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Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures. In India too, while piracy dropped by two percentage points, in value terms, it rose to $2 billion in 2007 as compared to $1.28 billion in 2006.

I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?

[Not Linux-related, but an interesting "analysis of analysts", those who make us laugh so often -J.]

Leslie Hawthorn, a Program Manager in Google's Open Source team, gave a talk at BSDCAN 2008 on Google's ongoing Summer of Code project. She started by explaining what the open source team does, including enforcing license compliance, hosting over 700,000 open source projects with Google Code, academic research, funding open source development, and community outreach including the sponsorship of conferences such as BSDCan. She went on to discuss how she got started running the project after its initial launch in 2005.

KDE is attending this year's LinuxTag in Berlin with a wide selection of talks. Starting with Aaron Seigo's lecture about KDE in the mobile world and a KDE-related series of presentations on Friday. There are also some stalls where you can meet people from the KDE community.

Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is "ready for the desktop." I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it's time we officially retire this criterion. What defines an operating system as being ready for the desktop? Surely everyone has a different opinion on the actual definition. While my search for an official definition or list of guidelines has failed, to me this phrase means that the OS is usable by everyone, meets everyone's needs, and is able to do everything that everyone wants it to do. In that regard, is any operating system truly ready for the desktop?

With the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 codename being Trondheim, which is a city in Norway, and today being Constitution Day in Norway, what better way to celebrate than to push out a new release! Phoronix Test Suite 0.7.0 contains over 40 major changes since the previous release just a week ago. Some of the top changes in this release include advanced merging capabilities of test results, several new test profiles, and support for abstract result types.

Randall Stewart of Cisco Systems gave a talk titled SCTP, what it is and how to use it, discussing the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). A paper that was displayed on the overhead projecter before the talk began summarized: "Integrated into FreeBSD 7.0 -- first standardized by the Internet Engineering Task force (IETF) in October of 2000, in RFC 2960 and later updated by RFC 4960. SCTP is a message oriented protocol providing reliable end to end communication between two peers in an IP network."

Yep, we're getting ready to start our print advertising campaign and we are going to need some eye-catching graphics to compete. Now, I know there are some of you that produce stunning work and far be it from me to ever ask anyone to do anything for free... That's a joke folks...insert laughter here and let's move along.

Italy-based KDev has found another use for its tiny, cellular radio-equipped Linux box. In its newest "Easy Guardian" iteration, the Acme FoxBox works as a network monitor that uses ICMP pings, SNMP scans, and text messaging to alert users to network events.

On the surface, a little choice isn’t going to kill anybody. In fact, choice is good. And if some poor kids can get a laptop, learn a bit and be exposed to the world I don’t care about the operating system. But here’s what gives me pause about XP coming to the XO (statement, Techmeme): There’s no way Linux will get an equal shake on OLPC’s XO. In fact, I reckon that more XO units will ship with XP than Linux in the not too distant future. Why? Governments are making the buying decisions. Not kids.

Open source icon Stormy Peters recently joined us for a live Network World chat. Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open soruce software is more secure than proprietary code.

I chose to only review the GUI web browsers, since it's not exactly appropiate to compare a text-based browser like Lynx with Opera, for example. The browsers reviewed are the latest ones included in Debian Lenny, current date (May 17, 2008). The system used to review them is a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz with 1 GB DDRAM2. The comparison includes the major five Linux browsers: Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, Epiphany and Galeon. I'm aware of others like Dillo or the older Mozilla, but decided to include only the big players at the moment.

Ever wonder what makes a computer tick or how a UNIX server does what it does? Discover what happens when you push the power button on your computer. This article discusses the different boot types, managing the AIX bootlist and the AIX boot sequence. After reading this article, you will better understand what exactly happens when your server starts.

Pawel Dawidek first ported ZFS to FreeBSD from OpenSolaris in April of 2007. He continues to actively port new ZFS features from OpenSolaris, and focuses on improving overall ZFS stability. During the introduction to his talk at BSDCan, he explained that his goal was to offer an accessible view of ZFS internals. His discussion was broken into three sections, a review of the layers ZFS is built from and how they work together, a look at unique features found in ZFS and how they work internally, and a report on the current status of ZFS in FreeBSD.

At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.

On Wednesday, DeviceVM, the company behind the distribution, said the hardware manufacturer would be putting Splashtop — which Asus calls "Express Gate" — into a million motherboards a month. Splashtop includes a Firefox-derived browser and the Skype internet-telephony application.

Cleaning up the mess left by the OpenSSH vulnerability in Debian and Debian-based distros (including Ubuntu) is easier than I thought. For those who haven't heard about the problem, I refer you to my recent entry, or invite you to Google it. I've had my Etch box -- which has both OpenSSH-client and OpenSSH-server installed -- turned off for the past few days. I'm using it as a Web server on the local network, and yes, I've been SSHing into the box for weeks now. Here's what I did ...

Peter Hintgens, writing at Freesoftware Magazine, explains why the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard is a dreadful development. More importantly, he tells us what can be done to combat such things. You can read more about it here

Everyone who surfs the Net is eminently trackable. Internet data packets include not only the actual data being sent, but also headers with routing information that is used to guide the packages to their destinations. Even if you use encryption for extra safety, the routing information -- which cannot be encrypted -- can reveal details about what you're doing, who you're talking to, what services you're connecting to, and what data you're accessing. Intermediaries (authorized or not) can also see that data and learn about you. If you want a higher level of anonymity, TorK can do the job. It uses The Onion Router (Tor) network to provide you with a safer way of browsing.

John Calcote has written a very detailed article on the GNU Autotools and you can read it all at the Freesoftware Magazine website.