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Leading items and editorialsComdex. This year's Comdex (the 20th anniversary of this massive show) features the "Linux Business Expo" for the first time. This page is being written in the LWN booth among a great deal of noise and confusion. If it seems even more incoherent than usual, that's the reason. It's only Wednesday, and it has been a long, strange trip... noise wars between the Caldera and Linux Today booths... Slashdot trades in beanbags for Aeron chairs... who are those XLinux girls anyway?... did Linux Today really have to bring an accordion?... Conectiva Linux comes north... that shiny new LinuxMall van... $20 to park a car... sure would be nice to have restrooms on the same floor... Corel's surround sound system... you mean there was a conference program too...? and why o why can't Comdex provide an Internet connection that works? But seriously, the Linux Business Expo has proved to be useful in a couple of different ways. First of all, the exhibitors are mostly walking around with highly pleased (if tired) grins on their faces. This exhibition has been good for the business of Linux. The next Comdex LBE will be substantially larger. More interestingly, the LBE has turned out to be a top-quality Linux advocacy event. There are tremendous numbers of people here who know little, if anything, about Linux; they learned a lot here. The LBE got Byte's "Best of Comdex" award for a reason - the good stuff is here, and people are seeing that. It is hard to imagine a better way to bring more people into the Linux sphere. See our Comdex page for some coverage and photos. Moves in Linux professional certification. It has been a busy week on the certification front, as two competing organizations make announcements and seek to become the de facto certification standard. Some of what's going on includes:
The end result of all this is that certification for Linux professionals will be available from two sources shortly. This news gives rise to a couple of questions... Is there room for two certification organizations? (Actually three, counting Red Hat's distribution-specific program). That depends on a number of factors, including the demand for certification in general, the quality of the individual programs, and the demand for Linux administrators in general. If all goes well, both programs could be around for a long time. Is Linux professional certification really necessary? Certainly not everybody is sold on this point. Certification has its uses, however. It does provide a minimal assurance to employers - especially small businesses and human resources departments which lack the technical background to truely judge job applicants. It gives training companies a target to aim for - and it gives students a way to judge trainers as well. And certification is an important part of Linux's public image in general. It is not for nothing that Microsoft, in its Linux Myths page, asked how many certified Linux engineers there are. The existence of a credible certification organization is an important step in corporate adoption of Linux. Thursday, November 25, is the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday; the LWN weekly edition will not be published that week. The daily updates page will be updated as always, and the weekly edition will return on December 2. Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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November 18, 1999
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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. |
SecuritySecurity ReportsFreeBSD: Exploitable hole in ssh-1.2.27. An exploitable hole in ssh-1.2.27 has been reported under FreeBSD and a patch has been released. Note that versions of ssh not compiled with "RSAREF" defined are not vulnerable. Current reports indicate that Debian GNU/Linux and the international rpm packages for ssh are not vulnerable to this problem as a result.thttpd remotely-exploitable buffer overflow. A buffer overflowin thttpd, a small, fast web server with a limited feature set, has been reported and fixed by the author in an extremely prompt manner. Check below for distribution updates for thttpd. Red Hat security update for user-mode nfsd. Red Hat has issued an update to nfsd for versions 4.2 and 5.2 of the distribution. The older user-mode NFS daemon had an unpleasant buffer-overflow problem. Those running older systems will want to upgrade. Red Hat 6.x, which is running the 2.2 kernel, is not vulnerable.
