Jan Rafaj.SuSE LinuxXFree86 4.0 Available for SuSE (LinuxPR). SuSE has announced that XFree86 4.0 is now available. " It is very important to keep in mind that XFree86 4 is still very much in development, and it contains a lot of new work. That means two things: there is a lot of new exciting stuff to try, but being new code, it hasn't had nearly as much of a workout as the stable 3.3.x releases. " The SuSE rpm's are available for download as are the release notes. And, oh yeah, "Have a lot of fun!"Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
March 30, 2000
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
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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 projectsHow Many Bugs Does Linux Have?. There is an interesting discussion going on over at Advogato. The original poster is amazed that the average distribution is so stable, and wonders if there is a way to somehow get a handle on how many bugs a large distributed open-source software project might have. "It is truly amazing to me that Linux and all the packages that make your average distribution are so stable. The stability is certainly not due to testing. I'm still stumped as to the reason beyond the most obvious one: things that are used (dogfood) are fixed. But what about the stuff that's not used, but you may one day need to work?" LART CAD files released. The LART project has announced the release of a full set of CAD files under an open hardware license. "The LART is a small yet powerful embedded computer capable of running Linux, built around an Intel SA-1100 StrongARM processor. Its performance is around 250 MIPS while consuming less than 1 Watt of power." Application of the week: Gnumeric (Linuxcare). Linuxcare's application of the week is the Gnumeric spreadsheet. "This application looks sharp and functions pretty well for my current needs. Given the momentum behind the GNOME project, Gnumeric is on its way to becoming a convincing alternative to similar proprietary applications." Developing with Open Source. This week's Freshmeat editorial discusses the approach one should take to develop software using the open source model. "Be very strict about the project. Write guidelines on how the code is going to be formated. Write guidelines about the extent of documentation required both in the code and externally. And then stick to your guidelines. This way, you'll understand the code in two months time, but more importantly, if new developers join the project, there will be some consistency and cohesion to it." LUIGUI is dead. We mentioned LUIGUI , the Linux/UNIX Independent Group for Usability Information, on the front page of the February 24th, 2000 edition of the Linux Weekly News. Now, only a few weeks later, we must report its demise. "I have the unfortunate job of telling you that the LUIGUI list and associated projects have been put on hold (read: cancelled) due to lack of support by the University."
BrowsersWhy Gecko Matters .... Jeffery Zeldman of both The Web Standards Project and A List Apart takes a look at Gecko. "If the result is a browser that fully complies with HTML 4, CSS-1, XML, JavaScript (EcmaScript) and the W3C DOM, it won't matter how long it took to get there."EducationSEUL/EDU Linux in Education report. Last week's SEUL/EDU Linux in Education report is available. It provides a link to Doug Loss and and Pete St. Onge editorial on Linux in Education. This week's Linux in Education Report talks about testimonials from teachers and students using Linux in schools that they received in response to the editorial. Many of these people thought they were alone in their efforts. It also mentions a search for a summer camp that supports Linux or open source software ... none were found. Here is a good project for next summer: a Free Software Summer Camp! Embedded LinuxKURT: The KU Real-Time Linux. A whitepaper has been released describing KURT: The KU Real-Time Linux, an implementation of a real-time system that lies in between the arenas of soft real-time and hard real-time. "Some types of processing (eg. multimedia) do not fit well into the hard or soft real-time categories. The periodic requests made by multimedia applications are sensitive to variations in timing. As such, they are not well served by the loose guarantees provided by soft real-time systems. Hard real-time systems are often faced with providing guarantees at the expense of providing services. Thus, while they can meet the timing requirements of a multimedia application, many times they cannot meet it's other service requirements."Enterprise ApplicationsIT-Director looks at four ERP suites that are under development for Linux. "Compared to heavyweight ERP suites like that from SAP, these may look fairly thin, but these are early days. The very fact that there are four Open Source initiatives leads us to believe that the ERP market will undoubtedly have at least one significant Open Source competitor." (Found on LinuxWorld.)GamingFor Gamers: An interview with CEO's of BioWare Corp.. Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Dr. Ray Muzyka are joint CEO's of BioWare Corp, a company based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada which developed Shattered Steel, Baldur's Gate, Tales of the Sword Coast, and is developing Baldur's Gate II, MDK2, and Neverwinter Nights. LinuxPower has put out an interview exploring their future plans in general and their plans for Linux. " BioWare's goal is to develop products for every possible platform. Linux is an operating system with a lot of potential for the future." InteroperabilityWine Weekly News. Wine 20000326 has been released, announced this week's Wine Weekly News. Other discussions include Wine's resource compiler (wrc) and compatibility between Wine and XFree86.Samba Kernel-Cousin. The Samba Kernel-Cousin for March 23rd covers five alpha releases that have gone out this week, including the second pre-release of Samba 2.0.7 and four alpha releases of Luke Leighton's Samba-TNG branch. This branch, by the way, is slated to go directly into Samba 3.0 if and when the code is stable enough. NetworkingAdvanced Linux Routing HOW-TO. A bazaar-style development project to produce an Linux 2.4 Advanced Routing HOWTO has been started by bert hubert and Greg Maxwell. They are looking for as many co-editors as they can get, since they have a lot of ground to cover. "It appears that Linux features a wildly powerful traffic controller under the hood that hasn't been recognized widely before, because of a staggering lack of HOWTO style documentation." Good luck to them, this project will be much appreciated.Along the same lines, Martijn van Oosterhout announced his Packet-Shaping-HOWTO.html. OpenNMS Update (Mar 28). The OpenNMS project, which is building an open source network management package, has started releasing bi-weekly development reports. Here is their first report. Office ApplicationsAbiWord Weekly News. - Starting Word Exporter, GNOME support, LaTeX export and Modal dialogs are the topics for this week's AbiWord Weekly News. On the DesktopKDE Development News. The implementation of a new icon scheme, a new crash handler, Java support and more are discussed in this week's KDE Development News. Meanwhile, over at mosfet.org, two new KWin plugins have come out, Krabber gets top ranking among audio encoders from Linuxcare and the kHTML widget gets complete bidirectional input support. ScienceThe SEUL project announces SEUL/sci. The SEUL project has announced the SEUL/sci project, to foster the development of useful open source scientific software for Linux. They have issued their first weekly Linux in Science report. This week's report includes a summary of recent scientific software releases, along with a bit more detailed coverage of the R Statistical System. Website DevelopmentZope Weekly News (Mar 29). This week's Zope Weekly News covers the announcement that ZEO is going open source and more ... "ZEO (Zope Enterprise Option) turns Zope into a distributed transactional object system, allowing people to add processors, machines, and networks to scale their web applications."Midgard Weekly Summary (#34). This week's Midgard Weekly Summary reports that a stable version of Oracle-enabled midgard-lib may be released within a week. Work on a postgres port is beginning as well, starting with developing better documentation for the internal Midgard API to assist the port. Midgard's default database implementation is MySQL. "Midgard is a freely-available Web application development and publishing platform based on the popular PHP scripting language." Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
March 30, 2000
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Development toolsC++Benjamin Kosnik released a new development snapshot for C++ on Friday, March 24th which is available for download.HaskellHaskell is a "purely functional language" that has several freely available implementations. We asked Jens-Ulrik Petersen for more information on the licensing of the various Haskell implementations and he provided a summary for us. "Until quite recently (last year in fact I believe), the Haskell community had a kind of academic attitude of distancing itself from licensing. However (because of the desire to be included in Linux distributions I would say) this changed and now all the main implementations have BSD-like or Artistic licenses."JavaEnhydra 3.0. Lutris Technologies announced the release of Enhydra 3.0. Enhydra is an Open Source Java/XML application server. The latest version includes support for wireless applications on cell phones and PDAs, load balancing and integration with Inprise's JBuilder products, including the JBuilder IDE. "Lutris Enhydra 3.0, which includes extensive enhancements in scalability and standards support, is the commercially certified and supported version