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With the hype growing to a feverish pitch about the public announcement of Xen, I thought I would share some insight into the knowledge I've had of the language for almost a year and a half. I'm still under orders not to post the video demonstration I have back to my blog (not because the subject matter is Xen, but because apparently the demonstration is internal to Microsoft... I still don't understand this (expecially now that the cat is out of the bag), but it certainly doesn't stop me from sharing some of the information contained in it. This will be an ongoing post as the demonstration is over an hour long, with lots of code samples to boot.

SCO's got a new SEC filing, an S-3 dated February 11. There are some interesting elements. What leaps off the page, to me, is that they seem to be gearing up to sue end users soon, and they are expecting serious backlash from their DMCA strategy. The feeling I get is they are suiting up for battle, and soon. McBride said in the Harvard appearance they'd file against some users around February 18, and after reading the S-3 financials, I now believe they actually will.

Lindows.com and its users are safe from the legal tentacles of the SCO Group, at least according to Lindows.com. The company, maker of a Linux-based operating system, has announced that a pre-existing agreement with SCO Group will keep it out of the fight between SCO and Linux vendors.

Nathan Hand - a Linux developer and enthusiast who represents what he himself admits is the "vanishingly small percentage of the Linux community" still believing The SCO Group's CEO to be "a reasonable man" - proposes what he calls a truce between SCO and the Linux community. Terms include: "You must stop distributing Linux, Samba and GCC unless you are willing to agree to the terms of our General Public License (GPL)."

The Press of Atlantic City offers a positive review of the PHLAK Linux distribution.

Opera and Mozilla are strong contenders for users looking for alternative browsers. Both of them have a fair deal of fan following and both can give IE a run for its money. Mozilla Firefox is the latest standalone browser to take on Opera as a worthy alternative to IE.

One of the most striking aspects of Monday's Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release was the new logo. This graphic is the work of the Mozilla Visual Identity Team, part of the Mozilla Marketing Project.

Has Linux finally matured into a viable desktop alternative to the Windows monolith? And will increasing adoption of this open source OS have a snowball effect in more and more organizations?

Solutions Linux is the main Linux Trade Show in France. The French KDE team was there like the precedent year promoting our favorite desktop. Our booth located in the very lively Association's village was organised by the indefatigable Gérard Delafond and sported an impressive Xinerama screen-wall demonstrating the brand new KDE 3.2. This wall was sponsored by MandrakeSoft and Belinea.

This fourth beta of PHP 5 is also scheduled to be the last one (barring unexpected surprises, that did occur with beta 3). This beta incorporates dozens of bug fixes since Beta 3, rewritten exceptions support, improved interfaces support, new experimental SOAP support, as well as lots of other improvements, some of which are documented in the ChangeLog.

Eric S. Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, said in an open letter Thursday that Sun needs to choose between controlling Java and seeing it spread as widely as possible.

Red Hat has released a test edition of Fedora Core 2, a version of Linux that incorporates the new 2.6 kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system.

Phong Nguyen identified a severe bug in the way GnuPG creates and uses ElGamal keys for signing. This is a significant security failure which can lead to a compromise of almost all ElGamal keys used for signing.

If you've ever worked on a car, you can easily understand the concept of open-source software. Some car parts, like a carburetor, can be torn down and rebuilt--you can see all of the working parts inside, and you can fix individual small parts. Other parts, particularly electronic parts, are sealed up tight with glue. If something goes wrong with one of those parts, you can't tear into it and fix it. Instead, you've got to go back to the part maker and get a new sealed piece.

I saw some fine articles on copyright and patent law by Dennis S. Karjala, who is Jack E. Brown Professor of Law, at Arizona State University'sCollege of Law, and because this is his area of expertise, I asked him if he would explain for Groklaw's readers what issues there might be for programmers who see the leaked code even inadvertently and what the impact of this leak might be on Microsoft's code. He graciously agreed. Here is his explanation. Thank you, Professor Karjala.

A cross-site scripting vulnerability was discovered in mailman's administration interface (CAN-2003-0965). This affects version 2.1 earlier than 2.1.4.

This whitepaper is the second in a series by William von Hagen on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel. von Hagen's whitepapers place special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel.

Linux is famous for coming with a large toolbox and good ways to integrate tools. In this article, Peter Seebach discusses the Unix tools philosophy, how new tools are developed, and how to make a one-off program into a utility you could be using for years to come.

Novell Inc. and adopted prodigy SUSE Linux struck a one-two punch at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here in late January with declarations by top executives that Novell will be a major player in the Linux world and is committed to responsibly shepherding the operating system and Novell’s other open-source projects.

A federal judge at the U.S. District Court in Central Utah is expected to make a ruling Friday afternoon or early next week whether the SCO Group can amend its lawsuit against IBM to include copyright infringement.