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Leading items and editorialsA quick report from the Linux Business Expo. Your editor managed to make a pass through the Linux Business Expo in Chicago on Wednesday. This LBE is somewhat smaller than the Las Vegas version, which is not entirely surprising: the Comdex event in general is quite a bit smaller. A number of fairly high-profile Linux companies (i.e. Red Hat, VA Linux) were not to be found on the exhibit floor. Nonetheless there was a good turnout, and the LBE floor was busy enough to make walking difficult. Doubtless it was helped by being physically located on the same floor as the rest of Comdex, rather than in a separate building. A few notes from the show:
Once one got bored with Linux, the first booth one stumbled across was pushing wrist rests with a built-in telephone - something many of us were not aware of needing... Microsoft's FrontPage back door. Most LWN readers will by now have seen the news that Microsoft's FrontPage server software, shipped with a number of versions of Windows, contains a back door deliberately inserted by a Microsoft engineer. This hole is amazing not only in its simple existence, but also in that it has been there for years. It says a lot about the security of closed-source systems; see Eric Raymond's take on the issue for one view. Nobody would say that free software is immune from security problems. And some fear that the availability of source makes some sorts of problems easier for crackers to find. But it really is true that open source makes this sort of deliberate back door difficult to get away with. And it is almost inconceivable that a back door would remain undetected for years. (Do see, however, this week's LWN Security page for a chilling example of a deliberate back door in source-available code. And yes, Ken Thompson's paper demonstrates that there are no guarantees, no need to send the URL to us again). Lest we laugh too much at Microsoft's expense, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Linux has vulnerabilities of its own. Open source is great, but very few people build their systems from source. Does that RPM or .deb file really contain a binary built from the source in the source package? Only your trust in the package builder can determine how you feel about that. One might assume that an engineer building packages for a Linux distributor is more strongly motivated to do the right thing than a Microsoft engineer, but that is never guaranteed. Sooner or later, somebody will probably get burned by a bad binary package. It can happen to us too. Update on Corel Word Perfect Office 2000. Last week's mini-review of Corel's recently released Word Perfect Office 2000 product drew a fair amount of attention, and a small amount of criticism. It also got us the attention of some engineers at Corel, who were most interested in tracking down the problems that we reported. One result of that conversation is that we owe Corel an apology for saying that Word Perfect did not show up in the GNOME menus. The reviewer simply did not look in the right place. Corel's preferred environment is KDE, of course, but they have worked hard at supporting GNOME as well. Installing WPO 2000 does, in fact, fix up the GNOME applications menu in the proper way. Corel recognizes some residual problems with interactions with the Enlightenment window manager. The file opening problem we reported was confirmed, though it (surprisingly) has to do with files served via NFS, rather than ownership issues. Sample files have been sent back to Corel to enable them to reproduce the QuattroPro crashes. They were unable to provide a date for a new release with fixes for the problems we (and others) have experienced. But Corel's engineers were clearly responsive, interested, and wanting to make things better. Even if the first release turns out to be a little rocky for some people (not everybody has reported problems), the indications are good that subsequent releases will be more stable. Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
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April 20, 2000
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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. |
SecurityNews and editorialsReputations Won and Lost. This week, a less-media-hyped issue than the Windows backdoor also surfaced. A commercial, perl-based shopping cart, the Dansie Shopping Cart, was reported to contain a backdoor, one that automatically sent mail to the author of the software as well as allowing the author to execute commands on the machine on which the software is installed. The Bugtraq discussion (see previous link) seems to indicate that the backdoor was created by the author in an attempt to allow him to check for unauthorized usage and/or automatically disable the software if he found it to be installed illegally. Unfortunately, acquiring the "key" from the code is reasonably easy to do and allows much more illicit actions to be taken by an unauthorized person.Whatever the original author's intentions, the revelation of his particular programming choices has both broken the faith of people who might use the product (it is very apparent in the code that the existence of the backdoor was meant to be hidden from a quick source code scan) and laid open his knowledge of security and programming techniques to severe criticism. In actions intended to better secure his revenue from the software, he has created a publicity roadblock to its adoption. Do note, however, that an updated version of the software without the backdoor is claimed to now be available. QNX password encryption broken. Here's a brief article on Advogato on the breaking of the password encryption scheme for QNX - which is used in the Netpliance iOpener and a lot of other systems. Evidently the QNX folks decided to roll their own, closed-source, unreviewed encryption, with the usual results. Encryption Matters, part 2. Inoshiro has posted part 2 of his series of articles on the importance of encryption. Security ReportsThree security problems with GNU Emacs 20. RUS-CERT has issued an advisory outlining three security problems with all versions of GNU Emacs 20, up to and including emacs 20.6. The severity of the problems vary, but are high on multi-user systems. A patch is provided against emacs 20.6, though it requires glibc 2.1. XFree86 server overflow. Michal Zalewski posted a report of a buffer overflow in XFree86 which he is confident can be exploited. The followup messages to this posting, however, did not confirm the problem, either with vanilla XFree86 3.3.6, 4.0.0 or the XFree86 package as shipped with Red Hat 6.2. We'll post additional information as it becomes available. imapd. Debates are nothing new in the security arena. This week, an overflow in imapd 4.7 was reported. This can be used to gain access to the mail account of an imapd user - a problem if a mail client is not supposed to have interactive access to the server. The usual discussions and workarounds are posted, but then followed later by a debate on whether or not the problem really needed to be fixed, since it did not allow unprivileged access. In that space, we would have to weigh in that it is a problem -- anytime a program has unexpected side effects or unintended capabilities, it should be either documented to warn people or fixed. In this case, it is to be hoped that the problem will be repaired, not just documented. xfs. A denial of service vulnerability in the X font server under Red Hat 6.X has been reported. Later, Chris Evans posted a followup, pointing out that this is just one of many security problems in xfs that have been around for over a year without any fixes being produced. Star Office 5.1. Michal Zalewski posted a note about the multitude of ways in which Star Office 5.1 could be made to overflow and crash. It seems that Star Office is mimicking Microsoft products right now to the bug level ... nmh-1.0.4 released. Security problems were formerly reported in nmh-1.0.2. Unfortunately, the fixes to these problems in version 1.0.3 introduced other errors. Version 1.0.4 resolves the new errors and the original security problems, as well as introducing a list of new features and non-security fixes. Updatesgpm-root improper permissions handling. Improper permissions handling in gpm was discussed in the March 30th LWN Security Summary.This week's updates: Previous updates:
pam and usermode. See discussion in the January 6th, 2000 LWN Security Summary.
