See also: last week's Linux in the news page.

Linux in the news

There was also a distinct pickup in the amount of negative press. The "who do you sue?" theme is back with a vengence. One wonders just how many of these nervous corporations have ever sued (insert name of large proprietary software vendor here) successfully. Oh well.

Meanwhile, here's this week's recommended reading:

• This article in Salon Magazine is one of the best LinuxWorld pieces we have seen thus far. Worth a read. "The basis for the decision to highlight Oracle was obvious, but the effect was unfortunate. Mark Jarvis, the Oracle VP, gave a slick presentation pushing the merits of Oracle database software, with a few obligatory references to Linux. The response from the audience was tepid -- they clearly hadn't come to LinuxWorld to listen to advertisements for Oracle software..." (Thanks to Peter Link).

• Wired News writes about Richard Stallman at LinuxWorld. "Like a Russian revolutionary erased from a photograph, he is being written out of history. Stallman is the originator of the free-software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system. But you wouldn't know it from reading about LinuxWorld. Linus Torvalds got all the ink." It's actually an interesting and sympathetic article. (Thanks to "llornkcor"). Wired News also published some letters to the editor inspired by this article.

• What should CIO's think of Linux? This ComputerWorld column attempts to give some answers. "Dear Mr. CIO: Your life is difficult enough already. You're grappling with the ever-alarming Y2K, the ever-later W2K (Windows 2000) and a variety of other crises. And now you have to deal with Linux. It's not that Linux is a bad thing. Far from it. Actually, Linux could be one of the best things to have happened to your enterprise in a long time."

• PC Quest's special Linux issue is now online. It contains a long list of Linux-related articles, and gives a good view of how Linux is being used in India.

• Microsoft has started the counterattack. Check out this ZDNet article devoted to the anti-Linux pronouncements of Microsoft's Ed Muth. "The more I study Linux, the weaker I think the value proposition is to consumers." (Thanks to Robert Graziani).

Let's take that last article as a good lead-in to the negative press. It's worth reading this stuff - how else can one be prepared to refute it? Or even, in the case of legitimate criticism, to make things better?

• PC Magazine (UK) has put out an editorial which is fairly critical of Linux. Most of the complaints have to do with usability, but there is also this: "The strength of Linux is also its problem--the general public licence (GPL). While the good thing about the GPL is that everyone can know what changes are made to the kernel, that openness limits what developers will add to the kernel. Why add something that has tremendous commercial value and give it away?" (Thanks to Joe Orton).

• CIO Magazine has an editorial about Linux in the enterprise. "Right now Linux is more Woodstock than Main Street. There aren't enough vendors dedicated to the operating system, and it's kind of hard to sue the surfer in Venice Beach, Calif., who gives you poor Linux advice."

• Here's an Internet Week column saying that all the vendor announcements at LinuxWorld don't necessarily mean a whole lot. "But will Linux find its way into the enterprise and (gasp) the corporate desktop? Don't bet on it. Commercial firms are risk-averse by nature. They are more than willing to pay an OS license for the right to sue somebody if things go wrong."

• Then there is this bizarre opinion column in ComputerWorld HK. "As I understand it, the penguin mascot came to be because Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, happens to be particularly fond of penguins. I suppose we can all be thankful that Linus doesn?t have a thing for something really disgusting like maggots or cockroaches..." One assumes this one is meant to be humorous. (Found in LinuxWorld).

Red Hat's new investors were the subject of a few articles. Not very many. To see how times have changed, it can be amusing to go back to our October 1 issue covering Intel's Red Hat investment. Now it's just another day's event...

• The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about the new investments in Red Hat. "`Red Hat will become the premiere flavor of Linux,' said Jon Oltsik of Forrester Research, adding that `this puts Caldera in a really bad position of becoming a second- tier version of Linux.'"

• PC Week reports on the latest investments picked up by Red Hat. "Red Hat's success in lining up enterprise vendors also has made it the target of other Linux distributors that want to standardize the technology under a set of specifications called the Linux Standard Base, or LSB."

• Internet Week also has an article about the new investments.

• News.com covers the investments and speculates that an anti-Red Hat backlash may be building. "The Linux community is sensitive to any one player dominating the open source community. The members of the Linux community who are really libertarian are going to feel affronted that the vendors are starting to...pick the winner in the market"

The tension between "free" and "open source," and the role of Richard Stallman drew some interest this week. Let's aim toward the LinuxWorld articles by starting with these:

• Here's a column about Richard Stallman in the San Jose Mercury. "You may find Stallman's views outside the pale, or simply wrong. I certainly don't share all of his fundamental beliefs. But he and his colleagues have earned the right to be heard."

