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Leading itemsThis issue of the Linux Weekly News is dedicated to the memory of Jonathan B. Postel. Mr. Postel, as most readers will know, died last week of complications from heart surgery. He will be much missed. Jon Postel was one of the founding fathers of the Internet. His hand can be seen in many of the protocols we now depend on. He was, the keeper of the RFC (Request For Comments) series of documents which, in a very real sense, comprises the open source code of the net. He ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority for its entire history. His dedication to openness and rational network engineering had much to do with the success that the net enjoys today. And the net is important. It seems self evident that Linux, and all that goes with it, would never have been possible without the net. Without a medium to distribute the system, collect contributions, and work with developers all over the globe, Linux would have had a hard time getting off the ground. Our community requires the net. Jon Postel was one of the builders of the net. We all owe him a "thank you" for what he did for us. Many other testimonials to the life of Jon Postel have been posted, some by people who knew him well. Please have a look at these messages from Dave Crocker and Vint Cerf. You may also want to read this New York Times article about Postel, though you will have to register or use the "cypherpunks" dodge. We got a note from Andy Partizio of CMP regarding whether Oracle will be supporting a version of Linux. Recall that last week's editorial was on this subject, following an article in Computing Magazine to this effect. The word that Andy got from Oracle is that Oracle does not plan to get into the Linux systems business. Thus last week's editorial addressed a fictional situation, but it still applies to the (likely) future, when some large corporation does venture into the Linux support arena. In retrospect, more investigation on our part would have been appropriate, however. Along those lines, expect some changes to occur with the Linux Weekly News, driven by a number of forces. First of all, as the Linux world gets larger and more complicated, LWN gets harder and harder to write. The amount of time involved in the creation of an issue of LWN has increased to the point where it is hard to sustain. We do not regret a second of the effort it has taken to do this newsletter, but our families are getting grumpy. If LWN is to continue to grow and thrive, it needs to become more of a day job. LWN consumes other resources as well. If you are reading this on Thursday, you will be well aware of the fact that LWN has long since grown beyond what our net connection can carry. We are working on this: more bandwidth is at hand. But we'll have to pay for that bandwidth. Finally, the Linux online publishing world is starting to get more crowded. LinuxWorld went online this week, signalling the arrival of the mainstream trade press. There are stirrings of other new publications as well. If LWN is not to fade away under a storm of well-funded competition, we are going to have to become more professional in how we do things. Better researched stories, wider coverage of the Linux world, etc. No more editorials about situations we have not been able to check out. So LWN is at a turning point. We could retire, let the trade press take over, and regain a lot of time in our lives. But we don't want to do that. We feel we have something to offer the Linux world. We want to be here next year. What this all means is that LWN has to earn money, somehow. The web currently allows a couple of models for online publications: subscriptions and advertising. Subscriptions, with the baggage that come with them (i.e. restricted content that could not be redistributed) do not fit well into the free software philosophy. So it has to be ads. Some of the groundwork has already been laid; expect to see advertising on the LWN pages shortly. Initially, ads will be sold through an ad network, meaning they could have little relevance to the Linux world. We will change that as soon as possible. (Companies interested in advertising with LWN are encouraged to contact us at lwn@lwn.net). We thank you for your support over this last year, and please stay with us as we try to improve. Speaking of needed improvements, we forgot last week to mention that the nationwide Linux installfest in France was a rousing success. Stéfane Fermigier reports that things went very well despite the highly improvised nature of the event in many locations, and that many new user groups will be formed. Interested parties can read the reports (in French) from the many events spread out over the country. Stephen Adler has put up a full report of his experiences at the Fall Internet World 98 conference. Quite a bit of fun to read (warning, it's long). Keep an eye on our daily page this week for reports from the Atlanta Linux Showcase. |
October 22, 1998