imwheel. For more information, check the BugTraq vulnerability database entry. This vulnerability was first reported on March 13th, 2000. EventsFinal Call for extended abstracts, RAID 2000. The final call for extended abstracts for the RAID 2000 conference, scheduled for October 2nd through the 4th, 2000, in Toulouse, France, has been issued. Note also that the online proceedings for RAID 1998 and RAID 1999 are now available.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 20, 2000
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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 still 2.3.99-pre5. This release has drawn a steady stream of complaints about substandard performance and poor memory handling. The kernel developers are still trying to get a handle on where the problems came from. A prepatch for 2.3.99 is available, and in its third iteration as of this writing. It contains more i386 interrupt handling work, a number of small Sparc tweaks, some large I2O updates, an ISDN update, some sound driver updates, and some ATM networking updates. Here's Alan Cox's latest 2.3.99 jobs list(from April 16) showing what remains to be done before 2.4 can come out. The current stable kernel release is forever 2.2.14. The 2.2.15 prepatch got up to its 19th version when, according to Alan Cox's diary, a memory corruption bug was found in the tty drivers. Even though the bug does not appear to be creating troubles for anybody at the moment, the developers still want to get it fixed before putting out the next stable release. Hopefully it won't be long, since 2.2.15 also fixes the recently-found masquerading vulnerability. (Evidently Linus is moving into a new house, which is not helping to get kernel releases out quickly). So you thought the devfs flamewars would end just because it got into the 2.3 kernel? No such luck, alas... the flames burn as brightly as ever, though in a bit of a different mode. The hot issue at the moment is how to deal with hot-plug devices, such as PCMCIA, USB, or hot-plug PCI peripherals. In particular, how should these devices be named? This is not a new topic, but it still seems to resist any sort of resolution. When a new device shows up on the system, the kernel reacts by simply picking the next available device name for it. This behavior is not new either: plugging a new SCSI device into a Linux system has been able to cause a renaming all other SCSI devices on the system for years. There appear to be two types of Linux users out there; the first type finds it really annoying when devices change names, and the second does not seem to care much. One of the purposes behind devfs was to address the frustrations of the first group - it can provide stable names for SCSI devices. Items on a SCSI bus can be uniquely identified by their bus and SCSI target numbers (OK, unit numbers too, on rare occasion). Devices plugged into a USB hub, however, lack that characteristic. These devices can come and go, and the system can not really track their state in between. So how do you name them in a way that keeps administrators and users sane? Some think that devfs can help. Some USB devices can provide serial numbers which can be used to create stable names. Disk partitions can have "UUID" identification numbers in their filesystems which can make life easier as well. But if you have two mice and want one to always be /dev/mouse0, life will be difficult. The hardware side of the equation is getting more dynamic, and the software side is finding it harder to simulate stability. Devfs could maybe provide some of that stability. But users are running into one of the perennial devfs problems: the persistent storage of attributes, such as file ownership and permissions. Devfs can be set up, via devfsd or by simply using tar, to set attributes correctly on stable devices. But that scheme tends to fall down when devices come and go. So people criticize devfs, but better solutions have been somewhat scarce thus far. Richard Gooch has said, however, that he will be implementing "tunneling" so that devfs can make visible device entries in the underlying /dev filesystem. That change will make persistence somewhat easier, and will also, incidentally, fix the "I configured in devfs and now the system won't boot" trap that is currently so easy to step into. Richard has not given a time frame for this work, but one would assume that he is aiming for the 2.4 kernel. (Richard has, meanwhile, released devfs v162 and devfsd v1.3.5). Other patches and updates released this week include:
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet |
April 20, 2000
For other kernel news, see: Other resources: |
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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. Nuclinux - a new single-floppy distribution. The initial announcement for Nuclinux went out on April 18th, 2000. This distribution appears to be primarily for acquiring internet access on a networked machine, complete with programs for web browsing, accessing mail and remote machine access (telnet only, no ssh). Bastille LinuxA patched version of Bastille Linux 1.0.4 has been announced, Bastille 1.0.4p1, to fix a confusing step in the installation process that was causing problems for some people.Caldera OpenLinuxCaldera Systems has put out a set of press releases, including this announcement that OpenLinux eBuilder is now available. It includes the IBM WebSphere application server and the "ECential Open Commerce Framework" from Evergreen. There is this announcement that they will be offering training at the Linux Business Expo. And finally there is an announcement that SolutionBank has signed up as Caldera's first "eSolutions Provider."CorelGerman, French and Dutch support. Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. has announced the first version of Corel Linux with German, French and Dutch support. The press release incorrectly calls this the "First Multilingual Linux O.S.", a claim that is, shall we say, questionable, given the number of distributions with multiple language support, many of them with much broader support than just four European languages. Can Corel Rope Linux Desktops? (ZDNet). ZDNet looks at Corel's future in this lengthy article. "But the bigger question, especially among investors and analysts, is whether the company can successfully pull off its move into the Linux market." Coyote LinuxA new prepatch for Coyote Linux has been released, Coyote Linux 1.20pre2.Debian GNU/LinuxThis week's Debian Weekly News announces the first new Debian developer in a long time: Brendan O'Dea. Hopefully Brendan will soon be joined by other people who've been waiting in the queue for approval. The first test cycle for the next release of Debian is scheduled to begin on May 2nd and will last two weeks, with an evaluation afterwards as to whether additional test cycles are needed. Other topics this week included dpkg progress, documentation registration, installation from floppies and fixing package priorities.DemoLinuxA beta version of DemoLinux 2.0, dubbed DemoLinux 1.9, has been released. It includes the StarOffice suite, which is apparently causing some problems, since they have applied for a license from Sun and have not yet received one. DemoLinux 1.9 is based on Debian Linux.MaxOSMaxOS beta to be released in May. The MaxOS folks have put up a product page describing the upcoming MaxOS distribution and indicating that the first beta release will happen in May. (MaxOS was profiled in this LWN feature back in March).Red Hat LinuxAd agency doffs Red Hat (Raleigh/Durham BusinessJournal). The Raleigh/Durham Business Journal has run this article on how Red Hat got dumped by its advertising agency. "Red Hat Software's advertising agency dropped the account only six months after winning the business, complaining that the Linux distributor doesn't have its marketing act together."ROCK LinuxThe latest snapshot of ROCK Linux contains support for the base features of ROCK Router Linux and also ROCK