of Enhydra. In keeping with existing practice, bug fixes, GUI installs, and other advancements and developments will be posted concurrently to the Open Source community. "Tritonus 0.1.91. A new version of tritonus, the Java Sound API for Linux, has been released, version 0.1.91. This version has MIDI mostly working and promises major improvements in the handling of 8-bit sound data. Perlperl v5.6.0 announced!. Perl v5.6.0 was announced today. Additional details were posted to the perl5-porters list. They include a long list of new features, such as Unicode support. "After almost two years of intense deliberation, patching, troubleshooting, and testing, the Perl Porters are proud to bring you the newest major release of Perl. Welcome to Perl v5.6.0!" (Thanks to Baiju Thakkar, PerlMonth.) Following up the above announcment, ActiveState has announced the release of ActivePerl 5.6. ActivePerl is a value added, binary distribution of Perl that can be downloaded for free. ActiveState provides commercial support for ActivePerl under Linux, Windows and Solaris. Perl Bindings for RealTime Linux. Zentropix has announced the release of perl bindings for real-time Linux. "Using these bindings, programmers can use the RTAI programming API from a scripting environment, thus giving simple access to a soft real-time programming environment." PythonPython 3000 to be Complete Rewrite. Linux Today reports a warning by Guido van Rossum that Python 3000 will not be backwards compatible with Python 1.x. Guido plans to develop 3000 in tandem with 1.7 later this year. (1.6 is due by summer.) "'Python 3000 is a monumental effort - all the code will be rewritten and the documentation revised. This is my one chance to reimplement Python and fix its efficiency problems. But how incompatible it will be is a very big open question and I don't have a concrete answer,' he said."Dr. Dobbs' Python-URL. This week's Python-URLcovers all the Python news for the past week. Tcl/tkDr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL. This week's Tcl-URL promises a pointer to reveal some of the 'hidden' Tk commands.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
Language Links Guile Haskell Blackdown.org IBM Java Zone Perl News PHP Daily Python-URL Python.org JPython Smalltalk |
Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessMandrakeSoft has been busy this week continuning to weave their classic Linux success story. Having grown way beyond their roots in the Red Hat distribution, Linux-Mandrake is clearly one of the top major independent Linux distributions. This week ASL adopted Linux-Mandrake for their Linux hardware-solutions, and last week MandrakeSoft bought Bochs and comitted it to Open Source. MandrakeSoft also announced two new Linux-Mandrake 7.0 releases: i486, and the UltraSPARC beta. Macmillan USA also had something to say about MandrakeSoft with their announcement of Secure Server 7.0, a secure Linux web server built within the Linux-Mandrake 7.0 operating system. The Pacoima Community Technology Center got a boost last week from Maxspeed and MandrakeSoft. In two separate press releases MandrakeSoft and Maxspeed announced their participation in a charitable donation to the Pacoima Community Technology Center. MandrakeSoft donated both software and technical expertise. Maxspeed donated thin-client workstations, monitors and a server. A nice balance of commercial partnering, open source nurturing and enhancing customer choice for MandrakeSoft last week. For the story of Linux-Mandrake as told by the distribution's creator, check out Gael Duval's feature article we published two weeks ago. MandrakeSoft's Chief Technical Officer, Jean-loup Gailly, talks about "gzip, go, and Mandrake" in this fun Slashdot interview from earlier this month.
TeamLinux blasted off this week with their corporate launch and the acquisition of Wimberley TechSys, Inc. (WTS) of Austin, Texas and Information Systems, Inc., (ISI) of Dayton, Ohio. WIS's chip design expertise makes an interesting first acquisiton for the new services firm. ISI's experience gives TeamLinux access to the health care and government markets. The company describes itself as "a professional services organization that provides customers completely integrated solutions enabled by open source / Linux technology". TeamLinux sponsors the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and Linux International. Their first announced business partners are TurboLinux, Mandrake, SuSe, Corel, Sun StarOffice, Compaq and HP. The management team has impressive credentials from established firms such as IBM, NCR, AT&T, TRW, Vanstar, Andersen Consulting and Coopers & Lybran. What I didn't find, at least at first glance, is any emphasis on Open Source experience or community involvement in those credentials. We wish TeamLinux well in service to their customers and the Open Source community. In IPO news last week Red Herring reviewed and Rackspace.com filed.