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityOlaf Kirch reported that systems running libc5.3.X (libc5) may still be vulnerable to the mountd exploits, even after upgrading to recent NFS packages. This is due to a bug in the older libc which causes a 1 byte overrun, which is sufficient to allow a root compromise. Until an nfs-server update is available (Olaf will be releasing one soon) that checks for this potential problem, you will need libc-5.4 (glibc) or newer to be safe. Even this may not be sufficient if you use directory names greater than 40 characters, due to another bufferrun in the newer libc packages. Olaf attached a patch for libc to his report for those that wish to close this immediately. The first set of repaired packages have been announced by S.u.S.E.. It specifically mentions both the nfsserver problems and the libc5 hole. Expect to see followups from the other distributions soon. Dan Brumleve published the existence of yet another Netscape security problem, this one being an exploitable MIME type buffer overflow. It can be used to crash the browser and potentially compromise root, though the latter has not yet been demonstrated. Fyodor published a list of operating system preferences at major security sites, which he garnered off the net using his latest version of nmap, a utility for port scanning large networks. Of course his choice of what is a major security site is presumably biased, but the results are fun in any case. No surprise to us, Linux was most popular, followed by other Unices. The version of nmap he used won't be released for a while yet. Sandia Labs has announced what they call the world's smallest combination lock. The device uses microelectromechanical system (MEMS) and contains a series of tiny notched gears "so small that a microscope is required to see them" and is touted as much more reliable than software, since it is less subject to manipulations. (Pointer to the article was found in the ISN mailing list.) The 1999 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium will be held in February, in San Diego, CA. Tutorials are also offered, in addition to the primary program. See the web site for more information. |
October 22, 1998 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel release is still 2.1.125, no new releases have come out in the last week. There is a 2.1.126 pre2 patch from October 17. On top of that, the adventurous can apply Alan Cox's 2.1.126pre2ac2 patch. This patch adds a lot of fixes and other goodies; see the 2.1.126pre2ac2 announcement for a list of what's there. Alan Cox's 2.2 jobs list contains the list of things that still need to be fixed before 2.2 goes out. Insufficient jiffies? This week's big debate was what to do about the "jiffies wraparound" bug. "Jiffies" is an internal kernel variable which is incremented each clock tick; it is used in a number of places to deal with short intervals of time. Given its resolution, it overflows and wraps back to zero after about 490 days of uptime. This problem has been around forever, but changes in the 2.1 kernel make the effects of the wraparound much more severe; in some cases, at least, the system dies. The problem is widespread through the Linux kernel, and any fix requires changing a lot of code. That makes a fix for 2.2 unlikely, especially since Linus is not worried about the problem. Alex Buell is looking for a wider audience for his Framebuffer HOWTO before moving its status to 1.0. If you are interested in reviewing his HOWTO and providing comments, check out the current draft and drop Alex a line. A call went out to create a white paper on Linux kernel performance. The point here is to evaluate the performance characteristics of the current kernel, and to look at ways in which the design of the kernel can be improved for better performance and scalability. Participants are being recruited; see the announcement if you're interested. An announcement has been made regarding the (perhaps unfortunately named) NADS (Network Architecture Discovery and Switching) project. This project seems to be trying to allow for networks to be served by multi-homed servers without the need to use subnetting. This is a school project, so something will actually likely be completed by their deadline. Work on the NFS server continues, headed up by H.J. Lu. A milestone was reached this week when an obnoxious Solaris interoperability bug was tracked down and squashed. The rescue of NFS (version 2, UDP) for 2.2 is looking to be near completion. A new version of the system and kernel log daemon is out. Version 1.3-27 fixes a number of problems and works with latter-day 2.1 kernels. |
October 22, 1998
Since we're a weekly publication, chances are we'll be behind a rev or two on the kernel release by the time you read this page. Up-to-the-second information can always be found at LinuxHQ. |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaFor those who have been waiting for the Caldera update script that can upgrade from Caldera 1.1 directly to the new 1.3, the script is now available.DebianApt 0.1.7 has been released. The announcement covers the changes in the new version, which seem to primarily include issues with the stdc++ library and fixes for a glitch in file URI handling.The Spanish magazine "Linux Actual" is featuring three articles on Debian GNU/Linux. No on-line versions are currently available. For more information, see the Debian announcement. Compaq has donated a nice Alpha system to the Debian Project. We're sure it will quickly be put to good use. The Debian freeze took place on schedule. Sounds like the party was a lot of fun. You can find some "Favorite Quotes from the Party" at the same site that held the freeze countdown. MandrakeThe latest news from Mandrake includes an update to the Linux-Mandrake website, the planned release of the Official Linux Mandrake Guide, a Russian edition, and much more. Perhaps most importantly, they will be quickly moving to found a commercial entity. They are still looking for more people who wish to participate. Check their news for more information.Red HatThe Red Hat Secure Web Server 2.0 just won the NetWorld+Interop Data Communications/LanTimes Network Applications Category of the Best of Show awards, according to our sources at Red Hat.Alan Cox fans may want to check out his latest editorial for linux.org.uk. S.u.S.E.S.u.S.E. will be running two booths at the Atlanta Linux Showcase starting today. They plan a fairly large presence and will be demonstrating both the base S.u.S.E. distribution and the Office Suite 99 package. They are hoping to have received the first set of Office Suite 99 CDs by our press time, but no confirmation has come in as of yet.S.u.S.E. now has available packages for Qt-1.41 and KDE 1.0 linked against the new version of Qt. DragonLinuxOur attention was drawn this week to the "Dragon Linux" distribution. Dragon Linux's niche is that it is a very small (25MB) system which installs via UMSDOS on top of a running DOS system. The Dragon Linux page has all the information and downloads. |