Telnet Terminal. The former is a version of ROCK Linux tailored for routers and the latter is a floppy-based version that "can auto-detect it's IP-Address using bootp or rarp and open some telnet sessions to a hardcoded server ip".Slackware LinuxUpdates to slackware-current over the past week include sc-7.2, jove-4.16, elm-2.5.3, gpm-1.19.1 and sendmail-8.10.1. The gpm update closes a security hole, see the security page for more details.SuSE LinuxSuSE: Netscape package updates. SuSE has released updated Netscape packagesfor SuSE Linux 6.4 after reports of instability with the Netscape 4.72 originally shipped. The problem was tracked down to a compiler bug that affected the X11 libraries. An upgrade is recommended for anyone using Netscape with SuSE Linux 6.4.Linux is suited for Boris Becker (Yahoo Germany). Strong praise for Linux comes in this Yahoo Germany article, which takes a look at SuSE Linux 6.4 (Babelfish translation). The author praises the ease of installation, the support for USB mice, keyboards and printers, clean automatic support for sound and continuing improvements in DVD support. The Reiser file system is mentioned as well. TurboLinuxTurboLinux Clustering (ZDNet). ZDNet reviews the high-availability clustering offering from TurboLinux. "We also tested automatic fail-over by the time-honored technique of killing the power to the system that wasn't running TurboCluster's Advanced Traffic Manager (ATM). We don't recommend you try this at home. While the system performance took an immediate nosedive, within a minute the remaining server was automatically shouldering the whole load." (Thanks to C?sar A. K. Grossmann).Oracle takes equity stake in TurboLinux. Here's a very brief Reuters article stating that Oracle has taken an (unspecified) equity investment in TurboLinux. Vine LinuxVine Linux 2.0. A new version of Vine Linux, Vine Linux 2.0, was announced on April 14th. Vine Linux is a Japanese Linux distribution. Vine Linux 1.X was based on Red Hat 5.1. We do not have any details on version 2.0 as of yet (oh, for a babelfish that understood Asian languages ...).Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 20, 2000
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 projectsFilesystem Hierarchy Standard 2.1 released. The Linux Standard Base project has announced the release of version 2.1 of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard - the important piece of the LSB that says where all the files are supposed to go. It is important to note that the FHS is not solely a Linux project. Members of other Unix operating systems (particularly the BSD-based groups) have also contributed strongly. This is good for two reasons. First, Unix contributors have been able to share their experience with potential pitfalls they've experienced over the years ... particularly with large, networked environments that share software across heterogeneous hardware. Second, this also means that the file system hierarchy used by Linux distributions will make sense to administrators migrating from supporting Unix systems. Although not the primary goal of the LSB, it is a worthwhile side effect, potentially saving much frustration and energy. Linux Standard Base (Linux.com). Nicholas Petreley has written an article on the Linux Standard Base for Linux.com. "The least credible argument has been that Linux will fragment because UNIX did. This completely ignores the market dynamics that caused UNIX to fragment, and consequently why these dynamics do not apply to Linux. UNIX was a means to an end, and the end was to sell unique hardware solutions. Linux is the means to a completely different end: a free (as in free speech), reliable, scalable open source solution." (Thanks to Scott McNeil). Cscope released under the BSD license. Cscope is a developer's tool for browsing source code. Although not specifically ported to Linux, we're told that it compiles cleanly on Linux. SCO's decision to release Cscope under an open source license is tremendously welcome. A bit of history: "Cscope began its origins in the early eighties at AT&T. The earliest change log entry is circa 1986, but cscope existed before then. Cscope was then passed onto UNIX Systems Laboratories (USL), which was acquired by Novell and then by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)". GNU Pth 1.3.5. A new version of the GNU Portable Threads library has been released. Note that the importance of the release is marked high, due to a nasty bug that was introduced in version 1.3.4. First round Software Carpentry entries online. The first round entries in the Software Carpentry design competition are now online. BrowsersMozilla M15 released. A new milestone for Mozilla, Mozilla M15, has been released. From the talkback response, M15 appears to be a clear improvement on M14. However, the nightly builds, which are even newer than the latest milestone, are apparently even more stable. One downside: the TCP/IP memory leak is still present in M15.DatabasesPostgreSQL 7.0RC1. The first release candidate for PostgreSQL 7.0 is now available for download. (From dotcomma.)Product comparison: relational database management systems. Linuxcare has put up a page comparing relational database systems (both free and commercial) for Linux. Readers may also enter their own reviews of the various systems. EducationSEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. The latest SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report is now available.Embedded LinuxRTAI 1.3 has been announced. This is the latest version of the Real Time Application Interface. RTAI is available under the LGPL. "RTAI now includes dynamic memory allocation, a /proc interface, an enhanced LXRT-Informed (LinuX RT) module and PERL bindings for soft real-time task development."GamesHexen (Open Game Source). The latest Open Game Source is now available. "This month focuses on the SDL port of Hexen. It includes a patch to convert the minotaur into the classic Eliza program." Hexen is one of two fantasy games from Raven software based on the original DOOM source code. (Thanks to Dennis Payne.)InteroperabilityKernel-Cousin Samba. Last week's Kernel-Cousin Samba reports problems with the recently-integrated UTMP patch, the joys of short file-name mangling, reasons for using a different Netbios and Workgroup name for your server and much, much more.Wine News. Wine Headquarters has a nice new look-and-feel. The April 17th edition of the Wine Weekly News is also out, reporting that Canvas 7's port to Linux is happily using Winelib and that CorelDraw 9 for Linux is ahead of schedule, due to Wine's "sterling progress". NetworkingOpenNMS Update v1.4. The latest weekly update from the OpenNMS network management project reports significant development progress and a number of companies and other organizations that also want to be involved.Office ApplicationsAbiWord Weekly News. This week's edition mentions some significant bug fixes and a first step towards cooperation with the KWord project. gPhoto 0.4.3: A Sneak Peek (AboutLinux). AboutLinux reviews gPhoto 0.4.3. "gPhoto shows immense promise; according to its home page it can now download from over 100 different digital cameras. Even though gPhoto is quite far from the magic 1.0 release version it is certainly usable for downloading images from your digital cameras." Top 20 Influential People, Products and Companies in the Linux Graphics Marketplace. Michael J. Hammel looks at the top 20 players in the Linux graphics market. "Unlike most of the other open source projects I've seen, Gimp actually thrives without central authority. It is the first project I've seen where development by committee actually seems to work." On the DesktopAn Interview with Ettore Perazzoli (LinuxPapers). LinuxPapers has published an interview with Ettore Perazzoli, one of the Gnome developers. He provides a less rosy opinion on the development of two Linux desktops, KDE and Gnome. "This "desktop war", as you call it, has been unhealthy from a practical viewpoint. We