Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekEverything Linux has been redesigned and is worth a look. Lots of good documention, pointers, and other stuff. It is, however, heavily frame-based. Over the last few months, announcements from large, commercial database companies have gotten a lot of attention in the Linux community. It's time to remember that there is also a thriving project that is producing an industrial-strength object-relational database as free software. PostgreSQL has produced some impressive accomplishments, and they're not stopping yet. Release 6.4 is currently in beta, and should be out shortly. This is a good project, and certainly deserving of a look. |
October 22, 1998 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to editor@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: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:14:49 +0200 From: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Comments on "impressive list of XEmacs advantages" Hallo, You posted a link to Rose Romildo Malaqui's list in the LWN Distributions page on why redhat should include XEmacs. But the funny thing is that most of the cited advantages are not relevant to Linux at all and others are outdated. Here are some: * Binaries are available for many common operating systems. - RedHat couldn't care less. * Some internationalization support (including full MULE support, if compiled with it.) - GNU Emacs 20.x has the same, partly even more MULE support (although RedHat ships it with these features disabled) * ToolTalk support. - Only on Solaris, not on Linux. * Better Motif compliance. - ... When compiled with Motif, which RedHat doesn't and can't. Also in my experience (I got burned a few times) XEmacs is more buggy than GNU Emacs, rms might be rather conservative on accepting features but he does a good job on release stable code (although I must admit that 20.3 could have been better). Also GNU Emacs redisplay engine is much faster then XEmacs', both on ttys (it does sophisticated screen drawing optimization which got dropped from XEmacs) and on X11 (the variable width fonts and inline image support slows it down a lot). Generally I think RedHat should not get into the "Debian trap" of putting so many packages into their distribution that a uniform quality control of complete releases becomes impossible. -Andi | ||
Date: 19 Oct 98 05:27:11 PDT From: Gopalakrishnan P <gopalji@netscape.net> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Linux and Oracle Hi, Thanks for the excellent job, that you guys are doing at lwn. Your recent editorial has prompted me to write this. Of late Linux is getting more attention from all the corners, and big companies like Oracle and IBM has jumped in to the bandwagon with their products and support. But we shouldn't mistake this for their love to Linux or open source software. One common thing that all these companies share, is an anti microsoft feeling at more or less different degrees. And the increasing popularity of Linux has given them a nice opportunity to use this platform for giving a lesson to microsoft. While we need all the applications from Oracle and other major companies to run on Linux, we should also see that Linux doesn't become a tool in their hand to fullfill their ambitious goals alone. There should be ample return to the Linux community, and to the vast majority of users in terms of free software and support for open source projects. One more point. Now we have an industry strength open source operating system. With GNOME showing excellent progress, and KDE getting more and more fine tuned (apart from the Qt licensing problem) in the near future we will have a decent GUI also in the open source way. This should satisfy the needs of a small or medium business to run all their applications based on Linux. But there is something missing. That is an industry strength Data Base Management System. True that from Oracle to Sybase everyone is supporting Linux today and their products are excellent. But we do need to have a similar product in the open source. In my opinion the one which can become a candidate for this slot is Postgresql. It is already has an object relational model. And of late, the implementation, documentation etc. have improved a lot. Technically what is lacking there is a scripting language (something similar to Oracle's PL/SQL). Apart from that it needs a lot of support from the open source and Linux community. Something like GNOME or Apache project is enjoying today. With this Postgresql can grow in to an industry strength DBMS and fill the void felt in this area. Hope you guys at lwn can do something about this! Thanks for all the information that you bring up = every week. Wishing all of you at lwn the very best. --Gopalakrishnan | ||
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 01:27:00 +1000 (EST) From: Conrad Sanderson <conrad@hive.me.gu.edu.au> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Linux and Intel: dealing with a different devil So Intel has invested in Red Hat, and "we are all happy that such a high profile company is investing in Linux". Not so quick brother. I've never liked Intel - be it because of the mediocrity of their processors (right from the start), their alliance with Microsoft, or their own monopolistic and bullying tendencies. And now I have found this: http://www.igc.org/faceintel/ Every Linux user, particularly those guys at Red Hat, should have a look at the above site, just so we know who we are dealing with. Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory Griffith University, Queensland, Australia http://spl.me.gu.edu.au [ under construction ] | ||
Date: 16 Oct 1998 02:14:23 -0000 From: Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Microsoft claims of not having a monopoly. Microsoft claims not to have a monopoly, and cites Linux as an example, further claiming that it was developed by one person. You refuted the one person claim in your 15-Oct-1998 issue, but you didn't carry it far enough. Although I certainly don't want to downplay Linus Torvald's role in leading the development of the Linux kernel, not even the kernel was developed by a single individual. And for an apples-to-apples comparison, it is not realistic to compare the Linux kernel (by itself) to Microsoft Windows, since Windows (of any flavor) is much more than a kernel. The contents of a typical Linux distribution have taken more resources to develop than *ANY* one corporation can muster, even Microsoft. Citing Linux as evidence that "Market entry costs are very low and profit opportunities vast in software platform technology" is thus completely absurd. There has not been (and will never be) an accounting for the cost of development of Linux, but it has been astronomical. The fact that it was largely a volunteer effort does not in any way support the notion that it was "low cost". If anything, the Linux experience demonstrates that even with thousands of engineers developing an operating system, it still may not be possible to effectively compete with Microsoft. Of course, many of us in the Linux community would like to believe that Linux will eventually offer effective competition for Microsoft, and we are optimistic about it, but it will likely still take at least several years for this to happen. Sincerely, Eric Smith | ||
From: dblake@phy.ucsf.EDU (David T. Blake) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 08:05:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Oracle/MS/Linux To: editor@lwn.net Editor, you seem to suggest a futuristic scenario in which Linux could become fragmented as part of a turf war in which a major company decides to push its own Linux developemnt, and fragments the developer team. This, IMHO, is not a real possibility. Linux grew out of freedom, and almost every developer values that. The amount of labor it gets in exchange for this freedom is something that no company, not even Microsoft, could compete with. Besides, if Linus has established one thing, it is that he has good intentions and is committed to doing what is in the best interests of Linux. And for that, he gets loyalty from the other developers. I don't think anyone could buy the kernel development away from Linus. If anything could happen, it would be an outmarketing of something else compared to Linux. But Linux is spreading already primarily by word of mouth - and the best marketing in the world cannot compete with real world experience. Linux should not, and in my opinion can not, be viewed as something that could be used as someone's tool to be manipulated. Linux will be linux. If that helps some company, it will help them. If they like it, they can give back by funding kernel developers (like Red Hat), or providing resources (like Cygnus for egcs), or writing excellent drivers (like SuSE). And even if the corporate world never embraces linux, it would still be the best open source GPL kernel ever, and it would still be the most stable full featured POSIX system ever, and it would still be a great developer environment, and it would still run the world's web servers. --- Dave Blake dblake@phy.ucsf.edu | ||
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