See also: last week's Back page page.

Linux Links of the Week

Doc Searls' weblog is usually a source of something interesting - and often even Linux-related as well.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

This week in history

Prediction of the week:

Linux will never go mainstream. But it will have a powerful influence nonetheless.
-- Jesse Berst, ZDNet.

Perhaps it depends on your definition of "mainstream"...

The development kernel was 2.1.121. A fair amount of controversy surrounded the addition of the QNX filesystem, since the kernel was alleged to be in a feature freeze at the time.

Oracle announced its first set of marketing partnerships, with Red Hat, VA Research (now VA Linux), Pacific HiTech (now TurboLinux) and S.u.S.E. (now SuSE).

Dell, it was revealed, had been selling Linux-installed systems to a few big customers for a year, despite its public denials that there was even interest in such systems.

An interesting press release came out. Here's a quote from LWN's coverage:

Seems that the "Timpanogas Research Group, Inc." is looking for investors so that they can "complete development and product launch for its VNDI (Virtual Network Disk Interface) Technology," which will be available under Linux. They had $2M in initial capital, but blew $1.4M of it in litigation against Novell. All is not bad, however: "On the positive side, due to the litigation costs, TRG posted a tax credit of $1.6 million dollars for FY97 returns that the company can carry forward and credit against future sales of its products." They're looking for another $2M...

A look at this week's kernel page will show where TRG has gotten in the intervening two years...

One year ago (September 9, 1999 LWN): Licensing problems turned up with some of the code distributed with Bind 8.2, a crucial piece of network infrastructure. In the end, all was worked out, but it showed the kind of difficulties that licensing conflicts can cause.

SCO distributed a brochure in northern Europe:

Linux at this moment can be considered more a play thing for IT students rather than a serious operating system in which to place the functioning, security and future of a business. Because Linux is basically a free-for-all it means that no individual person/company is accountable should anything go wrong, plus there is no way to predict which way Linux will evolve

They certainly failed to predict how things would evolve...

Quote of the week:

Any time you're sort of slacking off or saying you're thinking of taking a day off our president says, 'You know, I'll bet Bill Gates is working today.'
Marc Ewing on Red Hat's relaxed corporate culture.

The latest, greatest NFS patches were withheld from the 2.2.12 (and later) stable kernel release, due to fears that they would destabilize things.

Caldera 2.3 was launched this week. MandrakeSoft announced the opening of its Chinese offices, in cooperation with a little-known company called LinuxOne. Red Hat, meanwhile, announced "Lorax", the beta version of its 6.1 release.

Letters to the editor

From: Robert Graham Merkel <rgmerk@mira.net>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:01:45 +1100
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Re: "Let's move towards easier software installations"

In LWN 31/8/2000, Larry Kollar wrote a letter his experiences
installing GnuCash on LinuxPPC.  

It's unfortunate that he found installing gnucash tedious.  The
GnuCash developers (of whom I am one) are trying to make the
installation from source easier, even though, as Mr Kollar pointed
out, installing from the binary RPM would have been much easier.

However, the statement ". . .that an important user app like Gnucash
should be WM-agnostic anyway" suffers under the misconception that
GNOME (and KDE, for that matter) is a  window manager. While
GNOME works best with window managers that support its extensions,
GNOME is far, far more than the set of panel applets and file manager
most people associate with it.

In GnuCash, the GNOME canvas is used to render the account register.
The new gtkhtml widget is used to display (and print) reports.
gnome-print is used directly to print checks.  Preferences dialogs
could not be effectively presented without the extra widgets that the
gnome libraries provide.  Using the gnome libraries gave us all of
those capabilities with far less programming effort than they would
have taken otherwise.  Indeed, I personally expect that as time goes
on GnuCash's user interface will take more and more advantage of the
gnome libraries, and I am convinced that this is an entirely sensible
decision.

Installing the gnome libraries does *not* require users to stop using
KDE, or any other window manager they choose to use.  GnuCash will run
fine on any Linux desktop, and we fully intend things to stay that
way.  Installing the libraries is just a matter of running rpm or
dselect, or even using Helix's excellent gnome installer.  The amount
of disc space used is negligible.  About the only problem is that
running gnome apps and KDE apps at the same time might chew up RAM,
but these days video cards come with 1000 times the memory than my
first computer ever had.

Of course, anybody who really wants to write a GNOME-free GnuCash (or
any other example of the new generation of applications dependent on
GNOME or KDE) is more than welcome to try.  See you in a couple of
years when you end up reimplementing a large proportion of the
libraries you were trying to remove in the first place . . .

------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:04:21 +0200
From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@BIK-GmbH.DE>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Your GPL comments

I think that LWN has an overly narrow view on the license problems
mentioned at the beginning of issue August 31, 2000.

The GPL is the only major license that narrows linking with other
licenses.  Your text implies that mixing licenses in general is bad;
this is not the case, i.e. shipping BSD kernel with AFS would be no
problem.

I don't say that each clause in the "custom" licenses is good or
acceptable, but that has to be decided by the individual
user/binary-builder for the individual purpose.  The real problem - as
LWN rightly points out - is that linking may not be allowed even when
all licenses of the parts are acceptable.  However, this is just the
GPL's fault.

The GPL tries to eleminate all software that is not GPLed or can be
made so.  That is a problem for people like me who use much software
under different licenses where none of the clauses is a problem for
me (i.e. the formerly BSD advertising clause and many university
licenses). 

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@bik-gmbh.de> http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer/
BIK - Aschpurwis + Behrens GmbH, Hamburg/Germany
Tel.: +49 40 414787 -12, Fax. +49 40 414787 -15

Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 13:40:02 +0200
From: Davide Barbieri <paci@linuxcare.com>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: No open source company profitable?

Hello,

I read your comment about LINEO S1-filing and found
a phrase that states:

The combined  open source/proprietary software business  model is
unproven.  "We know  of no  company  that has  built a  profitable
business based on open source software."

I can give you a very little  example. In 1998 me and some friends
founded Prosa, an  italian company, which were forced  to base its
business only  on open-source  software (which means  use, modify,
develop, sell, etc. only free software).

After one year  of activity, Prosa has been  acquired by Linuxcare
Inc.. However,  in its  year of  activity Prosa  had a  revenue of
about 200.000US$, with a profit of about 10.000US$, after we payed
taxes and our little salaries.

These are not big numbers, but  they were pretty good for a little
company in its first year,  which grew without any investment from
VCs. And moreover,  proved that a *pure* open  source company, can
be profitable.

ciao
-- 
Davide Barbieri, Direttore Generale, Linuxcare Italia, SpA.
+39.049.80.43.411 tel, +39.049.80.43.412 fax
paci@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.