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OK, so I admit: I can’t get enough news about SCO. It’s like the best and worst parts of a soap opera, train wreck, and slapstick comedy all rolled up into one big, sticky ball. This week’s entry into their history of shame is a claim to own the standard Unix executable file format, which is ridiculous for more reasons than I feel like going into right now. What I took away from the whole circus, though, is that you’re playing with fire if you entrust your company or personal computing to proprietary software vendors.

The Open Source Movement weakens the classic model of property rights by presenting an alternative, viable, vibrant, model which does not involve over-pricing and anti-competitive predatory practices. The current model of property rights encourages monopolistic behavior, non-collaborative, exclusionary innovation (as opposed, for instance, to Linux), and litigiousness. The Open Source movement exposes the myths underlying current property rights philosophy and is thus subversive.

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! With the recent new Linux distribution releases being digested and evaluated, it's no surprise that news was somewhat slow last week. The developers of Debian GNU/Linux have engaged in yet another major flame war - this time over the new Java licence, while the openSUSE project continued its hard work resolving the package management problems affecting many users of SUSE Linux 10.1. In the opinion section, we take a look at the three major distribution releases of the past two months and suggest the winner. Finally, the annual DistroWatch package database update will take place this week and we would appreciate your input! Happy reading!

This interview occurred six days into Thomas Kelly's tenure as MontaVista's new CEO, and one day after his appointment was made public. It covers Kelly's plans for MontaVista, including potential acquisitions and partnerships, investments in new technologies and growth, and focusing on sound business practices.

Red Hat India is rolling out one of its most ambitious channel programs in the country. Called the Red Hat - Intel Partner Program (IPP), this program is aimed at targeting existing Intel partners and brings them into the Red Hat's fold to proliferate the Linux desktop initiative.

Consolidation growth will occur in heterogeneous environments: Linux, 14.4 percent; Windows(R), 9.8 percent; and UNIX(R), 1.2 percent. Linux represents an emerging growth opportunity for consolidation, particularly for servers and software (22.3 percent and 22.0 percent, respectively).

DistroWatch states - I'd like to let you know that a release candidate of SLAX 5.1.7 is out. This version contains a few major feature updates. The most important features include: modified 'changes=' cheatcode to accept device names with path; added 'fromiso' cheatcode to load CD data from a different ISO image. Also new in this release, the Linux kernel has been upgraded to version 2.6.16.20 with SMP support, while KDE has been upgraded to version 3.5.3 and KOffice to 1.5.1. OSDir has done some nice screenshots of SLAX 5.1.7 RC1 in the SLAX 5.1.7 RC1 Screenshot Tour.

Bluewhite64 Linux is an unofficial port of Slackware Linux to the AMD64 architecture. This means that it runs on AMD64 based servers and computers. The goal of this port is to mimic the user experience of the Intel x86 distribution at it's best.

The real nuts and bolts of everyone’s IGP of choice, OSPF, are a bit complex, but strangely satisfying. After understanding how it works, we’re left wondering, “what else do we need?” Make sure to review the first part of our look at OSPF before embarking on this potentially confusing journey.

This article will cover LSA types, packet types, and area types. First, however, we’d like to dispel a common misunderstanding about dynamic routing:

Open Shortest Path First is a robust link-state interior gateway protocol (IGP). People use OSPF when they discover that RIP just isn’t going to work for their larger network, or when they need very fast convergence. This installment of Networking 101 will provide a conceptual overview of OSPF, and the second part of our OSPF coverage will delve a bit deeper into the protocol itself, as well as OSPF area configurations

If udev is driving you nuts, read this. For example, this document helped me configure my Kubuntu Dapper system to let me run my scanner as an ordinary user, rather than root-only. Dapper helpfully removed all the useful udev documentation, may their fleas be the size of Chihuahuas.

In Part 1 we discussed all manner of fascinating backup tools and strategies. Today we roll up our sleeves and build a sleek, dependable cross-platform network backup server with the excellent BackupPC. We're not going to mess around with dumb old tape drives, nor CDs, nor DVDs, nor floppy diskettes, but nice, fast high-capacity hard drives.

Linux may be the catalyst that boosts sales of blade servers in India. As vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell grapple with new strategies to sell the sleek and expensive blade servers, the Linux operating system (OS) is the trump card they play to win over cost-conscious Indian IT buyers.

Computer stores are chock-full of all manner of backup software and network storage appliances of varying quality, usefulness, and ease of use. Do you really need some expensive commercial product? Probably not. Backing up Linux/UNIX systems is easy, and *nix comes with everything you need. Backing up Windows systems can get expensive, what with all those per-user and concurrent and per-machine blah blah licensing, and cross-platform backups can drive even strong admins to develop substance abuse habits. But don't run out and start one just yet, even though you'll be able to afford it, because this two-part series is going to show you how to perform the two primary types of backups the easy and cheap way: data files on a mixed LAN, and custom operating system images for fast bare-metal restores.

We're fond of the phrase, "lies, damn lies, and statistics." We tend to be cynical about data in general, but especially data that comes from sources we've long considered suspect. But deep down we're gearheads, and are lured to numbers like magnet to metal.

Scott Kveton and Jason McKerr, who created the lab in 2003, will head a software startup in Portland

here we go again- same dung, different day
No doubt many of you saw on Slashdot the article "Microsoft Talks Daily With Your Computer" or in Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article for eWeek titled, Big Microsoft Brother, about allegations that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage validation tool phones home daily to report information to Microsoft about you on each boot. Lauren Weinstein broke the story on his blog. Microsoft has now put out a statement, asserting that the Windows Genuine Advantage tool is not spyware, that they're going to change it some, and that one thing that distinguishes it from spyware is that they get consent before installing it. I question the accuracy of the statement.

David Berlind did a fabulous job of discovering that in fact the tool has two parts, one of which is new, the Notification part, as you can see in his helpful series of screenshots. First, he explains how the applications actually work. His research indicated to him that Microsoft asks permission for only one of the two, but the wrong one. I think it's muddier even than that, after reading the EULA. Thanks to Berlind's work, I see a legal problem with consent, which I noticed by reading the EULA. I also see a problem with the statement Microsoft has issued with regard to what information it collects. And something in the EULA needs to be explained, because it doesn't match Microsoft's statement

The long-awaited Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support (LTS) release, also known as Dapper Drake, made its debut last week. After extensive testing, I can say that it was worth the delay from its originally scheduled April release date.

When Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985, it was organised around a radical idea: software should be free, not just as in free of charge, but free as in the concept of liberty. During the next 20 years, this idea turned out to be not just radical, but surprisingly practical. Beginning with Stallman’s Emacs text editor, to the various Gnu utilities, the Linux kernel, and beyond, free software has proved to be an enduring success.

[Note to McAllister: The price of subjection is cheap, but its cost is huge. - dcparris]

"My view is that the people of our company want to continue to challenge and look for new and innovative ways to solve problems," said Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat. "That requires risk and that requires novelty of thinking."