IBM announced it has filed with regulators to sell about $14.37 million worth of shares in Red Hat. Meanwhile Red Hat has reported its fourth quarter results. "Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the leading provider of open source solutions for Internet infrastructure, reported revenue of $13.1 million for the fourth quarter ended February 29, 2000, a 39% increase over revenue of $9.4 million for the fourth quarter last year. " Merlin Software Technologies announced the "Option Source Program, which combines the benefits of free & independently tested Open Source Linux software with compensation for programmers. The Option Source program is proprietary to Merlin and is designed to speed the development of Open Source Linux software." Merlin then holds joint copyright and intellectual property rights to the software so developed, which would then be released under a yet-to-be-specified "Merlin Option Source license". IHS Consulting Group releases findings of a study that shows Linux is stirring strong interest from the POS (Point-of-Sale) terminal market. IHS President Greg Buzek admits that it will be an uphill battle, though. "Looking forward, Buzek added, 'If those in the open source community can avoid a potential split in Linux, if POS drivers can be written, and if vendors step up for support, Linux could make some significant impact in the market. But these are some major challenges for a product that has no clear owner.'" Evans Marketing Services announced the availability of a comprehensive research study of Linux developers. "The study found severe dissatisfaction amongst Linux developers with the tools currently available." Compaq has made some of its new, super-thin, 1U rackmount Alpha servers available for testing via its TestDrive program. There are both Red Hat and SuSE systems available, with Debian "coming soon." Slashdot headlines are now being made available on QUIOS Mobile Phones, according to this recent press release. "The QUIOS service will connect geeks on more than 150 mobile networks world-wide to their beloved Slashdot.org headlines enabling them to stay connected with the pulse of the Linux/Open Source industry 24 hours a day." LinuxMall.com is urging the adoption of certification standards developed by the Linux Professional Institute. Section Editor: Dennis Tenney.
Press Releases:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
March 30, 2000
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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 Salon reports on the marriage of Google and ODP (the Open Directory Project). "The difference is that there are now targeted directory entries among the search results, providing both intelligible context and lateral, topic-based browsing, with your results as point of departure. If you search on 'Eric Raymond,' for example, you get links to sites associated with the open-source advocate, plus a selection of relevant directory categories, including 'Computers ?> Open Source ?> Advocacy.'" The article also contains a nice history and philosopy of the ODP. Legal and Political This well written article in SF Gate explains the danger to consumers of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act. "As contracts begin to apply more and more to sales between businesses and consumers, the software industry called for new rules to handle these specific cases. That's the problem. Because in any contract, there are at least two parties concerned. In the case of a software license agreement, the contract involves both a consumer and a software vendor. And who is the #1 supporter of UCITA? It's not the federal government. It's the software industry. Are your alarm bells buzzing yet?" (Found through LinuxToday.) Wired reports that Geeks Protest, Nobody Comes. "Only about 20 Washington-area Linux users and administrators showed up Tuesday morning in front of the Capitol building to protest a controversial federal law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Waving signs saying 'DMCA Copyright or Wrong,' they marched past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress -- and got mostly puzzled looks. 'What's the DMCA?' asked one curious tourist. 'Is it about the death penalty?'" Well, yeah. Netpliance LinuxPower takes a look at the i-opener from Netpliance and its recent relationship with the open source community. "The important outcome of the whole i-opener affair is that Netpliance suddenly had some of the best technological minds on the planet working with their product, testing novel configurations, pushing it to the limits, and freely reporting their results back to the community. Yes, this was costing them, but it was only a small fraction of the cost of actually employing these people." News.com covers Netpliance's blocking of modifications to its iOpener system. "The company appeared to be unfazed earlier this week when Las Vegas slot machine mechanic Ken Segler revealed that the company's i-opener Internet appliance could easily be modified to function as a Linux-based PC. But in a tersely worded statement today, the company said it has reconfigured the i-opener to prevent unauthorized upgrades." Business CNet reports on Intel's investment in Lynx, producers of the proprietary LynxOS as well as Blue Cat Linux. "Lynx will translate Blue