See also: last week's Back page page.

Linux Links of the Week

Galeon is a smallish web browser built on the Gecko engine. We can't describe it any better than this NTK article did, which is where we found it... "The beauty of Open Source, though, is that say you *could* do without Mozilla's built-in WYSIWIG HTML editor, Mail handler, News reader, IRC client, xterm replacement, run-time XML UI interpreter, cross-platform high-level C++ widget set, and re-implementation from scratch of Microsoft's entire COM system, you can. And, thank God, someone has."

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

This week in history

Two years ago.(July 23rd, 1998).

Oracle announced support for Linux. They were one of many big database vendors to do so in 1998. At this point, all of the major databases run on Linux. However, Oracle is now considered the major database player for websites. Perhaps it maintained its position partially out of its early support for Linux.

Linus made clear his position that 4MB machines would no longer be a development priority or interest for the 2.1.X development tree. Nowadays, finding a PC with only 4MB of memory might be difficult. Even projects such as TINY Linux, which is designed especially for old, recycled computers, requires at least 8MB (but still supports the i386 chip).

One year ago.(July 22, 1999).

Red Hat announced its community stock offering. At the time, its efforts were viewed with suspicion; was this just an effort to get more people to buy stock and therefore drive up the price? After all, no one knew for sure but that the IPO would fail and the stock end up worth less at the end of the day than at the beginning.

In addition, their list got put together hurriedly and under time pressure and left off a lot of important contributors. Nonetheless, in the long run, a lot of people made a little bit of unexpected money as a result and the offering set a precedent for including the community that was later followed by the VALinux and Caldera IPOs. None of them went perfectly or smoothly, but again, at least some people got an unexpected bonus for the work they had done gratis for so long.

On a slightly different note, Red Hat unveiled more of its IPO plans, including a major investment in developing their 'web portal'. Plans included the hiring of over 20 people, setting up their own news service and much more. Of course, nowadays most of that has gone by the wayside and Red Hat is looking in much different fields (such as embedded Linux) for new revenue models.

Letters to the editor

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 17:50:38 -0400
From: Christopher Wong <cwong@world.std.com>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Going beyond skin deep

Chad Simonds in his Tucows article
(http://news.tucows.com/ext2/00/07/articles/ext207112000.shtml) thinks
that some Linux reviews were bought. As many distributions also provide
commercial software along with the free stuff, this may be
possible. However, I wonder if the real problem is the reviewers'
unwillingness to go beyond what is skin deep. Too many reviews spend too
much time covering the latest graphical install, and little or no time
evaluating quality and stability. When Mandrake 7 was released, for
example, there were tons of positive reviews focusing on its new GUI
installer and configuration tools. None covered the bugs that I hit,
such as the long-broken XEmacs info system, the ftape driver that did
not load correctly and the Mandrake Security script that could (and did)
wipe out my /etc/inittab. 

I realize that it is easier to cover the more glitzy aspects of a Linux
distribution than to actually sit down and use a distribution at
length. I also understand that web-reviews often strive to be timely and
fast. Nevertheless, I believe that such superficial reviews do the Linux
community a disservice in praising only the glitter and eliminating any
incentive to fix basic bugs.

Speaking of skin deep, Leon Brooks' letter could use a little more
historical integrity. He wrote of a John Tetzel who allegedly sold an
indulgence for a future crime later committed against himself,
surrendering his right to persecute. According to the online Catholic
Encyclopedia, a John Tetzel did indeed exist, and did some unfortunate
things, but there is no historical basis for the story that Brooks
related. The doctrinal confusion displayed -- in fact a Catholic
indulgence cannot apply to future offenses, cannot be given to someone
unrepentant, and does not remit civil penalties -- suggests that this
tale is a caricature fabricated in the heat of the Protestant
Reformation. Brooks does not help his case by uncritically repeating old
anti-Catholic polemics.

Chris