See also: last week's Linux in the news page.

Linux in the news

Recommended Reading

Copyright bill universally rejected (GlobeTechnology). Globe Technology is running a Reuters article on the reaction to the CBDTPA. "The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has also held hearings on the issue, has received more than 3,500 comments criticizing the bill, a spokeswoman said. 'We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill,' said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin." (Thanks to Michael Walma).

The EFF Gets a Blog (Linux Journal). Linux Journal looks at Consensus at Lawyerpoint, part of the EFF's effort to raise concern about the activities of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. "As with everything else the EFF does, Consensus at Lawyerpoint helps us save the Internet's commons from the self-righteous paranoids whose unseen hands operate congressional sock puppets like South Carolina's Fritz Hollings, (prime author of the CBDTPA...)"

Don't Buy Hollywood's Broadband Script (Business Week). Business Week writes about problems with the latest bill from Senator Hollings. "Little by little, Hollywood is calling the shots when it comes to the Digital Age. Standardization and legislative work is going on in bits and pieces, making it difficult to fully understand how much traditional consumer rights could ultimately be infringed upon."

Judges iffy about library filtering law (News.com). Reuters covers another threat to online rights, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). "A trial to determine how far the government can go to protect children from pornography ended Thursday with judges openly concerned about whether the latest online smut law from Congress infringes on free-speech rights."

Linux and Large Database (IT-Director). This is a followup to last week's article "Can Linux Do Database?". "An interesting straw in the Linux database wind is the announcement that Florida International University, a leading public research university, is using Linux (and also DB2) running on an IBM SP Supercomputer to power its High Performance Database Research Center. One of the applications it will run is TerraFly which gives users an image based overhead view of almost any location in the US. This will be one of the largest on-line databases in the world and hence it may prove a point or two."

Linux grrls break free (Sydney Morning Herald). Here's an article about LinuxChix, the LUG for women. "The LinuxChix community primarily revolves around eight general mailing lists. They include "techtalk" for technical questions and answers from beginner to expert level, "issues" relating to Linux, open source, technology and women and "grrls-only" - a combination of the LinuxChix mailing-lists topics but for women only. Grrls-only is deliberately not archived, to encourage people to speak openly."

ISS ranks Net vulnerabilities (Register). The Register looks at the results from the most recent ISS survey of Internet vulnerabilities: "The company counted 7,665,000 hybrid related attacks during the quarter, which eclipsed the number denial-of-service attacks tracked by the ISS X-Force Internet Threat Intelligence service."

IBM's unfolding power play (ZDNet). ZDNet is skeptical of the justification provided by IBM and Microsoft for excluding Sun from the board of the Web Services Interoperability Organization. "At the time of OpenServer.org, Oracle and IBM were holding up payments to Sun for their licenses of Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition . Could those licenses have served as pawns in a power play that was culminating in the launch of OpenServer.org? At the last minute, Oracle licensed J2EE, withdrew support for OpenServer.org, and OpenServer.org subsequently went poof . Sun, after patching up its J2EE license snafu with Oracle, appeared to have pulled the rug right out from under OpenServer.org, IBM, and the rest of the companies behind the consortium."

Anti-Unix site returns - on MySQL? (Register). Andrew Orlowski further analyzes the Microsoft/Unisys "wehavethewayout.com" site, which was, until recently, running on an OpenBSD machine. "But is the site itself entirely clean? The server yesterday revealed that some interesting ports were left open. The most interesting of which is port 3306, which is used by MySQL and Postgres. Since wehavethewayout.com was a BSD/Apache combination, it was almost certainly running an open source database, too. While Unisys has switched the front-end server to Windows IIS, the most likely explanation for keeping this port open is that the back-end still interfaces to a MySQL database."

Anti-Unix Web site back online (News.com). News.com looks at the Microsoft/Unisys "We have the way out" publicity fiasco. "'Microsoft is well known for trying to steer people away from anything non-Microsoft by any means possible,' Jon Fields, of LinuxFreak.org, which runs the 'We have the way in' parody Web site, wrote in an e-mail. ''Wehavethewayout.com' was developed to fool people into thinking Unix-based systems are a dead end and very costly. However, they didn't seem to notice they were running on FreeBSD at the time.'"

