Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But...But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested.

LXer Feature: 02-Sept-2007

Microsoft is under the microscope with the FSF looking into GPLv3 violations, and news that there will be a Gnome Desktop for the Windows API, Carla Schroder writes about 802.11n, HP launches Linux desktop in Australia, Mandriva Benelux is launched and I finally start getting tired of of the constant FUD coming from Matt Hartley. All this and more in this weeks LXer Weekly Roundup.

The Ubuntu Linux team last week announced Hardy Heron, the next release of the popular open source Linux operating system to include long-term support.

People Behind KDE releases the third interview in its series of four interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Leo Franchi, Juan González Aguilera, Andrew Manson and Marcus Hanwell!

Linux Gazette is a volunteer-run monthly web magazine dedicated to two simple ideas: making Linux a little more fun, and sharing ideas and discoveries.

OpenBSD project creator Theo de Raadt detailed his concerns regarding BSD-licensed code and Dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code being re-licensed under only the GPL as previously discussed here, "honestly, I was greatly troubled by the situation, because even people like Alan Cox were giving other Linux developers advice to ... break the law. And furthermore, there are even greater potential risks for how the various communities interact."

So, you want to be a kernel hacker. Before you go down that path, or get involved with any other free or open source development project, you should know that it's often a wild, raucous place where -- no matter what level of coding skill you possess -- your tolerance for criticism or rejection might constantly be tested. Even Linus Torvalds isn't immune to criticism.

Set aside an hour on September 11th or 12th and learn how to debug those complex Linux applications without leaving your desk. Linux application tool vendor MontaVista has scheduled a live online 'webinar' to show off the debugging features of its DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE) for Linux. It says the IDE will help developers build better Linux applications and deliver them to market quickly.

Gartner Webdev has published an interview with KDE's very own marketing renegade Wade Olson. Wade talks about KDE 4, what makes it special and what KDE's role in the software market is. He sheds some light on the user's point of view and discusses his vision about the way the computer and software industry is moving.

Red Hat has announced the beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, the new Eclipse-based IDE for the Red Hat family of solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The next Ubuntu Linux distribution with long-term support, "Hardy Heron," Ubuntu 8.04, will be released in April 2008. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, like Red Hat with Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell with openSUSE and SUSE Linux, releases both a community version and a version for businesses or individuals who want to rely on a distribution with long-term technical support. Unlike Red Hat and Novell, though, Canonical doesn't separate the two versions with different names.

Public Service Announcement: The not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative (HCHIC) isannouncing its inaugural fund raiser at, St. Arnold's brewery September 20th, for a Houston, Texas area, county-wide or state-wide, non-proprietary EMR:"Much like a lighthouse benefits all of us, your tax-deductible contribution to HCHIC will be used for desperately needed Electronic Medical Record (EMR) unification with proven and robust non-proprietary software that will be implemented, developed and promoted in Harris County and Texas. If you cannot attend the event, your tax-deductible contribution can be sent to HCHIC 4010 Blue Bonnet, Suite 202 Houston, Tx 77025. Individual memberships starting at $100 are available as well as silver ($500), gold ($1000) and platinum ($10,000) Sponsorships. Membership and Sponsorship donations received prior to October 31st will be 'founding' memberships. Membership allows voting rights as well as access to internal communications. Current goal: $80,000. 3 year budget goal: $2 million." All implementation and development products will be FOSS licensed.

"I've long hated the non-killability of tasks accessing a dead NFS server," Matthew Wilcox said along with a prototype patch to fix the issue based on a 2002 posting by Linus Torvalds. Matthew added, "I've only added one real user of the killable concept to this patch -- try_lock_page(). However, this is enough for 'cat */*/*' to be killable with a ^C when I unplug the ethernet cord between it and the nfs server."

Discover why you need to change your applications and build environments that supply 32-bit-only kernel extensions to accommodate IBM AIX Version 6. In this article, apply two easy solutions to help you make the transition and start reaping the benefits of the simplified kernel environment.

During the many threads discussing Ingo Molnar's recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler, Roman Zippel has repeatedly questioned the complexity of the new process scheduler. In a recent posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list he offered a simpler scheduler named the 'Really Fair Scheduler' saying, "as I already tried to explain previously CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. This patch should now make it clearer, why I could so easily skip over Ingo's long explanation of all the tricks CFS uses to keep the computational overhead low - I simply don't need them."

LinuxSecurity.com: Thanks to Anand Jahagirdar for this feature! As the variety of attacks and threats grow, you need to be prepared. In this HOWTO, get a feeling for the Fork Bombing Attack, what it is, how it works, where it comes from, how to deal with it and more.

As one of his clients told us, "Mark Radcliffe is the law when it comes to open source software." Radcliffe, an attorney at giant DLA Piper, has lurked behind some of the most important shifts in the open source world over the past few years. He helped Sun Microsystems open source the Solaris operating system, developing Sun's CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) license. He crafted SugarCRM's controversial attribution license and then did similar work for a handful of significant open source players. This year, he teamed with SocialText to push the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) through OSI (Open Source Initiative) approval, while at the same time advising the OSI as legal counsel. And Radcliffe worked with the Free Software Foundation on v3 of the General Public License (GPL).

Opinion: The Department of Justice has declared Microsoft's antitrust settlement to be a success, and if they say so, it must be true!

Voting irregularities, it appears. The Swedish Institute of Standards (SIS) has invalidated the vote that controversially approved the OOXML standard at a meeting this week.

Gold Lasso uses an open source infrastructure to power its email marketing business. Cofounders Elie Ashery and Michael Weisel say open source is the only way to keep prices down and"truly compete in the current marketplace." And, they say, Gentoo Linux is the only way to keep their system truly secure. But finding employees who can manage a system built on Gentoo has been a challenge.