• EE Times ran a LinuxWorld article concentrating on tensions between free and proprietary software. "The irony of hosting those companies at a Linux show wasn't lost on some. 'What do you see at these trade shows? You see somebody from a company stand up in this room and talk about their proprietary software,' said panelist Larry Wall, creator of the Perl language. 'The issue of `free' is getting lost. It's not getting talked about.'"

• There's a lengthy article about "rifts" in the free software world. It's essentially about Richard Stallman's presence at LinuxWorld. The author doesn't quite grasp the nature of the difference of opinion and paints Stallman as anti-commercial. "By packaging an idea about software development along with value-laden judgments about capitalism and commercialism, Stallman and the FSF risk offending the very people they need to recruit to spread their ideas."

  Internet Week covers the panel discussion. "The disagreement showed the contrast between the dry pragmatism of Torvalds and the revolutionary fervor of Stallman."

  TechWeek talks about the issue, and brings in Bruce Perens as well. Quoting Eric Raymond: "My ideology is: I want software that doesn't suck. We think that's a powerful enough argument for open source without the moralistic tub thumping"

• This week's Unix Riot column in Performance Computing is mostly about LinuxWorld. "Amidst the gaudy (by open-source standards) commercialism going on in the next hall, Stallman's sentiments, while extreme, seemed anachronistically quaint." Despite evidently having been at the "continuing the revolution" panel, the author manages to miss Stallman's point entirely. (Thanks to Alberto Schiavon).

OK, time to hit the rest of the LinuxWorld articles.

• Here's Nicholas Petreley's LinuxWorld column in InfoWorld. "I've overheard a lot of excited hallway chatter about the strong commitment IBM has made to Linux. But when it came time to vote for the show awards, the attendees picked VA Research as the best computer manufacturer. These attendees have not forgotten their roots."

• Also in InfoWorld: this article about the large cluster that IBM demonstrated at LinuxWorld. "The message IBM was trying to convey to users is that Linux has some innate capabilities for linking together parallel computers working in clusters -- not just working, but working robustly using existing hardware and software available off the shelf or on the Web."

• This TechWeb article is about corporate announcements and adoption. "The number of companies using Linux will double over the next 12 months, according to a survey of 166 IT managers last week by InformationWeek Research."

• TechWeb has a summary LinuxWorld article. "While most attendees at LinuxWorld seemed pretty happy about the operating systems' spectacular success, some feared the potentially corrupting influence of money had come back into a process that had previously been ruled by a love of creating good software..."

• TechWeek covers the conference from a commercial point of view. They also have a picture from the exhibit floor. "...behind the cheerleading there was some substance as major players such as Oracle, Compaq, Sun, Computer Associates and IBM displayed their new Linux-based software and hardware."

• Le Monde has a LinuxWorld article (in French) entitled "Linux prepares its world conquest." It's a combination introductory piece and article about Linus's keynote. A partial and painful translation may be had via Babelfish. (Found in NNL).

• Internet World covers LinuxWorld. "...perhaps the most important event of the week was the release of Gnome by the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat. Gnome was praised for making a Linux machine look and feel more like a Mac or a Windows desktop. Gnome (for GNU Network Object Model Environment) comes with a word processor, spreadsheet, database, Web browser, e-mail client, and presentation manager."

• The (Christchurch, NZ) Press ran an articleabout Linus's LinuxWorld keynote. "Linus Torvalds, the 29-year-old Finnish programmer who created the Linux operating system, was greeted like a rock star..."

• There are two articles (in German) in Der Spiegel about LinuxWorld. The first appears to be about Linus and his keynote; the second is about the conference as a whole and some of the exhibitors there. (Thanks to Hartmut Oldenbuerger). Babelfish links are available for the Linus article and the conference article.

• Computer Reseller News has a LinuxWorld piece focussed on corporate announcements. Interestingly: "...Adobe will take a serious look at Linux. It would be 'a piece of cake' to port the applications, [Adobe Chairman] Warnock said."

• Here's an article in Web Review; the author was impressed by what he found on the exhibit floor. "The Corel booth is indistinguishable from a commercial booth at a show like Comdex, with attendees sitting to watch a polished presentation calculated to convince them that Linux is ready right now to run their businesses. Impressively, most of them look like they might actually have businesses."

• InfoWorld has an article about commercial databases on Linux. "As the flood of vendors announcing Linux support at this week's LinuxWorld continues, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix have, as expected, all laid out plans to extend support of the Linux platform on the database level."