Cat so it works on Intel's IXP processors, special-purpose chips designed for networking hardware such as routers and switches, Singh said. The chip competes chiefly against chips from Motorola and IBM... Intel's investment turns up the heat on Lineo, an embedded Linux company that is working with Motorola..." Here's News.com's take on Cobalt's acquistion of Chili!Soft. "Charles Crystle, chairman and former chief executive of ChiliSoft, said today he plans to donate about $11 million of the $15 million he expects from the acquisition toward boosting high-tech education opportunities in Central America." News.com looks at Maxspeed, which makes multi-head hardware used to deploy Linux in retail situations. "Linux, an operating system cloned from Unix, is spreading across all sorts of computer markets. Its Unix roots, which allow many users to tap into a single server, make it a natural pick for MaxSpeed." The Ottawa Citizen looks at the future of the Corel/Inprise merger in the light of Corel's falling stock price. "The deep selloff reduced the original deal to just 52 per cent of the announced value and it put a charge in the campaign of angry Inprise shareholders led by Don Magie of Toronto." According to this TechWeb article, Infonautics is betting big on Linux servers running Cold Fusion to handle the increased web traffic generated by March Madness. "'We were literally betting more than $1 million worth of promotion, betting it all on Cold Fusion on Linux as our scalable high-performance solution,' [CTO Ram] Mohan said." PCWeek writer, John McCright discusses how Intel will not be the only 64-bit Linux platform. "Intel's own partners on Trillian aren't content to back an Intel-only strategy. HP, for example, is signing up partners to make Linux run on HP servers equipped with non-Intel processors. The Puffin Group, for instance, is porting Linux to PA-RISC so that HP 9000 server users can run Linux applications. And Cygnus is making development tools for both Linux and HP-UX." The Motley Fool reports on Red Hat's fourth quarter earnings. "Red Hat intends to gain an additional 25% in annual sales from acquisitions over the next five years, though that figure would depend upon finding the right deals. The company has plenty of capacity for acquisition. Its cash balance sits at $242 million, eight times current liabilities, after Red Hat raised $261 million in a secondary public offering on Feb. 3. In addition, the company has a large balance of authorized shares available for use in acquisitions." However, the piece is not optimistic about Red Hat being able to increase revenues enough to justify its current valuation. CNet reports that Marc Andreessen has joined Collab.Net as an investor. "'Andreessen will raise Collab.Net's profile,' said Giga Information Group analyst Stacey Quandt. 'The start-up already has strong open-source ties through chief technology officer Brian Behlendorf, a key figure in the Apache movement, but Andreessen will give Collab.Net a higher profile with proprietary software projects.'" Here's a ZDNet article claiming that services and support are the only way to make money with Linux. "Wall Street high-flyers Red Hat Software and VA Linux are essentially using software and hardware, respectively, to prime the pump for higher margin Linux services gigs. Meanwhile, giants like Hewlett-Packard and IBM also are staffing up their Linux consulting practises." The Chicago Tribune published a piece on a distributed supercomputer built with discarded computers from federal facilities and donations. The machines are dubbed the Stone Soupercomputer, after the stone soup tale. "The moral is that when everybody works together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -- like the SouperComputer. " (Found on LinuxToday.) Here's a lengthy introductory article in the Dallas Morning News. "Open source developers are also stymied on other fronts. While RealPlayer, the most widely used audio and video streaming program, has been made available for Linux, Microsoft's Media player has not. Linux users can't open those files yet, and the prospect that Microsoft's player may yet dominate Internet streaming is troubling for Linux devotees." This column on the LiViD site advises a pragmatic approach in dealing with commercial software. "Eventually we will not need closed source commercial applications. There is no doubt that Linux would not be where it is now if it were not for one very important commercial application: Netscape. Commercial applications fill many gaps in the available software for Linux in the near future." This LinuxMall article takes a look at the Free Documentation License (FDL), from the GNU Project. "According to Robert McMillan of Linux Magazine, 'The real question is what the book publishers will be doing with this license. They are creating a lot of content right now, but very little of it is under an open license ... I'd be curious to know if the book publishers (IDG, Macmillan, Coriolis) are interested in adopting this license or not.'" Opinion Upside Today discusses the unmet consumer need being fulfilled by Napster. "The other interpretation is that a large number of arguably reasonable people -- such as college students -- have simply turned into a bunch of thieves. I'm just not inclined towards this simplistic view. No, there must be a gulf between what the record industry sells and what music consumers now want....The real question is whether the record industry will ever get it? " (Found through Salon.) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gives the top five reasons why "Linux isn't going to fork its way into disaster." In Opening the Dungeon, Salon writer Wagner James Au describes the response of the Dungeons & Dragons/Open-Source Community to Wizards of the Coast's recent announcement to release the game's core rules under an "open-source" license called D20. Many in the community greeted the announcement with skepticism, based on the company's history under previous owners. "Gygax, who in the mid-'80s left TSR, the company he founded, on the heels of internal conflicts that read like a treacherous palace coup, confirmed the gist of Harrington's charges: 'The former management of TSR was, in my considered opinion, quite incompetent,' he says in an e-mail. 'Indeed they had a most aggressive enforcement policy in regards to their copyrights, and their fan base eroded considerably, in part because of alienation due to their strict enforcement.'" Here's a CNet article about the future of Linux. "Even people who don't know what a CPU is have heard of Linux by now. Does that mean that the renegade, Unix-like operating system is on its way to becoming mainstream? Yes. But not by replacing Windows on your desktop." (Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann) How-To Here's a technical article on Linuxcare's site solving an obscure communications problem. " This will tell you how to set up a masqueraded PPP connection via IrDA from a Windows CE PC Companion to a Linux based notebook computer. Once you are IP connected, the rest is up to you." LinuxMall.com has put up an article looking at the GnuCash project. "...we've fixed some important mis-features in Quicken, I think we are building on a more solid foundation, on a better conceptual design, than Quicken ever had. So we hope to be better than Quicken someday, hopefully not too far away." Linuxcare's application of the week is the Gnumeric spreadsheet. "This application looks sharp and functions pretty well for my current needs. Given the momentum behind the GNOME project, Gnumeric is on its way to becoming a convincing alternative to similar proprietary applications." Dear Lina answers your questions about bash. Audio/Video Formats
Wired presents an
interview with Richard Stallman in mp3 audio format. The page
has links for the entire interview (21 minutes) or you can listen
his responses on the individual topics: Liberating Users (6 min),
Boycotting Amazon.com (5 Min), Hackers, Crackers, and Pirates (6
min), Advice to Users (4 min). They also have a link to the 1993
hit by RMS, "The Free Software Song" (.au). PBS will air Code Rush this Thursday evening at 10:00 pm ET. The show "takes a dramatic, inside look at living and working in Silicon Valley. The one-hour documentary follows bright and quirky Netscape Communications engineers as they pursue a revolutionary venture to save their company. Through the program's verit style, viewers see human and technological dramas unfold in the collision between science, engineering, code and commerce." (Found on Kuro5hin.) Finally SystemLogic.net interviews Transmeta's Dave Taylor. "I end up sticking my nose in a lot of things, but my job description du jour is Mobile Linux hacker. I came from the game industry, where I helped write Doom and Quake, and I financed/produced Abuse and Golgotha (not released). I'm probably best known for being one of the earlier Linux adopters in the game industry." AndoverNews.net is running this continuing nightmare installation saga. In this episode our author waits for a shippment and responds to email. "When it gets here, you'll be the first to know if I manage to make it to Linux utopia. In the meantime, I want to share a few of the quite engrossing conversations I've had with you in response to last week's rant about ease of installation." (Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann) TwoMobile.com has come up with a new analogy for Linux. "Just like Linux, rap music was something that scared corporations until it was big enough to be profitable, and suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the action." (Thanks to Donnie Brassco). Though Linux is not mentioned by name, this Dilbert cartoon shows clearly how the disadvantages of proprietary, closed source software are becoming more widely understood. "Put more bugs in the software! I'm making a fortune out here!" (Thanks to James Cownie.) Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
March 30, 2000 |
Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesThe Linsight team has announced the launch of its new LinDeveloper site. LinDeveloper is aimed at the information needs of Linux developers, including news and reference information.The O'Reilly Network has announced the launch of its Meerkat news service. It covers high-tech issues in general, in a headline format, and provides the ability to filter out just the topics of interest. MozillaZine.org has become an affiliate in the O'Reilly Network, according to this announcement. O'Reilly is lucky to have gained another site of this quality; Mozillazine continues to be an essential source of information to anyone interested in tracking Mozilla development. LinuxMonth has an article on Designing Mason [firewall] Rulesets for Multiple Machines. LinuxPapers is a new, volunteer, free on-line magazine about Linux which has just been announced. They've started their publication with two articles: GNU/Linux Distributions, describing and comparing six major Linux distributions, and First Steps With GNU/Linux (version 1.0), which covers some Unix fundamentals. EventsThe Geek Pride Festival, sponsored by Andover.net and VA Linux, is set to make a splash this Friday and Saturday in Boston. "Once upon a time, you would've gotten stuffed in your locker for being such a Geek. But now, it's OK. In fact, it's kind of COOL to be a Geek! Who knew?"Here's an updated press release for LINUX EXPO 2000 NORTH AMERICA - MONTREAL April 10 to 12. Web sitesLinuxLinks.com has announced 10,000 verified Linux links and other improvements, such as a new search engine.User Group NewsThe Linux werkgroep HCC afdeling Groningen will be giving Linux demonstrations at a computer show on Sunday, April 2 in Groningen (in the north-eastern part of the Netherlands). There will be an entrance fee of about Hfl 7.50. For more information email Johan Swenker at Johan.Swenker@HetNet.NLJobsService911.com is looking for authors to help bolster its selection of Linux tutorials. Go to www.learnlots.com to find out more about the company and authoring opportunities. Tutorial writers can earn $3500 for 100 tutorials! |
March 30, 2000
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Software Announcements
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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 weekMunitions. munitions is a cryptographic Linux software archive, "providing a high-availability, widely mirrored forum, hosted entirely in crypto friendly countries, for publication and distribution of cryptographic software as well as for fostering community interaction on related issues." Somewhere Near. GBdirect has announced its geographical search engine, called "Somewhere Near." The source to the engine will be released under the GPL "after it has been thoroughly debugged". The first deployment has been put to good use: creating a database of pubs in the U.K. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
March 30, 2000 |
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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: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 16:38:20 +0000 From: Stuart Ballard <sballard@netreach.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: Use of term "viral" in reference to the GPL In a letter published in the March 23 issue of LWN, Paul Collins writes: > The use of the term "viral" with reference to the GPL (and now the FDL) is > unfair and prejudicial. > > The GPL is not a virus. The GPL is written the way it is because otherwise, > others would be able to take away freedoms that you explicitly grant when > you choose to use the GPL. I have heard this argument many times and agree with it. However, I have not heard any suggestions of alternative terms for this property of the GPL. People are bound to continue using the term "viral" if there is no alternative, even if they disagree with the message it sends. Therefore, I would like to propose the term "infectious". Although this term sometimes has a negative meaning similar to "viral", it is also used of giggles, enthusiasm, smiles, yawns, happiness, determination, and many other positive characteristics. The word itself, therefore, is neutral; the interpretation of whether being "infectious" is a good or bad property of the GPL is left to the reader. For the record, I happen to think it is a good property. Stuart. | ||
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 15:00:00 -0600 From: "John J. Adelsberger III" <jja@wallace.lusArs.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: a sense of perspective Recently, the old 'moral crusade vs pragmatism' argument has started in LWN's letters to the editor section. Already, both sides are making false statements and committing the fallacy of repetition(if I say it enough times, it will be true!) For all of the readers' sake, myself included, how about getting some perspective, people! For the pragmatists: as long as you are free to do what you think is best, what practical gain do you derive from endless flamewars? And for the moralists: remember that freedom does mean the freedom to disagree, and that that freedom is only truly important on the matters that mean the most to us. Constant bickering does not magically cause the creation or improvement of code, nor does it promote the adoption of that code. In fact, the only results are wasted time and upset participants. -- John J. Adelsberger III ETAONRISHDLFCMUGPYWBVKXJQZ jja@lusars.net | ||