Judge: U.S. has jurisdiction in DMCA case (CNN). CNN is carrying this Reuters story covering the ElcomSoft trial. "The judge previously denied a defense motion to dismiss conspiracy charges against ElcomSoft, but Burton said the judge said he could refile that motion after getting more information."

Adobe-Hack Lawyers: Toss the Case (Wired). Wired looks at this week's developments in the Elcomsoft case. "The courtroom debate lasted about an hour, with Judge Whyte asking few questions of the attorneys. He made no immediate ruling. He is also still considering a a previous defense motion to dismiss the case. "

US courts claim jurisdiction over Sklyarov (Register). The Register further examines the latest developments in the Elcomsoft case. "During a pre-trial hearing on Monday, lawyers argued that since ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor, which can circumvent the weak copyright protection in electronic books, was legal in Russia and distributed over the Internet - a US court had no right to adjudicate on the matter.

This argument failed to impress US District Court Judge Ronald Whyte."

Microsoft still trying to stop Lindows (PC World). PC World reports on the continuing developments between Microsoft and Lindows. "Saying that the court asked the wrong questions and therefore arrived at the wrong answers in its preliminary injunction ruling that allowed Lindows.com to continue to use the name Lindows, Microsoft filed a motion for reconsideration late last week with United States District Court for the Western District of Washington." There's a related story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Companies

Dell looks to employ old tactic with new products. Newsalert talks about Dell Computer Corporation's push into the server market. "Dell believes businesses are increasingly interested in switching to Windows and Linux servers from the now common Unix servers, a market Hewlett-Packard dominates. If that switch happens, the Intel processors inside Dell servers would be in greater demand."

News.Com also covers Dell's plans. "One area where it will likely grow is services, which now represent about 10 percent of Dell's revenue. The company is working to expand the offerings of its services arm, Dell Technology Consulting, in a variety of ways, including partnerships, organic growth and acquisitions focused on Microsoft and Linux software."

Open source: IBM's deadly weapon (ZDNet). ZDNet examines IBM's changing business practices over the past twenty years. "There's no question that IBM's involvement in Linux is, in some ways, a power play against Microsoft, Intel, and even Sun . IBM could take much more control over its destiny if it minimized its dependency on these companies. But in order to strategically marginalize these three companies, IBM would have to place a few more bets under the industry-friendly guise of open source."

Red Hat bitten by Linux's low cost (News-Observer). The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer examines Red Hat's situation. "Meanwhile, the company's top executives have been selling Red Hat shares, which doesn't typically boost investor confidence. In late March, Chief Executive Officer Matthew Szulik filed to sell 425,000 of his shares after filing to sell 600,000 shares in February, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Company co-founder and Chairman Robert F. Young has unloaded nearly 700,000 shares so far this year, part of a plan in which he sells shares automatically on a daily basis."

Red Hat Lands a Big Fish (IT-Director). IT-Director looks at the Linux deployment at Credit Suisse First Boston. "Trading systems are not trivial applications. They are demanding in many ways, particularly in terms of the requirement for very high availability, failover and high performance. About 10 years ago the Digital VAX dominated this application space, primarily because of its resilience, and later on UNIX machines dominated. Now the space appears to be going over to Linux."

Business

Canadian Linux Consultants Offer Safety from Software Audits (Linux Journal). Don Marti examines a site called stay-legal.org that a group of consultants started in order to help businesses reduce the liability of software piracy fines. "Afraid one of your employees ratted you out to the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft? Linux consultants will help you replace those illegal copies of proprietary software with legal Linux."

Reviews

MS Office for Linux? Not quite--but close! (ZDNet). ZDNet investigates Code Weavers' CrossOver Office, which uses parts of WINE to run Microsoft applications on Linux. "CrossOver currently supports only three Office applications: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. While those three are sufficient for most users, you're out of luck (at least for now) if you want to use Access, Outlook, or FrontPage."

KDE 3.0 in the news. Open For Business looks at the new KDE 3.0 release. "According to Andreas Pour, Chairman of the KDE League, 'KDE systems - combined with GNU/Linux or a UNIX system - offer a compelling solution for enterprises which desire to realize substantial savings in their IT budgets, and comes at an opportune time in light of current economic conditions and runaway licensing fee inflation.'" (Thanks to Timothy R. Butler.)