Updatesbind: Six different vulnerabilities are described on this ISC page. Upgrades are strongly recommended. nfsd: Buffer overflows in the nfs-server packages have been identified and fixed.proftpd: Version 1.2.0pre9 of proftpd has produced enough confidence to result in updated packages, the first package updates for proftpd we've seen since late September. thttpd: A remotely-exploitable buffer overflow has been discovered. ResourcesSANS: First Tuesday broadcasts. The SANS Institute November First Tuesday broadcasts will include two topics, "The Hunt for RingZero", which talks about investigating reports of heavy scanning activity in September and "The CVE Project", which talks about efforts to "to develop a common language for describing vulnerabilities and consensus list of vulnerabilities and exposures". The broadcasts are free, but registration is required.EventsThe 12th Annual FIRST Conference. The Call-For-Papers for the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) Conference has been issued. The conference will be held June 25th through the 30th, in Chicago, IL, USA.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
November 18, 1999
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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 2.3.28; this one is a small patch which came quickly on the heels of 2.3.27 - which had some embarrassing compilation problems. One thing that remains broken in this release is ramdisks. The current ramdisk implementation doesn't sit will with the new memory management in the 2.3 kernels. Until somebody fixes the problem, ramdisks will not be available. The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.13. Work continues on 2.2.14; the latest prepatch, which is considered a release candidate, is 2.2.14pre6. Why is the ext2 filesystem defragmenter not maintained? The answer, of course, as per this week's discussion, is that there is rarely a need to defragment ext2 filesystems. Ext2 is designed to resist fragmentation in most situations. One exception can be with larger files. Once a file exceeds the size of an ext2 "block group," the system has no choice but to fragment it somewhat. The magic size depends on the block size used to create the filesystem. Older ext2 filesystems - of which there are a lot out there - use a 1K block size, and will fragment files that are larger than 8MB. Newer filesystems use 4K blocks instead, which can go up to 128MB. This, of course, begs the next question: can a 1K filesystem be converted in place to 4K? The sad answer is that no such utility exists now; it is necessary to back up the filesystem, recreate it, then restore the files back onto it. For most applications it is probably not worth the effort. Version 0.1.0-pre2 of the Encryption HOWTO is now available. This HOWTO currently covers the encryption of disks; expansion into networking (i.e. FreeS/WAN) is in the works. BitVapor? Larry McVoy is getting closer to a release of the BitKeeper code management system, which is likely to be used for management of the kernel source in the future. In lieu of an actual release now, Larry has announced a set of screen shots which show, graphically, the history of the various kernel versions over time. Larry will also be releasing a repository containing the entire kernel development history - a lot of stuff. Other patches and updates released this week include:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
November 18, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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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. Caldera OpenLinuxXFree86 3.3.5 RPM packages for OpenLinux 2.3. These packages are now available in the "earlyaccess" area of the Caldera ftp site. Note that these are not official upgrades and are provided so that people can try them out and report bugs. If you're interested, you'll find them here.Debian GNU/LinuxDebian Weekly News. The Debian Weekly News for November 17th has been published. Top items include the new Debian Machine Usage Policy, yet another Bugsquash party, planned for this Saturday, November 20th, and a Y2K update for slink with "fixes for every known Y2K problem in Slink except a small Y2K problem in nethack (which still has no known fix)". Comments on the new Corel Linux distribution, which is Debian-based, are mentioned as well.LASER5 LinuxLASER5 news from Japan. This press release touts the progress that the LASER5 Linux 5.0 distribution is having in Japan, having the highest domestic sales volume from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2 of all operating systems sales (including Windows 98). "It is really our pleasure to know that customers realised that the Linux is another means to replace the Windows, and the domestic distribution for Linux is superior to the major foreign brands."Linux-MandrakeMandrake 6.1 Flattens the Linux Learning Curve . PC World reviews Linux-Mandrake 6.1. "Mandrake adopts some of Red Hat Linux's components, and software packages built for Red Hat will work on Mandrake. But Mandrake adds some real value: The developers have worked hard to configure the system to work well, right out of the box. With