• Another article about Linus's LinuxWorld keynote may be found on TechWeb. "...Linux creator Linus Torvalds faced a crowd so friendly it would have made the pope jealous."

• The (Raleigh) News & Observer has an article about LinuxWorld. "To listen to the hackers talk about it, the game with Microsoft is virtually over." (Thanks to John Thacker).

• Two articles in Italian may be found in La Repubblica. the first is a basic introductory piece clearly inspired by LinuxWorld (they give the LinuxWorld logo as that for Linux as a whole); the second is about the GNOME 1.0 release. Babelfish translations available for the intro article and the GNOME article. (Thanks to Massimo Marengo).

• Macleans Magazine ran an article about LinuxWorld. They are a print publication; all that's available online is this abstract. (Thanks to Francis Wong).

• Here's a TechWeb wrapup on the conference, which is mostly a summary of corporate announcements.

Finishing out the LinuxWorld department: here are a few pieces that seem to have been inspired by the conference, even if they don't cover it directly.

• This InfoWorld column is about Linux on the desktop. "...there are still major philosophical issues regarding how a community-based effort such as Linux can continue moving forward and avoid splintering, especially now that it has started to reach critical mass. While efforts to avoid breaking off into multiple directions have been somewhat successful to this point, the entrance of major commercial players and the fiscal issues that will arise may completely change the Linux landscape over the next few years."

• TechWeb writes about Linux certification. "Hairdressers have certification programs, so why shouldn't Linux engineers?"

• Multimédium has run an article (in French) about Corel's distribution intentions. It is somewhat cynical in tone, pointing out that Corel has made few decisions about what graphical interface the distribution will have, or what software will be bundled. Babelfish translation available here. (Found in NNL).

• Inter@ctive Week talks about graphical interfaces on Linux. "...the contenders for the popular user interface under Linux remain KDE and Gnome, and at the moment, Linux experts agree, KDE is in the lead."

• PC Week has run an article about the Linux Standard Base.. "Intel Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. are attempting to formalize the unorganized LSB effort initiated by Dan Quinlan of Transmeta Corp., the San Jose company that employs the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds. Officials at Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. said they would likely support the effort as well when it becomes more organized."

• CRN also ran an article about certification. "Linux, spreading like wildfire across parts of the computer industry, has sparked an effort by Linux vendors, resellers and computer scientists for a formal Linux certification program."

• The Industry Standard has run an article about the Linux Standard Base. It's evidently based on Daniel Quinlan's talk at LinuxWorld. "Quinlan needs to strike a balance. If the standards body exerts too much control, it might blunt innovation. But without standards, developers won't be assured their applications will run on every version of Linux."

A few introductory pieces:

• Here's A beginner's installation guide to the Linux operating system, published in the Bangkok Post. "If you're a complete beginner to computers and not willing to pay your dues studying manuals and reading lengthy help files, you might want to pass on Linux. That said, there is nothing really all that complicated about installing or running Linux: it's no more difficult than installing and running DOS with Windows 3.1..." (Thanks to Frank Skagemo).

• PC Magazine has put out a very long series about Linux. It includes a great deal of introductory material, and a comparison of four distributions.

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has run a fairly standard introductory article on Linux. "A recent study by First Albany Corp. and the technology consulting firm META Group said Windows NT won't face 'serious competition' from Linux for at least four years. The study said Linux first must overcome 'very compelling weaknesses,' foremost of which is the 'Linux culture.'" (Thanks to Mitchell Blank Jr.)

• Here's a Linux installation article in the "Newtown Bee." "If you have not used at least three versions of PC/MS DOS, don't even consider leaping into Linux. The characterization of Linux as being 'DOS on Steroids' falls short. It is closer to 'DOS on Amphetamines'."

Various other business-oriented articles from this week:

• Forbes Magazine asks about why Intel is investing in Linux. "Intel... is investing in Linux companies because it needs to expand the demand for its chips. With Windows 2000 being delayed, Intel hopes that the trend towards Linux will still keep the demand for its chips intact."

• ZDNet has published a response to Jesse Berst's Don't bet on Linux column from last week. "This is all about making computer technology serve our needs, and not about betting on an underdog. I'm sure Bill is not going away. Just because Microsoft is in a position of dominance, just like IBM before them, doesn't stop Linux and other open source products from taking a major position in the technology landscape."

• This article in Fairfax IT is about SGI's recent open source moves. "The commitment to embrace and extend open source includes the following elements: ... Making Linux the desktop of choice for a wide range of work-station uses."