October 22, 1998
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed. |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsJavaThe Blackdown Java-Linux JDK Porting Team for PowerPC has announced their version 1 port of Sun's JDK 1.1.7 for the MkLinux, Linux-PMac, and LinuxPPC platforms. They sent special thanks to the Blackdown x86 porting team, particularly to Juergen Kreileder for almost all of the work to get the 1.1.6 diffs to work on 1.1.7 with no regressions!The latest JDC Tech Tips concentrates on improving I/O performance using buffers and Jar file manifests. PythonThe first issue of the Python Journal is available. (Thanks to NNL.)Also regarding Python: Eric Raymond now recommends Python as a first programming language in his Hacker HOWTO. "If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects." LLNLDistribution.tgz is a full source distribution for several LLNL-managed packages, including NumPy, CXX, Gist and others. The release notes for the distribution cover where to get it and specific changes in the latest version. A brief weekly newsletter of interesting Python posts and announcements seems to have popped up. It is called "Python-URL," and you can read this week's issue to see what it's like, and to get subscription information. Version 0.20 of xmlarch, an XML architectural forms processor, has been released. Tcl/tkVersion 1.0 of TkApache was released Monday, October 19th. TkApache is a configuration tool built with Perl/Tk. It is currently in a development stage, but a feature freeze was called in order to get a stable product for ApacheCon. If you are interested in more information, check out the TkApache homepage. |
October 22, 1998 |
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Development projectsLinuxPower has published an interview with Rasterman, Mandrake, and Technoir concerning the Enlightenment window manager and its future. Alan Robertson has started a web page for high-availability Linux. It is just a start and he is looking for comments/additions. ht://DigGeoff Hutchison of the ht://Dig project tells us that the 3.1.0b2 release should be out soon, with recent work on a nasty bug in the database code finally completed. He also mentioned that he's looking for programmers interested in improving the accuracy of searches as well as information on a GPL-compatible HTTP/1.1 implementation. If you are interested, contact Geoff directly.GNUGuile 1.3 was released on Tuesday. GUILE is the GNU extension language, which is planned to be linked into all GNU programs that call for extensibility. It is a library implementation of the Scheme language, with additional facilities. The abridged release notes indicate that the new version contains some bug fixes, improvements to the C API, easier compilation and linking for C code that uses Guile and more.The Electric VLSI Design System is now available from the Free Software Foundation site. linuxconfThis linuxconf FAQ page now allows people to add entries to the FAQ database. The author, Friedrich Lobenstock, welcomes comments. If you don't find the answer you want there, you may want to try Jeremie Wood's Linuxconf on Red Hat 5.1 FAQ. It is unofficial and does not have a search interface, but it appears to have some good information. | |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessComputer Associates has announced an open beta period for its Ingres II database engine. The beta version can be obtained for free from CA's web site. Be warned, though, that it has a rather short fuse: the beta version expires on December 2, 1998. (Those interested can also read a short Sm@rt Reseller article about Ingres on Linux). Andreas Sikkema wrote in to give us a pointer to a firewall for Linux now available from IONA Technologies. Their emphasis is Inter-ORB support. The arrival of the Inter-ORB Interoperability Protocol (IIOP) means that CORBA is now ready for the Internet. The availability of the Firewall for Linux can be confirmed on their availability page. There is an article in Red Herring about how the Google search engine is being turned into a commercial endeavor. The article never mentions it, but Google runs on Linux. A couple more Linux system VAR's have announced their presence this week. Sunset systems seems to specialize in low-cost systems ("Home of the $500 Linux computer"). Wheat Computers sells systems preinstalled with the Mandrake distribution and KDE. Cobalt Networks (maker of cool, low-cost, Linux-based servers) has found a big-league investor in the form of France Telecom; see Cobalt's press release for more. (Found in NNL). Press Releases:
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October 22, 1998 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThe character of the coverage of Linux in the press changed somewhat this week, perhaps due to a couple of factors. The Microsoft trial is dominating the technology headlines, with the result that many of the mentions of Linux were made in that context. Numerous articles made passing mention of Linux as an alternative to Windows; we have not listed those here. It may also be true that the wave of coverage resulting from Intel's investment in Red Hat is subsiding somewhat. Anyway, here are the trial-related articles that are worth passing on:
There was a small run of introductory articles in the overseas (non-U.S.) press.