Mandrake, Windows users can start using Linux as a desktop OS without huffing and puffing over a huge learning curve." (Found in NNL).MandrakeSoft names Jean-Loup Gailly CTO. Jean-Loup Gailly, better known as the author of the compression utility Gzip and co-author of the compression library Zlib, as well as a member of the team that produced the specifications for the Ada programming language, has been named CTO for MandrakeSoft, according to this press release. "It's a pleasure to be employed by a company that is so devoted to open-source and has a very high potential on the Linux market in the coming years", said Jean-Loup Gailly. LinuxPPCMacdiscussion.com interviews Jason Haas. Jason Haas, of LinuxPPC fame, is interviewed by Macdiscussion.com. "We're seeding major Linux development projects with PPC boxes to ensure that we get PPC versions of software on a timely basis. That makes more sense than trying to have a few of our guys chase the projects around and try to figure out why something's not building."LinuxPPC nominated. LinuxPPC 1999 Q3 has been nominated for Macworld magazine's Editor's Choice ("Eddy") awards, given annually and with winners to be announced in January at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. "The Eddy Awards, the Macintosh industry's highest distinction for breakthrough product development, are given to honor the top software and hardware products in 26 categories. LinuxPPC 1999 Q3 is the first version of the Linux operating system ever to be nominated for the award." Red Hat LinuxRed Hat powers NetAid servers. The NetAid concerts, sponsored by the United Nations, Cisco and others, and given to promote awareness of world hunger, were powered by 400 servers running Red Hat 6.0 according to this press release.Slackware LinuxPictures from Comdex. The Slackware guys have put up a website with pictures from their booth at Comdex.Storm LinuxLast week, it was announced that Applixware would be shipped with Storm Linux 2000. This week brought two more announcements of this type, indicating that Star Officeand the VMWare evaluation binaries will also be shipped with the upcoming Debian-based Storm Linux 2000 release.SuSE LinuxSuSE 6.3 announced. The official announcement for SuSE 6.3 (which will ship in early December) talks about SuSE's new graphical installer. "At last - YaST2 is here. There are now two versions of this powerful setup tool. It guarantees the Linux newcomer an uncomplicated installation. The automatic hardware detection for PCI components and the menu-driven graphical interface enables the newcomer to set up a complete SuSE Linux, including KDE, within 20 minutes." (Thanks to Pieter Hollants.)Yellow Dog LinuxYellow Dog Linux announces 'Ruff Pack'. Yellow Dog Linux has announced the "Ruff Pack," which is, of course, a beta version of its upcoming distribution.Black Lab Linux at SC'99. Black Lab Linux, a Linux distribution aimed particularly at high-end workstations and cluster computing and optimized for the Apple G4 platform, was demonstrated this week at SuperComputing '99. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
November 18, 1999
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 projectsThe German government supports GPG. According to this article (in German, here is the Babelfish translation), the German government will donate approximately 250,000 DM to the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) project. The money is to be used to support comfortable user interfaces for GPG and its use with multiple operating system and mail clients. The fact that the project is open source was apparently crucial to the decision to support it. (Thanks to Peter Kis) OpenMerchant released under the GPL. OpenSales Inc. announced today the release of the source code for their OpenMerchant online retailing solution under the terms of the GNU General Public License, according to this press release. The choice to both open the source code and to use the GPL is a very welcome one. "We have created the future e-commerce standard by providing the only channel for developers to freely use, modify and improve an enterprise-class Internet retailing solution." Comparative Linux DBMS. LinuxPlanet has started a series of articles to take a look mSQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL on Linux, beginning with this article, which looks at installation and configuration for the three databases. SGI Linux University Report. Jose Nazario sent us this report from his attendance at a recent SGI Linux University. "SGI's efforts at contributing to Linux are, simply put, going to be huge in at least three areas: OpenGL, where they are working with various vendors of X servers and graphics cards and working on high performance OpenGL for Linux; security, where they are doing an OpenBSD style code review and contributing software to bring Linux to C2 and B1 grades in the future (DoD scales); and the third item we heard about in Dayton, OH, was their clustering technology, bringing Beowulf up to commercial levels for management and scalability." Embedded LinuxJob match service for embedded Linux developers. LinuxDevices.com has announced a free job match service for