• Fairfax IT also has an article about SGI's hardware plans in Australia. "Paul Rushton has been appointed to the role of Australian business planning director in charge of the new range of Windows NT and Linux workstations. He intends to develop strategies to push the technology, once the exclusive preserve of high-performance computing enclaves, into the lives of everyday users."

• MSNBC has run a story about Microsoft's real monopoly - office suite software. "Because in all likelihood, you won't be able to view that important Word document or spreadsheet unless you have at least one box in your office running Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. So, like a few Linux shops I know of, you keep a Windows box around - because without one, you couldn't do business." (Thanks to Ramana Juvvadi).

• Inter@ctive Week writes about The Fall of Microsoft and the Rise of Linux. "Some Linux strengths, including its small footprint and efficient code base, are strong counters to areas in which Windows NT and the forthcoming Windows 2000 have been heavily criticized. Indeed, many backers believe Linux represents the complete antithesis of NT."

• Here's a ZDNet UK article about W2K and Linux. "...for decision makers contacted by IT Week, Linux is already being considered as a contingency server operating system in the event of Microsoft losing its case against the US Department of Justice." (Thanks to David Killick).

• News.com covers Microsoft's attack on Linux. "While the software giant dismisses the 'open source' operating system as ill-adapted to the marketplace, the company simultaneously holds it up to be a competitor--convenient while Microsoft is fighting off monopoly accusations from the Justice Department." (Found in Slashdot).

• Fairfax IT's OpenLine column talks about IBM's moves and also features a conversation with Caldera's Ransom Love. "Red Hat is tied into a demographic as where Linux is with regards to the technology - they're focused on the developer market. Seventy-two per cent of their market share is 16- to 22-year-olds. The other end of the spectrum is the business market and they have a whole other set of requirements. They deploy business solutions and what is critical is tested, proven integrated and stable solutions."

Finally, a few articles which were hard to categorize elsewhere:

• Byte Magazine is back, now under the CMP umbrella. So now we're once again treated to Jerry Pournelle's Linux installation problems. "Properly installed, Linux and the application 'Samba' can get all your computers talking to each other with less fuss and a lot more efficiency than the NetBEUI networking protocol that Microsoft networks uses by default.... There are other advantages to Linux, which we'll get to when I actually get it running; alas I didn't get that far this month."

• In ComputerWorld: The Secret of Linux. "Linux is just software.Not a revolutionary paradigm shift. Not the end of the software industry or even Microsoft. Not a religion, at least not for corporate IT people. Just another piece of software. Is it the product of radical free-software fanatics? Maybe. Who cares? The politics of Linux's programmers matters not at all to a computer."

• Internet Week talks about the joys of fsck. "The reboot question in Windows is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this is one OS that definitely forces you to reboot far too often. On the other hand, it recovers fairly well from sudden resets and shutdowns. For those playing with everyone's favorite OS du jour, Linux, this is definitely not the case."

• Should Linux be written in Java? asks an article on the Javalobby.org site. "Today, if I were to cast my gaze upon the current expanses of the software industry horizons, I would cast Linux as the young Luke Skywalker, a straight shooter fighting evil for the sake of good. I would cast Java as Han Solo, a helpful, reckless scoundrel and mercenary-turned-hero, moved to do good by Skywalker's example." (Thanks to Rob Landley).

• Web Review has put out The Insider's Guide to Zope, an overview of this system. "A few short months after Zope was released as Open Source, developments are churning along at a furious pace, and the Zope community promises to advance the platform on many fronts simultaneously."

• They also have an article on the GIMP. It's a fairly brief overview. "GIMP is a step in the right direction for Linux, making it more accessible and useful for the non-techie community, and helps to pave the path for a non-Microsoft-based world."

• Developers try to keep Linux from forking proclaims a relatively low-clue article in Internet Week. "Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus Solutions, a company that makes Linux-development tools, said Linux has defenders besides Torvalds. For instance, Ray Norda, founder of Linux vendor Caldera, already has two lawsuits against Microsoft going right now. If Microsoft or any other large software vendor tried to take off with a proprietary version of Linux, Norda would have the means and motivation to go after them legally for breaking the General Public License, which Linux developers must sign."

• The Journal of Commerce ran a column about the difficulties of getting going with Linux. The authors problems were mitigated somewhat by his discovery of the Gimp. "Even though it's only in its version-1.01 release, the Gimp is in many respects superior to Photoshop. It has a much simpler user interface and it does some things I always wished Photoshop could do, like being able to copy more than one image to the clipboard at a time. And the price is right."

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

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