See also: last week's Back page page.

Linux Links of the Week

SPECweb99 Results. Everyone loves a benchmark, right? Well, only if your side wins. So enjoy this one. LinuxToday took a look at the results from the SPECweb99 Benchmark and discovered two Dell machines with "almost" identical hardware. Yet they turned in vastly different performances. "The W2K machine received a score of SPECweb99 = 1598, which means that it was able to handle a median of 1598 Conforming Simultaneous Connections. The Red Hat Tux 1.0 machine received a score of SPECweb99 = 4200, which means that is was able to handle a median of 4200 Conforming Simultaneous Connections."

Woo hoo for our team! Aren't benchmarks great? Isn't that what we've said all along? Ah well, maybe not, but we might as well enjoy the results when they happen to run in our favor.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

This week in history

The current development kernel release was 2.1.108.

The voting for comp.lang.perl.moderated ended with an overwhelming yes vote. Today the site is still alive. It has less flames than comp.lang.perl, but also tends not to get the best material. These days our developement editor monitors websites like Use Perl instead.

One year ago, July 8, 1999. Security web site Packet Storm was taken off-line by Harvard University on July 1st. Packet Storm was described by SecurityPortal.com as "gigabytes of open source and free security software, categorized in a well thought out manner. We could find nearly all the tools we needed there, from network analyzers and intrusion detection utilities, to firewalls and encryption solutions." Today Packet Storm can be found at http://packetstorm.securify.com/.

The current development kernel was 2.3.9.

Stormix Technologies sent us this press release about their new distribution, Storm Linux. See this week's Distributions page for an article about Stormix.

A company called Hard Data Ltd. contested MontaVista Software's use of the name Hard Hat Linux. Today, MontaVista's distribution is still called Hard Hat Linux. Hard Data Ltd. is still around. They focus on providing hardware systems, which come with a choice of operating system, including Linux.

Letters to the editor

To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: Plan 9 license
From: Nathan Myers <ncm@nospam.cantrip.org>
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 21:09:58 -0700


There has been lots of activity lately regarding the Bell Labs Plan 9 
operating system release and its license.  The short summary is that 
the license is "not there yet".  Here are some links, in order of 
appearance:

  My article on Advogato, "The Problem with Plan 9":
    http://www.advogato.org/article/117.html

  Richard Stallman's "The Problems of the Plan Nine License":
    http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-07-02-007-04-OP-LF-SW

(Note that the proper name is "Plan 9", not "Plan Nine".)  IMHO some of
RMS's objections miss the mark, but most are deeply insightful if read 
carefully.  As always when we discuss freeing software, the issue is not 
what the authors "owe" us, but what is needed before Free Software 
developers consider the code safe to invest their own time into.

Nathan Myers
ncm@nospam.cantrip.org

Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 02:32:03 +0100
To: letters@lwn.net
From: Robin Becker <robin@jessikat.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Penguin on wrong track

Linus apparently said

> As if wanting to re-assure me that yes, it really =was= the holy penguin, it finally
> added "Do you have any Herring?" before fading out in a puff of holy
> penguin-smoke. Only a faint whiff of rancid fish remains as I type in these words.. 

it seems the holy penguin has developed a taste for fish from the wrong hemisphere!
-- 
Robin Becker