have incompatible libraries, incompatible object/component models, and porting between these platforms is a pain. For this reason, one of the main purposes of free software, which is the sharing of source code, is defeated in the desktop field, and this is sad."Last week's GNOME summary. Here is last week's GNOME Summary, by Havoc Pennington. It covers the integration of Mozilla and Nautilus, and many other topics. Mosfet's desktop. Mosfet has put up an updated version of his desktop, showcasing the new KDE2 look and feel. Other news this week from mosfet.org includes the merge of KDE developer Matthias Elter's changes to Kicker, the new KDE2 panel, more updates to pixie and the introduction of application lauch notification, courtesy of KDE developer Rik Hemsley. ScienceLinux in Science Report #4. This week's Linux in Science Report takes a look at a couple of existing roadblocks to the adoption of Linux in some scientific arenas, along with the usual reports on a selection of useful scientific software for Linux.Website DevelopmentKeeping Up with Apache's Bleeding Edge (LinuxPlanet). LinuxPlanet has a tutorial on Apache. "...suppose you want to keep up with the latest and greatest Apache developments (and bugs), without having to wait for a release? How would you do it? That's what this article is all about." Midgard Weekly Summary #35. This week's Midgard Weekly Summary is "rather populated with major announcements", including the release of Midgard 1.4-beta3 and the creation of the nonprofit organization to promote and support Midgard development and usage, "The Midgard Project Ry". Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 20, 2000
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Development toolsQt 2.1 released. Trolltech announced the release of Qt 2.1 on April 15th. Here is a list of the changes in the latest version of this cross-platform C++ toolkit (on which KDE is based). (From dotcomma.) JavaSAX2/Java final pre-release. David Megginson announced the availability of the final pre-release of SAX2/Java, along with a feature freeze. Barring unforeseen problems, the final version will be released on Friday, May 5th. "SAX2 is a new Java-based release of SAX, the Simple API for XML. A C++ version (at least) is planned as well. SAX2 introduces configurable features and properties and adds support for XML Namespaces; it includes adapters so that SAX1 parsers and applications can interoperate with SAX2." (From xmlhack.)Jakarta - Tomcat 3.1. Version 3.1 of Tomcat, an implementation of the Java Servlet 2.2 and JavaServer Pages 1.1 Specifications, has been released, promising substantially improved documentation as well as a variety of bugfixes and new features. Sun Ships Forte for Java (InternetNews). Sun started shipping Forte for Java this week, according to this InternetNews article. "The Forte for Java product family is Sun's attempt to deliver a complete set of development and integration tools for creating dot-com applications, from the simplest to the most complex." PerlWhat's New in Perl 5.6.0? (Perl.com). Simon Cozens takes a look at the new features in Perl 5.6.0. "If, like me, you remember the day that the combined might of Malcolm and Sarathy produced the last major release of Perl, you might be wondering what's happened since then. Allow me, then, to present to you the wonderful world of 5.6.0."Processing XML with Perl (XML.com). Michel Rodriguez takes a look at processing XML with Perl. PythonLast week's Python-URL. Last week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL came out a bit late for the LWN weekly edition. It covers the usual array of topics in the Python development world.Meanwhile, this week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL reports on the great Starship Python disaster and other developments from the Python world. PySol 4.10. Two versions of PySol have been announced in the past week, version 4.00 and now 4.10. Note that the number of solitaire variants supported jumped from 173 to 273 in a single week! We thought that might have been an error in one of the announcements, so we checked. The numbers are correct; they added support for 100 Mahjongg variants ... O'Reilly announces Python Dev. O'Reilly announced their new Python Dev portal on April 14th. Tcl/tkSection Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
Language Links Guile Haskell Blackdown.org IBM Java Zone Perl News PHP Daily Python-URL Python.org JPython Smalltalk |
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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 businessThe end of the party for Linux stocks? The decline in the prices of Linux stocks is not a new story - it has been a steady process for most of the year to date. A new milestone was reached, however, in last week's ugly market: shares of Caldera Systems, VA Linux Systems, Andover.Net, and Eon Communications all fell below their IPO prices. Linux stocks are no longer an instant fountain of wealth. As LWN has said before, this return to earth is not an entirely bad thing. The stock values we were seeing back in December made very little sense. Was VA Linux really worth more than, say, United Airlines? Irrational valuations will, in the end, right themselves. Better sooner than later. Having that amount of money flying around also distorts the Linux community in a number of ways. When cash seems to be raining from the sky, it's hard to concentrate on the code. A great deal of effort was going into press releases, acquisitions, and the all-important IPO. None of that will go away now, but perhaps we have at least seen the end of the idea that instant riches are a natural right of Linux companies. It is also true, though, that a difficult market will make life harder for Linux businesses. Businesses need to raise cash to grow, and that has gotten harder to do. It remains to be seen whether all of the companies that are planning IPOs this year will be successful in going public; if not, some of them could find themselves hurting. Linux, however, remains as strong as ever. Free software is a better way of doing things, regardless of what is going on in the stock market. Linux deal-making proceeds, heedless of the movements of the markets. Here's some of what came out this week:
Expanded LPI certification exam incentive program. The Linux Professional Institute has announced an expanded incentive program designed to get people to take its second certification exam. A 50% discount will be offered until May 12; people who have already taken the first exam will be able to take this one for free. Those who pass both exams qualify for the LPI's level 1 certification. Online PhotoLab launches. The Online PhotoLab has announced its existence. Section Editor: Jon Corbet. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
April 20, 2000
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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 newsPolitical Tech Review has run an article by Richard Stallman on familiar issues. "In a democracy, a law that prohibits a popular, natural and useful activity is usually soon relaxed. But the powerful publishers' lobby was determined to prevent the public from taking advantage of the power of their computers, and found copyright a suitable weapon. Under their influence, rather than relaxing copyright to suit the new circumstances, governments made it stricter than ever, imposing harsh penalties on readers caught sharing." Events LinuxMall reports from Comdex in Chicago. "The Linux presence here is strong-eyeballing the expo floor map, at least a quarter of the exhibition hall's floor space is designated for Linux exhibitors-and a separate track of Linux speakers runs counter to other talks going on throughout the conference. Jon "maddog" Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, and Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Helix Code are among Wednesday's featured speakers. "
ABCNews has picked up
this Reuters article on the Linux Expo in Montreal.