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October 22, 1998
``Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?''
``Add in the other software bundled with the typical Linux distribution and you have an approximately $4,000,000,000 investment contained on that one single CD-ROM.''
``No, he's not the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or even Mark McGwire. This god is a geek who wears socks with his sandals. His name is Linus Torvalds.''
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesClemmitt Sigler wrote in to tell us about his mini-HOWTO for installing and configuring the General Instrument SURFboard 1000 phone-return cable modem. He has also made an autoinstallation disk image available.Eric Harlow is writing a book on Linux applications development, with an emphasis on GTK, PostgreSQL, CORBA, and other good things. The GTK chapters seem to be the most complete. They are available, but in the RTF format; he has a link to an RTF reader if you need one. Ying Zhang has written a mini-HOWTO on setting up Samba on RedHat Linux. The December Issue of the Linux Journal is scheduled to be shipped November 6th. The announcement contains a complete table of contents, for those who want a peek at what is coming. AL DEV has released version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL Database HOWTO. EventsThe Atlanta Linux Showcase is this week. A good time will certainly be had by all. Here is the Showcase home page for those who haven't seen it. ALS also issued a press release on the more than 60 companies that will be exhibiting there.A new conference on free software has been announced. The Bazaar will be held in New York, March 13-15, 1999. They are expecting over 5,000 attendees. The Call For Papers for the USENIX 1999 Annual Technical Conference has been posted. The conference will be in June, in Monterey, California, USA. They are looking for instructors for tutorials as well. It would be good to see an increased Linux presence at this well-known conference ... UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) is giving away Red Hat 5.1 CD's as part of their "Latin American And Caribbean Unesco NetDays" celebration. Here's the info (in English) (Spanish, French, and Portugese available from the Net Days page). "We believe LINUX can play a very important role in Latin American and Caribbean modernisation, constructing networks to permit a great number of universities, colleges, schools and educational centers, to connect to Internet in order to use this fabulous tool to improve their scientific and cultural levels." (Thanks to Roger Dingledine for forwarding this on to us). Web sitesThe Free Software Bazaar is a site where people can list free software projects that they would like to see done, along with the amount of money they would be willing to contribute, to the author or to their favorite charity (seems to be a common thread) for a completed project. It is a good place to look for ideas for fun projects to work on. Although most of the money offered is very nominal, at least one of the projects does offer a full $1000 .. go see the list to find out which one!There is also the compatriot page at the same site for giving away or lending that Linux CD, hardware or literature that you no longer need. User Group NewsB. 'Avatar' Avianto sent us this report on a recent Installfest held in Bandung, Indonesia, potentially the first in Indonesia. The Installfest included a presentation on Linux and the successful installation of Linux on 9 PCs and 1 laptop.The first meeting of the El Segundo/LAX/South Bay Linux User's group has been announced for October 24th. Time to get in on the ground floor ... A mailing list has been started to help people in the process of developing, growing and maintaining Linux User Groups. Check out the announcement for more details. Help WantedRed Hat is hiring, as usual. This time they are after part time quality assurance people. |
October 22, 1998
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Software AnnouncementsSoftware
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back 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 | ||