developers in the embedded Linux arena. "The new service allows companies who need developers, and developers looking for projects, to find each other online using a convenient search engine."GnomeMusic and movies under GNOME (LinuxPower). LinuxPower looks at the Grip and GXanim utilities. "Video playing software under Linux is a problematic area due to the fact that some countries in the world, including the US, accepts patents on the video compression algorithms. Mark Podlipec, the XAnim author, has managed to get the permission to use some of these codecs in xanim, with Intel Indeo being the most important one. This is probably because Xanim is not a GPL'ed application."Porting Abiword to the MacIntosh?. This MacDiscussions.com article bemoans the fact that no port of StarOffice is available for the MacIntosh, though support is promised in the next version. It continues on, though, to recommend another alternative, providing assistance to the AbiSource project to help finish the port of AbiWord to the MacIntosh. "AbiWord is an open source project, released under the GPL. I tried this application out and found it to be mostly complete. It would make a great addition to the alternatives on the Macintosh platform, but they need help. Paul Rohr of Abisource sent this idea: 'Rather than lobby Sun, you have another option -- round up one or two talented GUI hackers to finish porting AbiWord to the Mac...The AbiWord development community is actively thriving, and Macintosh is the one modern GUI that's still sorely missing.'" (Thanks to Louis Pierce.) Reuters reports on Miguel de Icaza's new company. Here is more news on Miguel and Nat's plans for starting their new company. "We are creating applications like Microsoft Office, for GNOME," the 26-year-old de Icaza said in a phone interview. "We have investment. It's exciting and I get to work on GNOME full time so that's even better." The company will be based in the Cambridge, Mass. area and is expected to have about 12 employees initially. From the press release, it appears that the Linux Fund is at least one of the sources of investment in the new company. Gnome Development Summary. The Gnome Summary for November 9-17, 1999 covers news from the GNOME UI Improvement Project, courtesy of the first installment of the GNOME UI Summary, sound support issues, the new GNOMEnclature column by George Lebl, over on IBM DeveloperWorks, and more. KDEKRASH release frozen. The KRASH release, also known as the 1.89 release, has been frozen, according to this announcement. No modifications to the API are allowed and they would like to make the actual release available by December 1st, two weeks ahead of schedule. The release of KRASH is intended to allow third party developers to become familiar with Qt 2.X and KDE 2.X before they become the new stable version.MidgardMidgard Weekly Summary. The Midgard Weekly Summary for November 17th is larger than usual, since summaries were not posted the last two weeks. Included this week is the release of Midgard 1.2.5, the availability of combined Midgard/Apache packages, recent server problems and plans for an irc-based developer meeting on November 25th. Check the homepage for more information on the Midgard web application development and publishing platform.MozillaMozilla M11 is out!. Mozilla M11 (Milestone 11) has been released. Word seems to be that the latest release has made great strides in stability (some say it is now more stable for them than Netscape 4.7), but performance appears to be an issue. However, the developers themselves do not seem to be concerned about this. The software is, after all, still in pre-beta and once the basic stability issues have been addressed, performance issues will become a top priority. Linux binaries are currently available. Check the release notes for more details.Note that Mozilla is currently not safe to use with systems unless they are running glibc2.1 or higher. See the this posting for more information on that problem. Update on Mozilla from Interview with Chris Hofmann. This interview with Mozilla lead engineer Chris Hofmann provides an update on Mozilla's progress. "At current growth rates the number of "non-Netscape" Mozilla developers will eclipse the number of Netscape developers with direct CVS checkin privileges in a few short months. I think we are at around 50-60 now and about 15-20 of these contributors that are checking in modifications to the code every week." PHPInterview with the PHP team. LinuxPower has made available an interview with the PHP team. It covers the upcoming features of PHP 4.0 and its new backend, Zend, plus licensing issues and more. "Erik: What do you see as the next radical evolutionary step for php? Jim: Easier extensibility. Right now its pretty much impossible for people to distribute their own extensions to PHP (which has contributed to the PHP code base getting pretty fat with interfaces to everything). Hopefully PHP 4 will make it easy enough for people to build even more interesting extensions on top of PHP. "SambaSamba 2.0.6 released. The Samba Team has released version 2.0.6. This release contains lots of fixes, some new features, and support for the CUPS printer