"Students make up much of the crowd at Linux Expo 2000, although
[Jon "maddog"] Hall points out that gray hair has crept in as Linux
moves into the business mainstream. Internet.com reports from the Montreal Linux Expo. "While the crowd was large, it wasn't necessarily the corporate crowd organizers were hoping for: 'This feels more like the McGill student union than a real trade show,' said one vendor who asked for anonymity." MSNBC covers the Montreal Linux Expo with this Reuters piece. "A corporate forecast of the Linux market evolution may not mesh with the views of developers. But the two groups do find common ground in praising the promise offered by the technology's freedom." Here's the Ottawa Citizen's report from the Montreal Linux Expo. "The crown princes of the fading kingdom of Linux were a study in contrasts at the LinuxExpo show yesterday." Business Linsider picked a difficult week to start its weekly Linux stocks summary column. "Looking at strict Linux plays, Red Hat lost 7.75 points and was down 24% for the week. Despite the dire sound of this, it wasn't the big loser. VA Linux lost just over 17 points and 37%, while Corel and Cobalt logged 34% and 38% losses. The big loser in the pure plays was Andover, which lost 42% of its value over the course of the week. Ouch." Evan Leibovich takes a look at the post-Rush world of Linux. "So there are some -- and I'd list myself among them -- who believe that the return to earth is a Good Thing. There's nothing wrong with making a buck, but Linux doesn't benefit from being elevated beyond reality on a shaky foundation." Here's a News.com story on how Linux companies are still interesting to investors. "After generally spectacular initial public offerings, Linux stocks have slipped downhill. Stock in three Linux companies traded last week below IPO prices, dragged down by the stock market descent. But wheeling and dealing hasn't tapered off. In addition to several IPOs in the works, Linux companies have been attracting investments from established computing companies." Nicholas Petreley looks at Corel and VA Linux Systems in this InfoWorld column. "My advice to Corel is to fish or cut bait on its commitment to Linux. Corel stands to benefit more in the long run if it raises a family of native Linux applications rather than persisting with Windows half-breeds." Here's a Forbes article on the state of Linux stocks. "Larry Augustin, chief executive of VA Linux, which makes Linux-based computers, has seen his personal wealth plummet from a post-IPO $2 billion to just over $200 million. That doesn't even get you a table near the kitchen in Silicon Valley." Newsbytes reports on OnLinePhotoLab - Gimp creator Spencer Kimball's latest venture. "The Gimp is touted by the open-source Linux community as being in the same league as professional image-editing software - like an Adobe Photoshop, but coded with a sense of humor. The Gimp's amusingly named scripting capability - Script-Fu, as in Kung-Fu - is what makes Online PhotoLab possible." ZDNet looks at Linux on the IBM S/390. "Linux on a mainframe isn't a joke. IBM thinks that by bringing Linux to a mainframe, customers will be able to run the Apache Web server, the Samba file/print servers and other popular Linux-based services on System/390s." Michael Hammel starts a series of weekly articles summarizing activities by Linux companies that have a strong interest in the graphics market. "Mozilla steps up to SVG, Corel sets up for an early CorelDraw release, and Precision Insight wraps up early development for Voodoo 3 drivers." This Linuxcare column makes the point that people are the most important resource in the Linux "revolution." "Thankfully, the open source revolution has momentum. We are increasingly gathering the cream of the crop into our fold. Free software is ubiquitous at universities all over the world. The best and brightest will inevitably gravitate to our working model." Information Week looks at Home Depot's Linux deployment from a support point of view. "But the company wanted to make sure it could get help developing Linux device drivers for key pieces of retail hardware such as credit-card readers and signature-capture pads. To ensure this, Home Depot has a high-level support arrangement with Red Hat. This includes round-the-clock support, plus a dedicated point of contact to make sure it gets speedy access to programming expertise during the development process" The Raleigh/Durham Business Journal has run this article on how Red Hat got dumped by its advertising agency. "Red Hat Software's advertising agency dropped the account only six months after winning the business, complaining that the Linux distributor doesn't have its marketing act together." Michael J. Hammel's first Linsight column looks at technology acceptance cycles and Linux. "Linux won't take 30 years to be adopted for several reasons. The first is that Linux is not a new technology. Its the inevitable extension to the PC technology that itself has to evolve to reach its final acceptance." Linuxcare Upside looks at post-Sarrat Linuxcare and at Linux stocks in general. "[Art] Tyde has based his entire business vision for Linuxcare on the notion that Linux could evolve toward a de facto standard for Internet-device operating systems. The recent swoon is merely a reminder to him that once you take away the novelty and the semi-radical social undertones, Linux quickly becomes about as sexy as asphalt, copper plumbing or any one of a dozen or so technologies we all use but rarely notice." G2News is reporting that the anticipated ouster of Linuxcare CIO Doug Nassaur has taken place. The Linux Mall has put up this article about events at Linuxcare. "Linuxcare may well remain in a position to 'Support the Revolution,' but critics are wondering: Whose revolution is it? Tight-lipped executives, scandalous rumors, denial and angry investors may well be critical parts of the rough and tumble world of venture capitalism and public offerings, but for many in the Linux Community, those sorts of dealings fly in the face of much of what the Open Source movement stands for." Resources LinuxPlanet has a tutorial on Apache. "...suppose you want to keep up with the latest and greatest Apache developments (and bugs), without having to wait for a release? How would you do it? That's what this article is all about." Linuxcare brings us Tales From The Tech Support Pit. This edition documents one man's 'Quest for a Leaner and Meaner Kernel'. "Not all calls to Linuxcare Technical Support are from distraught customers experiencing imminent technical meltdown. Sometimes calls come from customers who simply wish to leverage the power that only an open source operating system can provide. Paul was one such customer. He had the technical know-how, but still wanted to ask a few careful questions and verify that any customizations he performed would not be irreversible." Test & Measurement World looks at Linux device drivers. "On the other hand, writing kernel-space drivers calls for advanced C programming skills. To write them properly requires knowledge of arcane issues such as kernel headers, kernel-dependent version control, memory management, and resource control. And if your kernel-space driver doesn't work properly, it can crash your system-requiring a reboot." (Thanks to T.O. Lee). This week's Linuxcare 'Dear Lina' column deals with color ls. "The next number is the color, in this case 34 is blue. This tells ls to paint directories in beautiful bold blue--an obvious choice for me, love!" The Linuxcare Application of the Week is grepmail. "grepmail version 4.23, an application licensed under the GNU GPL, is a program that searches /bin/mail-style mailboxes and returns all emails containing the search string. " Reviews and Interviews Michael Cheek reviews the Dell laptop preinstalled with Red Hat 6.1 in this article entitled It's a bumpy ride, but Dell takes Linux on the road. The laptop only gets a C+ rating, primarily due to a lack of tuning