Here's the Official KDE 3.0 announcement, the site is somewhat slow, however.

KDE polishes Linux desktop (ZDNet). Here is another look at KDE 3.0, this time from ZDNet UK. "The software currently supports 50 languages through the use of Unicode, a standard for rendering international characters, throughout its libraries. KDE 3.0 also supports right-to-left writing systems."

New version of Apache released--again (News.com). News.com takes a look at the latest version of Apache. "On Friday, the Apache Software Foundation endorsed version 2.0 for real-world "production" use, not just for test machines. Apache Software Foundation Director Greg Stein designated version 2.0.35 as the first general availability--or final--version, and now recommends it over the earlier 1.3 versions."

Sharp starts shipping Linux handheld (News.com). News.com gives its coverage of the Linux based Sharp Zaurus PDA. "Another feature that sets the new Zaurus apart from other handhelds is a tiny keyboard that slides out when needed. Zaurus owners can also input data via handwriting-recognition software and an on-screen keyboard." Hooray for that.

Palm handed open-source browser (ZDNet). Linux Labs has released a beta version of the Vagabond browser. "The browser's features include support for color screens, HTML, WAP, i-mode, cookies, SSL, bookmarks, an advanced toolbar and history, and auto-fill of Web addresses. It is designed for wireless Palms like the Palm VII, VIIx or 705, but will work with any Palm handheld that has a recent version of the operating system and the Web Clipping libraries installed."

Lessig's doomsday look at cyberspace (News.com). News.com reviews Lawrence Lessig's book 'The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World'. "The Internet, Lessig reminds us, was originally designed to be an intellectual 'commons,' a free public space open equally to all (see, for example, the mission statement of the World Wide Web Consortium). But in recent years corporate heavyweights have begun using copyright and patent law to turn large swathes of the Internet into their own private property. " (Thanks to Kyle Roberson.)

Linux Orbit reviews the 3D Tank game BZFlag. Linux Orbit has reviewed BZFlag, a 3D tank game. "BZFlag is a 3D multi-player tank battle game. You can fight other tanks by yourself as a Rogue (some game servers don't support Rogues) or join a team based on your tank color (Red, Green, Blue, Purple). The object of course is to kill other tank opponents by shooting them, a fairly straightforward scenario for a first-person shoot 'em up type of game. "

Resources

Simulating Massively Parallel Database Processing on Linux. IBM is running this article exploring how to set up two database partitions on a single computer (known as multiple logical nodes) and create tables partitioned across these nodes. This single CPU machine can then run multiple nodes and simulate having computers connected together in a cluster. (Thanks to Frank Carlos)

ELJOnline: Quest for PDA Utopia: Qtopia?. Are you getting a Zaurus? This ELJOnline tutorial shows you how to develop your first PDA application with Qtopia, and test it on your desktop before your new Zaurus comes.

Clustering Tutorial (IBM). IBM is offering an online tutorial on clustering. "When you finish this tutorial, you'll not only know what clusters are, you'll also know how to achieve high availability, failover, redundancy, and replication. For added measure, you'll understand resiliency, load balancing, CSM, and resource sharing. " Registration is required.

Whitepaper: Management of Web contents: the example of Zope. Here is an introduction (in French) to a whitepaper which uses Zope as an example in the management of Web contents.

A new era: Carrier-grade Linux for Telecommunications (LinuxDevices). This whitepaper by MontaVista Software's Glenn Seiler provides an introduction to one of the most significant emerging applications for Linux -- as a "carrier grade" operating system platform in public network telecommunications products.

LinuxUser issue 18. Issue #18 of LinuxUser is now available as a series of PDF format files.

Miscellaneous

IBM will own Java (ZDNet). Daniel Lord expresses his opinion on the future of Java in a letter to ZDNet. "I was surprised to hear IBM state that they had twice as many Java programmers as Sun did (including JavaSoft) and that they were scattered around the world in Russia and other locale, and developing Java 24x7.

I knew then that IBM saw the potential of Java better than Sun, who almost killed it."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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