system; details are in the announcement.Using Samba from O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Associates have announcedthe release of "Using Samba". "O'Reilly & Associates has announced the release of Using Samba, which has been officially adopted by the Samba team under an open content license. This new book is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration, including such recent additions as integration with Windows NT domains and the SWAT graphic configuration tool." WineWine 991114. The latest development release of Wine is now 991114. For more information on the latest release, check out this week's Wine Weekly News.ZopeSybase supports Zope. Digital Creations has announced that Sybase is now supporting Zope development. "The partnership will allow Digital Creations to further integrate the Zope platform and Sybase, enabling Sybase users to leverage the power of the Linux operating system in conjunction with the Internet. The combination of these two powerful platforms will enable companies who are moving to Linux to dynamically manage their enterprise data and create world- class applications."Zope Weekly News. Michael Pelletier is the editor, for the first time, for this week's Zope Weekly News. Headlines include the announcement of Sybase support for Zope, the announcement of VisualZope 0.1a, plus various updates and tips. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
November 18, 1999
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Development toolsJavaSun hiring Java-Linux developers. It seems that Sun is ready to back up their claims to supporting Java on the Linux platform with at least one new position. "You will be responsible for porting Sun's Java Virtual Machine, HotSpot, to the Linux operating system. As a member of the HotSpot team you will learn HotSpot internals and eventually take on additional HotSpot projects."PerlNews from Perl News. Perl News has some new reports out about learning more about RSS, Perl Month Issue #6 and more.On the development side, This Week on perl5-porters reports on lexical variables and eval, more on line disciplines and arcane topics ranging out as far as "Unicode Support on EBCDIC Machines". PythonDr. Dobbs' Python-URL!. This week's Python-URL! includes good news for the "Corba-inclined". Duncan Grisby announced Python bindings for omniORB, a "free C++ ORB conforming to the OMG's (draft) Python mappings.". Other news includes the latest release of wxPython, an "awesome" new collection of Python resource links and more.Tcl/tkDr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL!. This week's Tcl-URL! inquires whether or not there would be interest in a Tcl/tk conference in Europe, among other topics.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessConfirmed: Red Hat buys Cygnus. Confirming our report from last week, Red Hat has announced the acquisition of Cygnus Solutions for $674 million in stock. This move positions Red Hat well for a move into the embedded systems arena, and brings in a lot of other skills as well. For more information, see our talk with Donnie Barnes at Comdex. A new cluster from SGI. A special session held on Monday at the Supercomputing '99 show demonstrated a cluster based on the Intel Itanium chips. The session was sponsored by SGI and the National Computational Science Alliance and featured speakers from the NCSA, Intel and SGI. "The high-performance computing community is at a critical juncture in its history. The community will either continue down its familiar path of company proprietary software and RISC processor building blocks or begin to move toward a new model of high-performance computing based on commodity, high-volume parts and common software building blocks," said Larry Smarr, Director, National Computational Science Alliance and its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "The NCSA will aggressively pursue this new model." Intel invests in eSoft eSoft, maker of Linux-based server systems, has announced an investment from Intel. eSoft's stock price has responded accordingly - see the LWN Linux Stock Page for the latest. Creative announces open source SB Live driver. Creative Technology has finally gotten around to announcing the open source SB Live driver it released a couple of weeks ago. "The release of this open source driver marks a 'first' for Creative, and is expected to generate a wealth of supporting applications for the Sound Blaster Live! family of cards running on all major Linux kernel versions." New LinuxMall site launches The Linux Mall has announced its "grand reopening" with a new, redesigned site. VA Linux Systems sets IPO price VA Linux Systems Inc. set its initial public offering at 4.4 million common shares in a projected price range of $11-13 per share. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
November 18, 1999
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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 newsThe press section is somewhat incomplete this week - being at Comdex has made it hard for us to keep up. Here's what we have... This week's recommended reading:
There was, of course, some Comdex coverage:
Some articles on the Corel Linux launch:
Other Linux and business coverage includes:
And here's the rest:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
November 18, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesA Real-Time Linux 2.0 install guide was posted by Phil Wilshire.Hungarian free OS mirror. A Hungarian-based mirror site for distributing installation CDs from various free opearting systems (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) has been announcedand promises to have sufficient bandwidth to serve non-hungarian users as well. It has support for both ftp access and rsync access (rsync://ftp.kando.hu). EventsSCO and LinuxMall support Comdex Linux Community Hub. SCO and the Linux Mall have announced the hosting of the "Linux Community Hub" at the Linux Business Expo. This hub provided booth space for nonprofit development groups.Two Paris Linux conferences team up. The two Linux conferences planned for Paris early next year, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and Linux Expo, have joined into a single event. The new "LinuxWorld / Linux Expo" will be held February 1-3, in Paris, unfortunately at the same time as LinuxWorld in New York... Linux takes a ride - on a roller-coaster Linux @ the Lake is a two-day Linux conference sponsored by the North East Ohio Linux User Group which will be held September 6th and 7th, 2000 at the Cedar Point Amusement Park, the home of the world record breaking coaster, the Millenium Force. "For the price, having Cedar Point to ourselves for 2 days would be enough! But, that's not all. As you walk around you will be able to check out all the exhibitors' booths, or sign up for the seminars that we will be announcing. Still not enough? Sit down at one of our chats with the developers, or sign up for our keynote dinner. So, whether you just have a passing interest, or you're well versed in how to do a make config, this is the conference for you!" Notes from Supercomputing '99 The folks at ParaLogic have put up some notes from the SuperComputing '99 conference, held this week in Portland. (Thanks to James Cownie). Web sitesAdvogato.org launches. A new site, Advogato.org, has launched. Advogato is intended to be "the free software developer's advocate." It includes editorials, news items, comment posting, etc. Worth a look.User Group NewsClemson University LUG. Alton Eubanks wrote in to mention that he is trying to establish a LUG at Clemson University, in South Carolina. Drop him a line if you are in that area. |
November 18, 1999
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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 weekIcewalkers is another site dedicated to tracking releases of Linux software. They have added ratings to all the packages - expressed in numbers of penguin feet. What they lack, as do many such sites, is any sort of reasoning or justifications for their ratings. Maybe they'll get there. The Linux Tip O' The Day is exactly what it sounds like - a new nugget of Linux information each day. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
November 18, 1999 |
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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. | |
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Linux' certainty of success
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 15:22:55 +0100
From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <jcn@cs.leidenuniv.nl>
Hi,
You state:
Linux does not need the federal courts to assure its success
No, indeed it doesn't. GNU/Linux is doing quite fine for me, and the
installed base will continue to grow. But somehow, it seems to me that
you want to say that the Microsoft monopoly and it's malicious
practices, can and will be overthrown if only we continue to produce
good quality code.
I beg to differ. Although I'm convinced that, once this is bound to
happen, I'm not at all sure when that may be. By ordinary people,
Microsoft is often perceived as a big brother that helped them to feel
somewhat at easy, using that scary computer thing. There are people out
there that take Word97 classes, and party when they graduate. A large
enough number of novice computer users need to see a compelling reason
to turn away from the comfort Microsoft.
Convincing arguments might be availability and cost. Alarmingly,
the fof states that three support calls eat all OEM's profit. If you
look at it that way, when will you think we'll see GNU/Linux boxes in
computer stores, as prominently as Windows? `Hey, where has my A: drive
gone?' Ping, one support call. Even if GNU/Linux desktops get better
than Windows, by being different alone, they will trigger a higher
support call rate than a Windows box would.
Jan.
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien/ | http://www.lilypond.org/
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Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 11:49:24 -0500
From: Seth Gordon <sgordon@kenan.com>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Linux and the US vs. Microsoft findings of fact
The following anecdote, taken from paragraphs 209 through 216 of the
Findings of Fact, illustrates why the government cannot wait for Linux
to rein Microsoft in.