for the hardware. For example, Michael complains of the lack of a battery monitor, something that is available, but generally must be added to the default desktop. "Dell did not include any special documentation for the Linux version of the notebook. It's needed." (Thanks to Alan S. Petrillo and Jay R. Ashworth.) LinuxPower reviews Webdownloader for X. "Downloader for X is a neat little application for those of us who download lots of stuff from the net (meaning most Linux fans :). It rids us of many of the frustrations that the old netscape/ftp combo gave and replaces it with an easy to use and powerfull helper application." LinuxPlanet reviews Omnis Studio for Linux. "We like the way Omnis Software's Omnis Studio brings multiplatform, database application development and delivery to Linux. Omnis has a long track record on Windows and Macintosh with its rapid application deployment (RAD) tools. Omnis provides matching development and delivery tools on all platforms, and applications created on one platform can run on the others, assuming platform-specific features are not used." (Thanks to R. McGuinness). Here is a followup article to Nicholas Petreley's look at Word Perfect Office 2000. "I still owe Corel an apology for assuming that its stability problems were related to its decision to adapt Wine for its suite. (Wine is the open source project that brings most of the Win32 API to Linux.) I remain unconvinced that Wine was the best way to go, but Corel may yet make a convert out of me." (Thanks to "TJ"). Here's a San Francisco Chronicle article about Salon writer Andrew Leonard. "What would it mean to write in the way open source developers code? Open source code is produced collaboratively, by an international community. When hackers want to contribute to Apache, an open source server project, they literally write chunks of code (called 'patches') that are added to the server software. Can a book really be like Apache or Linux?" (Thanks to Michael Miller). Olinux.com.br interviews Trae McCombs of Themes.org and Linux.com fame. "I started using Linux for one plain and simple reason. It was a better looking desktop than anything you could have for Windows at the time. That was Sept 96." LinuxMall interviews Dave McAllister, the new CTO of Maxspeed. "McAllister wants to provide some of that direction from his post at Maxspeed. Maxspeed is an 11 year old company, originally founded in Santa Cruz, Calif., whose products have been largely UNIX based. At the moment, they are running their servers on Linux and their business clients are using Star Office, although they are also evaluating Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000." CBS Marketwatch interviews Caldera CEO Ransom Love. "I would disagree (with the notion that) we're a classic IPO that popped and dropped. We came out at a very reasonable valuation, and then the market itself went through a major correction. You can't attribute that to a lack of confidence in our company." Finally La Bastille is the world's largest fully-functional Tetris game. It transforms Brown University's fourteen-story Sciences Library into a giant video display. CNet commented, "The game--in which a player tries to fit shapes snugly together as they drop down the screen--runs on a Linux computer connected to a network of 10,000 light bulbs, according to project architect Soren Spies." (Thanks to Michael Gerdts.) Linux is at work at the Human Brain Project in this LinuxMall article. "Linux is surfing the curls of the human brain. In a project designed to study cerebral cortex topography as part of the Human Brain Project being carried out at the Massachusetts General Hospital Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Research Center, Linux is being used to assimilate massive amounts of data--and bring the project in under budget. " Here's an osOpinion piece about the Linux Standard Base. "Corel, Stormlinux, Debian and the other Debian based distributions are set to immediately adopt the LSB, but what happens to those distributions which depend on the RPM's and the Redhat filesystem structure? Mandrake, Suse, etc., why would they switch, how would they switch if Redhat won't? I don't want to see market leadership become an obstacle to compatibility." To call this Fox News article an "installation nightmare" story is perhaps a bit strong - it's more like an "unpleasant installation dream" piece. "My impressions of Corel Linux at half-time are mixed. To be fair, much of the difficulty I've had so far can be attributed to a lack of knowledge of Linux's basic procedures and directory structure. And I won't soon forget the severe pain it was installing Microsoft Windows Second Edition - caused by bugs and more bugs on the installation CD." (Thanks to Jay R. Ashworth). Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
April 20, 2000 |
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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. |
AnnouncementsEventsLinux@work Europe LogOn has announced "Linux@work", a series of free one-day conference and exhibition on Linux for business in Europe in May.The Embedded Systems Conference Summer ESC Summer runs from July 10-12, 2000 in Boston. Linux is covered in the technical program, and should be abundant on the show floor. Ottawa Linux Symposium The second Ottawa Linux Symposium has been announced for July 19-22, 2000. The keynote speaker is kernel hacker David Miller, and Alan Cox will be there as well. Report from the Linux Business Expo William Stearns is out at the Linux Business Expo and called Baiju Thakkar at LinuxMonth to pass on some brief notes. "First thing he noted was the security. "Security is extremely high here." At first he thought Linus was there and the secuirty was for him. After all the Windows Expo is also going on at the COMDEX. And you never know :) ... But the security is for President Clinton himself. Apparently he is giving some kind of talk at COMDEX. He is not sure if President has walked through the Linux Expo yet or plans to". Linux Talks at CA World The line-up of Linux talks at last week's CA World is quite lengthy, with speakers from Caldera, Conectiva, Red Hat, SuSE and Turbo Linux, as well as others. Slides from the various talks are supposed to show up soon on that site as well, though one correspondent tells us that convincing CA that the talks were not going to be given with PowerPoint was not easy ... Journal to Oslo From the Linux Portaloo: comes this article about a trip to a Linux event in Oslo, Norway. "This was a commercial sort of conference where people had paid to hear the talks, I believe. Lots of business types. We arrived, Alan talked about Linux 2.4, (again -- what he'll talk about when it's released, I have no idea..), and by then it was lunchtime. (We spent quite a while pushing cars, yes. But it was fun.) After that, Michael did his talk, and we headed to the trade show." Linux Expo Montreal a Success The Sky Events Group has released this announcement calling the Linux Expo in Montreal a success. The announcement also looks at plans for next year, and other events. Web sitesMoblieLINUX.com Axalia Inc. announced the "soft launch" of the www.mobilelinux.com website.The redhat.com Marketplace Red Hat, Inc. announced the redhat.com Marketplace. The new website "provides technology professionals with the perfect starting point for accurate, up-to-date information and purchasing options for Internet infrastructure solutions that are based on or support Red Hat Linux and other open source technologies." User Group NewsCentral Ohio Linux Users Group (COLUG) COLUG will meet Saturday, April 29, 2000 at 1pm CDT. |
April 20, 2000
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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 weekDan Kegel has put together an SSL Acceleration page which contains everything he could find on how to make secure socket layer-enabled web sites perform better. Dan's looking for input from anybody who has additions or corrections for the page. The GNU/Linux Audio Mechanics (or GLAME) project has set itself the task of producing a top-quality sound editor for Linux systems. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 20, 2000 |
