See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Dig into the Questions and Answers section and it confirms that the server side of CIFS/9000 is based on "Open Source Samba" and "HP is committed to submitting CIFS/9000 enhancements back to the Open Source community". Samba team member Jeremy Allison commented that this is the first he has heard of it, but it is, nonetheless, good news. HP's marketing group, on the other hand, needs to learn to give equal credit to the open source developers as they do to Microsoft.

Free at last... sort of (ZDNet). Here's a ZDNet column looking at a piece of code 20 years old. "The program is Kermit, possibly Columbia University's best-known contribution to the computer world. Its latest release, introduced New Year's Day, has a new license that will finally allow Kermit to take its rightful place among the pillars of free software."

Kermit (or C-Kermit, as the early C implementation of Kermit was called) was an early free software success story. However, when the service demands of a large community grew too much, a lightly restrictive license was chosen in order to generate revenue for support costs. That choice moved C-Kermit out of the larger free software community.

The new license may not go far enough. It comments, "The intention is to allow C-Kermit to be distributed with "free" operating systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, The Hurd, etc.", but restricts modifications to the code on much the same basis as the controvial Qmail license. As a result, C-Kermit is not likely to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines anytime soon. Fortunately, they've also introduced the lightweight G-Kermit under the GPL.

Bulletin Boards

Documentation

Education

Linux Professional Institute Weekly News. The January 11th, 2000 edition of the LPI Weekly News reports on the launch of their first exam and their upcoming plans for the LinuxWorld Expo in February. For more information, see the press releasefor their first certification exam.

Certification exam interest is high. We heard from the folks over at LPI that over 300 people signed up for free IDs within the first 48 hours of the announcement of the first exam. They are excited, particularly since other testing projects were launched at the same time and by far the most interest has been shown in the LPI exams. Congratulations, guys!

Gimp

Gnome

Gnome Summary, January 3rd-12th. This week's Gnome Summary headlines the announcement of GUADEC, mentioned above. They promise that almost all of the Gnome developers will be present.

In addition, GTK-- has entered feature-freeze, a new site contains an archive of "images to enhance your GNOME desktop" and the first development report on Evolution, the new mail client/calendar application, comes in.

KDE

Mozilla

Mike Shaver leaves Netscape but not the Mozilla project, though he'll no longer be working on it full-time. Mike has been an instrumental "mover and shaker" in the process up until this point. Read more over at Mozilla.org. "Though Mozilla will no longer be my full-time job, I will continue to participate in the community as much as possible, and my new employer is very supportive of that. "

Wine

Developer discussions this week, chronicled in the Wine Weekly News, focused on better support for Cyrillic fonts, the Odin project's possible license changes (Odin is a project working provide on OS/2 an execution environment for Windows applications), and improvements to Wine's loader.

XFree86

Zope

Zope at the Linux World Expo. Hadar Pedhazur forwarded an announcement to us of their plans for the Linux World Expo, coming up in two weeks in New York City. They are pleased to announce that they will be joining Tucows.com, Inc. in their booth. "Tucows.com wants to showcase innovative businesses and business models in the Linux world and provide an opportunity for greater communication between Linux developers and users. Digital Creations is honored to have been selected. Come to NYC and participate with us in our post Python Conference coming out party!

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Java

JLinux.org. JLinux.org is a new site, put together by Christopher Smith, to collect various bits of info about running Java on Linux.

Java Programming on Linux!, a new book out by Nathan Meyers, received an unsolicited plug from Weiqi Gao. "Browsed through it and found it packed with information that a Java-Linux developer would want/need/find indespensable. Not a textbook/tutorial. Lots of hints, tools, de-hype-ifications, whys, and coverage. The spirit of Linux shines through throughout."

Perl

The P5P Disgest, which closely tracked the Perl 5.X development process, appears to have gone on hiatus, with no new digests since early December.

Python

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Next: Commerce