Starting in 1996, Microsoft forbade its OEMs from running anything
other than the standard Windows boot sequence when a user started a
Windows machine for the first time. OEMs had been using these
customized boot sequences to give new users tutorials, sign-up
programs, and alternative user interfaces. The OEMs had a strong
incentive to customize their machines to make them easier to use, both
to differentiate their brands and to prevent expensive
customer-service calls. (Three customer-support calls can erase the
entire profit that an OEM makes from selling a PC.) However, these
customizations interfered with Microsoft's strategy for promoting
Microsoft Network and Internet Explorer.
In March of 1997, the R&D manager at Hewlett-Packard sent a complaint
to Microsoft. Before "the edicts that ... Microsoft issued last
fall", HP had "the lowest return rate of any OEM (even lower than
Apple)". Since then, customer support calls and returns on
HP-Pavilion PCs had gone up substantially. "If we had a choice of
another supplier, based on your actions in this area, I assure you
[that you] would not be our supplier of choice."
At that point, HP, IBM, Gateway, and Dell were in no position to tell
Microsoft, "The hell with your license -- we'll just preinstall Linux
on all our PCs." The most they could do was convince Microsoft to
give them a discount on the royalty they had to pay for Windows.
In the long run, in a perfectly free market, competitors will
undermine any monopoly. However, as John Maynard Keynes put it: "in
the long run, we are all dead". Windows 98 (or whatever its successor
is called) will face competition in the indefinite future, but
Microsoft must be held accountable for how it is damaging consumers
*now*.
--
perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\
(di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\
{s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s"
== seth gordon == sgordon@kenan.com == standard disclaimer ==
== documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==
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From: "Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel@graphics-muse.org> Subject: responses to top stories this week To: lwn@lwn.net (Linux Weekly News) Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 13:41:29 -0700 (MST) A couple of items in the news caught my eye, so I thought I'd write up a quick response. --------------------------------------------------- Re: Judge Jackson's ruling You noted that Judge Jackson said: "In practice, then, the open-source model of applications development may increase the base of applications that run on non-Microsoft PC operating systems, but it cannot dissolve the barrier that prevents such operating systems from challenging Windows. " You responded: "The growth curve of Linux shows that competition is indeed possible. The pace of development on desktop-oriented software - KDE and GNOME, for example - brings Linux ever closer to Windows in both ease of use and availability of applications. " This, however, is not the point Judge Jackson is making. The barriers go beyond the ability of Open Source to develop quality software. In and of itself, Open Source could not reach beyond those barriers to produce a competitive product if computer manufacturers did not openly support it to the same level that they did with Microsoft. The barriers introduced by Microsoft were financially based and backed by their array of products through monopolistic marketing methods. They are not simply quality and/or quantity based. Later you say: "That critical mass was achieved not via governmental action, but through the dedication and persistence ... of thousands of free software developers worldwide." Critical mass may have been reached solely by the volunteer efforts, but you'll find those who would argue that the critical mass became possible when business saw that the DOJ's case might be the impetus to allow them more freedom to choose alternatives to Microsoft. It can be argued that Microsoft backed down slightly over the past two years in order to give the appearance of a more competitive market. They failed, and Linux is benefiting from that. To say that Open Source stands where it does without the cooperation of both business and government is inappropriate. Its a symbiotic relationship. One that has helped to make Open Source what it is today. --------------------------------------------------- Re: Red Hat and Oracle distribution with Motif You said: "Interestingly, the release also mentions the integration of Motif 2.1. Integrating Motif is a step backward for Red Hat ... " How so? Motif has been around for years. Many companies have invested large amounts of man-hours and dollars on applications based on it. Red Hat is responding to their needs by providing a Linux solution which can limit the amount of effort and cost it would take to migrate to a new OS. Red Hat is a business. It has obligations as such, both to customers and its employees and stockholders. Adding Motif is far from a step backward. After all, Motif is just a set of libraries, a few binaries and headers files. Anyone wishing to redistribute this Red Hat version can remove those pieces. Or do you expect Red Hat to do all the work for all the other distributions? You then said: "A distribution containing Motif is no longer the 100% free distribution that Red Hat has been bragging about for the last couple of years." You assume that this distribution would be their only distributable product. But you don't back that assumption up with any research. Just because *this* distribution won't be 100% free doesn't mean they don't plan on providing some version that is. You finished with: "Bringing in Motif also calls into question Red Hat's committment to GNOME, which was supposed to be the Linux desktop package." Say what? Supporting Motif (and CDE, for that matter) doesn't mean they're dropping GNOME. GNOME hasn't been adopted in every corner of the earth yet. Do you expect Red Hat to simply ignore customers because they don't or won't run GNOME? THEY'RE A BUSINESS! I applaud them. They've found a way to differentiate themselves in the corporate customer environment without violating any licensing issues. Theres nothing wrong with that. -- Michael J. Hammel | I once heard the voice of God. It said The Graphics Muse | 'Vrrrmmmm.' Unless it was just a lawnmower. mjhammel@graphics-muse.org | Deep Thoughts, Jack Handey http://www.graphics-muse.com | ||
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 12:07:15 +0100 From: Vreught <J.P.M.deVreught@si.hhs.nl> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: http://lwn.net/ Microsoft is a monopoly [HOLD] Hi, I like to react on your editorial on "Microsoft is a monopoly". Although I don't really like the characterization of Linux in the findings of facts, I don't believe the judge is far from the truth. Yes, I also would like to disagree (I've been using Linux since 0.99pl13 and I dislike M$), but is the jugde that wrong? OK, he is wrong about the volunteers & open source, but the end conclusion "In practice, then, the open-source model of applications development may increase the base of applications that run on non-Microsoft PC operating systems, but it cannot dissolve the barrier that prevents such operating systems from challenging Windows." looks to me right on the dot. When you go to a PC shop, it is hard to buy a machine without any Windoze stuff (although with a bit of shopping around it can be done). If you want to buy a modem, you must be very careful not to end up with a Winmodem. Buying a laptop without Windoze is nearly impossible. Drivers for cards, written by the OEM, seldomly include support for Linux by default. At best, the OEM allows the Linux driver on one of its support pages with the explicit warning that it is totally not supported by them. Luckily there are some OEMs that do write drivers for Linux and they have made a bunch of loyal followers which will stick by there cards. Remember the Diamond refusal to open up their specs, that really hurted them a couple of years ago because in those days the people who were running Linux often had large influence within companies & universities when machines were bought. At my university Diamond cards were totally banned. So in some cases we, the Linux community at large, could make a difference. However, that was hardware. If you look at the desktop (the situation on the server market looks good for us), we have a long way to go. With the number of PCs that are sold, it is hard to see we can make a difference at all. Face it: the number of Linux desktops is peanuts and will be for a long time. I don't like it, but it is the reality. -- Hans de Vreught | ||
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 10:21:12 -0500 From: Baoqiu Cui <cbaoqiu@cs.sunysb.edu> To: esr@thyrsus.com Subject: Re: Communist China adopts Linux? Not so, apparently... Dear Mr. Raymond, This morning I read your message about ``Communist China adopts Linux? Not so, apparently...'' (http://lwn.net/daily/esr-china.html) from LWN. I have to say I am a little disappointed from what you said. As a hacker and one of the leaders of the Open Source (I personally prefer Free Software) movement, you are respected by me and by many people. I agree with most of your opinions and think you are making great contributions to the open source community. But I just do not understand why you are so sensitive on relating open-source with communism, and say something about the China government in your message politically. To me, free software has nothing to do with any *political* theory, no matter it is capitalism or communism or whatever-ism. As a leader of the Open Source movement, you should feel happy if China adopts Linux. Not only because you will have a much bigger user base, but also because you will have much more contributors. As far as I know, Linux is getting more and more popular in China. More and more people in universities, industry, and governments are starting to like it, use it, and make contribution to it. RMS just had a visit to China recently, and he might have a better opinion. So I hope politics is not involved when we talk about Free Software (or Open Source). Let's welcome more people and more countries to the Free Software community. Best Regards, Baoqiu Cui -- a Free Software believer P.S. I am cc'-ing this mail to lwn@lwn.net and RMS, and I am happy to be advised if I am wrong at some point. | ||
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