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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. | |
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 01:17:39 -0400 From: <esr@golux.thyrsus.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: John Gibson's letter on the DOJ vs. MS John Gibson claims "There would be no competitive economic environment without the regulation of law specifically crafted to promote and sustain it!" He is deeply in error. Economic competition is not a fragile hothouse flower requiring the constant protection of governments, but a robust and ubiquitous phenomenon that flourishes whenever human beings need to solve scarcity problems and are not forcibly prevented from trading with each other to do it. There are any number of counterexamples to the silly claim that government-made law is essential to economic competition. Customary law maintained by the self-interest of economic actors is quite sufficient (the economist David Friedman has written extensively on this topic). For especially pure cases, interested readers should investigate the history of dumb-show trading on the coasts of Africa, or of the Nevada silver-mining camps in the 1840s. He is even more fundamentally confused when he writes: >Or does anyone think we'd be better off without the regulation >implied by First Amendment protection? What "First Amendment protection" does is not regulate speech but rather *prevent* regulation of speech. Despite himself, however, Mr. Gibson has chosen a useful parallel. Just as the quality and vigor of public speech is improved when government is forbidden from regulating it, the quality of economic competition is improved when governments refrain from attempting to improve on it. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a> Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. -- Mohandas Gandhi | ||
From: "Wolf N. Paul" <wnp@crossnet.at> Subject: Andy Tanenbaum & Minix To: letters@lwn.net Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 09:59:53 +0200 (CEST) Hello, I would like to correct the impression given by your item about the license change for MINIX. When MINIX was first released it was part of a book published by Prentice-Hall, and like the text of the book was covered by P-H's copyright. Andy Tanenbaum went to great lengths to get P-H to agree to personal copying, etc; and in his note announcing the change to the BSD license says that now, with Linux, Free Software and Open Source being well-known bywords, it took two years to get P-H to agree to this change. While I deplore Andy's initial attitude towards Linux and its creator, I also deplore the implication that he is somehow to be blamed for the fact that MINIX simply predated the Open Source movement and was therefore published under a different license. Regards, Wolf Paul Crossnet.AT Technical Manager wnp@crossnet.at | ||
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 11:20:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Christopher Laprise <cprise@yahoo.com> Subject: WordPerfect "review" To: lwn@lwn.net I was surprised by this review, which read like so much flamebait. I've used WP Office on Corel and Red Hat Linux, and it works well (not having crashed even once). I find it very usable on a Cyrix PR200, although Wine has a tendancy to scan (and time-out on) every empty CD-ROM drive in the system; With CDs inserted, the apps start up in reasonable time. If WordPerfect doesn't work with his/her pet flavor of Linux, too bad. Linux distros are missing *SO* many services that mature apps rely on, and Corel is not going to sit around waiting for a standards group to set things straight. Corel is adding necessary functionality to Linux as they go (witness their involment in extending Linux printer support), but they can't write code to retrofit every distro. Most Linux distros are hideous, sprawling, inconsistent masses. And every major player who lumps in a new technology thinks they have bettered Linux. But thank goodness they're wrong; Linux consists of the kernel and nothing more until standards for various levels of functionality are set. These emperors are wearing no clothes. When people try to intimidate users with the implication they're running "crippled" Linux unless they have at least 4 or 5 scripting languages installed, at least I know better. Think of all the people who lumped their pet tools into Linux distros just to support their quick-and-dirty, user-unfriendly contributions. Why should Corel be lambasted for making their own additions and making their own apps dependant on them? Those OS additions are available to the community just like the other pet technolgies (which are often less usable anyway). IMO, the opinions offered in the LWN article are entirely incredible. The reviewer was not honest enough to describe the distro in use (Corel only supports a finite number, you know) or the modifications it contains, *or* to admit they were working from a particular brand of Linux conventional-wisdom. He/she also didn't acknowledge X-Windows' shortcomings as a source of GUI problems (lack of support for modal windows and dialogs, for instance). This is why the LinuxWorld review, in contrast, was much more fair and ultimately more positive toward WP Office. They stated the distros and mods being used, and gave Corel credit for extending Linux up to the task of serving a mature application. | ||
To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: [Correction] linux-msdos review just wrong.... From: ebiederm+eric@ccr.net (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 15 Apr 2000 11:36:29 -0500 This thursday you publish a link to a review of the linux-msdos@vger.rugters.edu mailing list. This appears to be a cascade of lack of knowledge. This is the mailing list for discussing running msdos on linux. In particular dosemu. The review appears to have been wholly gennerated from the title, without any thought. If you are going to link to flames about a public mailing list could they at least be correct flames??? Eric | ||
From: Dub_Dublin@tivoli.com To: letters@lwn.net Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 13:03:52 -0500 Subject: Re: de Icaza Speaking Ad? I gotten several challenges to my assertion about patents as a desirable thing (mostly asking for examples of small inventors that actually did profit from patents) so here's my quick response, FWIW: Anyone saying patents don't do immense public good, and provide worthwhile, needed, and *effective* protection of small inventors against large corporations is simply ignorant of the history of even quite recent technology. Many inventors started small, but because of patent protection were indeed able to profit greatly from their inventions. >From the "gararge-shop" POV, well, just off the top of my head, there are the examples everyone is familiar with: Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP, instruments), Steves Jobs and Wozniak (Apple, home computer), and outside the computer industry, folks like Edwin Land (Polaroid, polarized materials and instant camera), Chester Carlson (Xerox, xerography), Henry Ford (Ford, affordable automobiles), Thomas Edison (GE, light bulb, motion pictures, phonograph...), and Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T, telephone), all of whom profited greatly from their patented works. (One could argue for the inclusion of Jeff Bezos in that list, although around here, that's a bit like whacking a hornet's nest with a stick...) But the classic twentieth century example of patents providing exactly the kind of protection I'm talking about is probably that of Philo T. Farnsworth, whom you may never have heard of, although you likely use his invention (electronic television) every day. Farnsworth was the prototypical individualist inventor who persevered against all odds and eventually defeated David Sarnoff and Vladimir Zworykin of the immensly powerful RCA. RCA was truly the Microsoft of its day in terms of control of the market and underlying technologies through acquisition - often under severe economic and other pressure. RCA had a policy of never paying royalties for any technology - a policy they managed to uphold until they met Philo Farnsworth, who just wouldn't give up. Farnsworth fought virtually alone against all of RCA's power for seven years before the final court rulings that his patents had clear validity and precedence over Zworykin's, forcing a tearful RCA lawyer to sign a royalty payment agreement to Farnsworth. (Farnsworth publicly displayed television *five years* before Sarnoff unveiled RCA's infringing version to the world amidst great fanfare at the 1939 World's Fair, leading many to believe Sarnoff and RCA were the inventors of television - sound like anyone today?) Farnsworth's experience is, if anything, a case study for the need to *strengthen* patents and either streamline patent appeals or extend the length of patents when thier commercial utility is impacted by unsuccessful challenges. (World War II intervened, and the government outlawed television for the duration of the war (the technology was needed for radar, night vision and other inventions Farnsworth then worked on), and so Farnsworth's patents expired before he could profit from them. Do you still think patents are a bad idea? I'd argue experience shows that patents should be strengthened and perhaps that the duration of Farnsworth's patent should have been extended, due to RCA's clear abuse of the patent system and the courts. (I also think the government should have been upright enough to grant extensions in the name of fair play to all inventors whose inventions were commandeered for the war effort, but that's another issue entirely.) History clearly shows that often patents are all that stands between real progress and innovation and the acquisition by force so typical of a Sarnoff or Gates. Strong patent law is the *only* effective defense against large companies stealing technology from small inventors. (What RCA tried to do could be accurately portrayed as theft.) I'm amazed more people don't get this, but they tend to avoid history, and fail to recognize that our American forefathers were wiser than we are in pretty much every way. Although it's not perfect, there are very good reasons the patent system is the way it is, and we meddle with it at our peril. It would be nice to see a balanced discussion of this issue rather than the knee-jerk reactions that are more common in the open source/free software community. Dub P.S.: I recommend spending some time browsing through some of the links below to see how many of the great inventors of recent history were independent - the protection provided by the patent system allowed them to develop and in many cases profit handsomely from their inventions. You might be surprised at the diversity and "ordinariness" of many of these inventors of important breakthroughs - they're not such an elite group as you might imagine (the list is somewhat US-centric - our culture celebrates invention, and so links for US inventors are much easier to find): National Inventor's Hall of Fame: http://www.invent.org/book/index.html MIT's Invention Dimension Archive: http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/archive.html Good Internet Public Library list of links to Inventor information: http://www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/PF/everyday.html | ||
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:49:55 -0400 From: Derek Glidden <dglidden@illusionary.com> To: letters@lwn.net, sales@xig.com Subject: What is XiG's problem? I noticed in the April 13 edition of LWN a note about Xi Graphics releasing accelerated, OpenGL-compliant drivers for 3DFX Voodoo3 cards and was intrigued, being an owner of such a card. However, after just skimming over the press release and their website, I had run across such appealing quotes as: "Xi Graphics Engineering Manager Jon Trulson said that all Linux distributions have freeware graphics software because it's free, not because it's good." (Yeah, like all that other crappy, free software that comes with your Linux distro.) "In fact, if you have Mesa installed on your system, it should be removed when you install an LGD. Mesa is a freeware "knockoff" of libGL..." and mentions Mesa may cause conflicts with XiG's GL libraries and that without removing it, "things go to hell in a handbasket, and our code get [sic] a bad rap!" (Mesa is a "knockoff" of OpenGL the way XFree86 is a "knockoff" of X11R6 and Linux is a "knockoff" of UNIX I suppose.) "Then one notices that the system runs, and runs, and runs. Those annoying crashes and lockups you experience with the freeware drivers are gone." (I'm not familiar with those...) "On the other hand, some users seemingly will put up with about anything, so long as the software is free. We see our fair share of these folk, and needless to say, they are not our target customer." (They're really winning me over now with their honesty.) Then I recalled seeing a story on Slashdot at one time: "XiG Ad Campaign Slamming Xfree?" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/14/1420204) that covered a full-page ad run by XiG with the statement: "If you're still using that 'free' X server that came with your Linux distribution, well, hazardous conditions lie ahead" (one wonders why they felt the need to put "free" in quotes. I can think of few licenses more "free" than the X11 license under which XFree86 is distributed) and follows up with the completely false claim that: "When the X server 'falls over' - crashes - the entire operating system goes down." So XiG's advertising strategy appears to be one of slamming their free counterparts whenever the opportunity arises with claims of bad performance and instability. (Strangely, I don't notice them attacking Precision Insight or MetroLink, although I probablyl just overlooked it.) In light of this, I find some of the other quotes on their Voodoo3 driver page even more interesting: "Please be advised that the LGDs are not yet up to the performance level that can be obtained on other systems ... Direct Graphics Hardware Access is not yet implemented, and some speed optimizations are yet to be done." (You mean to bring them up to the level of functionality and performance of the freeware drivers?) "... we expect frequent updates for bug fixing and to increase performance, which is much slower than we like. The updates will be available free to owners, since their Key can be used to unlock the newest (faster, less buggy) demo version of the LGD." (Bugs? Increase performance?) One has to wonder what the marketing department is thinking at XiG to believe that this kind of smear advertising is going to win over the loyalty of the "demanding Linux user" they mention so frequently on their site. Yeah, we demand performance and stability, and we like "free" but we also demand a bit of common sense and fair play. This kind of attitude is NOT going to score XiG brownie points with the average Linux user, much less the "demanding Linux user." Oh, but maybe we aren't their target customer... A couple of quotes from the DRI mailing list (you know, that freeware graphics driver project) make the point just as well: "Mesa and XFree86 have pretty good reputations in the Linux community. I think Xi's only hurting themselves by printing such nonsense." "We've certainly put off buying their $300 product primarily because of their poor attitude." Exactly. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- With Microsoft products, failure is not Derek Glidden an option - it's a standard component. http://3dlinux.org/ Choose your life. Choose your http://www.tbcpc.org/ future. Choose Linux. http://www.illusionary.com/ | ||
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