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 15:59:49 -0600 (CST) From: Dave Finton <surazal@nerp.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: I can't figure out Corel Corel, which as of late has made good decisions technology-wise. They took the time to cut down the bloat of WP7. Their Linux distribution is by many accounts a good piece of work, and they even got kudos for basing it off a non-corporate version of Linux (Debian). They've been announcing Linux ports of their major software packages, which brings to a good platform good commercial software packages (albeit proprietary ones). Even their much maligned merger makes sense from a technological standpoint. It combines together two businesses who specialize in nearly disjoint sets of the computing market. If Corel's fortunes were based solely on technological sound reasoning, their stock price would have been valued in the hundreds of dollars, rather than barely above 9 points on the stock market. Business-wise, of course, watching Corel bounce between stock scandals and sagging revenues has been a lot like watching a comedy of errors. For instance, I think the merger between Inprise and Corel would have made much more sense if they had both waited until they had at least built up stronger revenues. In other words if they had done this 6-7 years ago or had waited another 2-3 years before attempting the merger, I think the business world would have viewed this whole thing in a more positive light. Now it just seems like a couple of companies standing on their last legs trying to make a desperate grab at profits by any means possible. To be a little fair, I think Corel has done good things business-wise that signal a potential turnaround. But even Michael Coupland admits that he doesn't know when the "take-off" will occur. Why on earth would anyone risk something a big as a merger when he doesn't even know when his company will return to profitability? Corel needs to settle down a bit and get the ball rolling before pulling off these shinanigans. "If you build it, they will come" is not a bad long-term business plan, but even that, too, has risks. As most people who have been involved in the Linux community knows that sometimes it takes repeated proverbial beatings over the head to get the point across to potential customers (even now people don't take Linux too seriously even though it claimed the #2 position in the server market and is merely one percentage point behind the Mac in the desktop market). This sort of thing does take time. All in all, considering the good technological decisions Corel has made, I sincerely hope the company does experience their take-off Coupland keeps muttering about. Until then, I'll keep a skeptical attitude towards them. - Dave Finton --------------------------------------------------------- | If an infinite number of monkeys typed randomly at | | an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite | | amount of time, they would eventually type out | | this sentencdfjg sd84wUUlksaWQE~kd ::. | | ----------------------------------------------------- | | Name: Dave Finton | | E-mail: surazal@nerp.net | | Web Page: http://surazal.nerp.net/ | --------------------------------------------------------- | ||
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 18:17:21 -0500 (EST) From: William Stearns <wstearns@pobox.com> To: comments@linuxone.net, info@linuxone.net Subject: Meta tags in use on the LinuxOne web pages Good afternoon, May I respectfully ask why the LinuxOne.Net web pages include these meta tags? Would it be safe to assume that you're hoping to get included in search results for these other Linux distributions? I offer my apologies in advance if there's a different reason why these trademarks are used in this fashion. (less than and greater than signs have been changed to asterisks so as not to confuse html capable displays). *html* *head* *meta name="description" content="The source for everything related to the LinuxOne distribution of Linux - the most powerful operating system for home or office."* *meta name="keywords" content="Linux, LinuxOne, kernel, S.O.,Distribution, Labs, Red Hat, Redhat, Caldera, OpenLinux, SuSE, S.u.s.e., applixware, news, resources, Operating, System, OS, KDE, GNOME, GNU, Server, Network, application, Penguin, Onestop, Free, Download, commerical, support"* *title*LinuxOne | One Stop For Linux*/title* [snip] For reference, from their respective web sites: Red Hat, ... and all Red Hat-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the United States and other countries. ... You may use the following image on your web site as long as it is accompanied by a hyperlink to Red Hat's web site. If you want to use this image or other Red Hat trademarks for any other uses, please contact us. Caldera Systems, the C-logo, and OpenLinux are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Caldera Systems, Inc. ... Use of any other Caldera Systems trademark in commerce may be prohibited by law except by express license from Caldera Systems, Inc. SuSE is a trademark of SuSE Inc. Applix, Applixware, Applix Data, Applix Real Time, and Applix Builder are registered trademarks of the Company in the United States and certain other jurisdictions. Cheers, - Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Responding to this message indicates acceptance of the terms that your response and any future response on this topic may be republished in any form without conditions.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Stearns (wstearns@pobox.com). Mason, Buildkernel, named2hosts, and ipfwadm2ipchains are at: http://www.pobox.com/~wstearns LinuxMonth; articles for Linux Enthusiasts! http://www.linuxmonth.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ||