Slashdot Mirror

Infoworld has a report about Tuesday's O'reilly Free software conference. The idea is to come up with some sort of coherent plan to address common issues such as fear of free software, commercial support, and how to develop software within the open source model. Not much appears to have been decided, but it's good to see a recognition of the need for concerted action if free software is to become more mainstream. It would be nice if they stopped calling it freeware, don't you think?

Infoworld has a report about Tuesday's O'reilly Free software conference. The idea is to come up with some sort of coherent plan to address common issues such as fear of free software, commercial support, and how to develop software within the open source model. Not much appears to have been decided, but it's good to see a recognition of the need for concerted action if free software is to become more mainstream. It would be nice if they stopped calling it freeware, don't you think?

This infoworld article talks about Corel losing $21 million in the first quarter of '98. Thanks to Andy Tai for sending it in, and noting that this is nice ammo for my theory that corel is an ideal candidate for Open Source.

Linux scored a few more points at InfoWorld as evidenced by this story sent in by David Cloud. RedHat won the Product of the Year for web site browsers, outnumber OS/2 and *ahem* Office 97 Pro. On the net more so then in print, Linux is taking the world by storm.

This InfoWorld Story talks about Netscape, their source, and misc stuff related to it. We should be seeing some source code at the end of march. This is still the most important thing that has happened in 1998. I can't wait to see what happens by the end of april. Thanks to James Ratliff .

Apparently Microsoft and Intel pay vendors to port their applications to NT. And while some rationalise this by saying PC hardware is cheaper, I have to wonder about the monopoly implications. After all, NT does seem to be gaining ground, despite some of its, err, features.

After widespread network attacks, the US government cannot think of any better strategy than attempting to police the internet. Now, if my house falls down every time the wind blows, should I make sure that my next house is built solidly, or should I try arrest the wind? I find it amazing that instead of recognizing the problem (poor programming), people concentrate on vilifying hackers, the only people who will reveal the inadequacy of most OSs.

Apple has rolled out the first of their G3 servers. They come in 233 and 266 mhz flavors, featuring the usual gooides-RAID complaint etc. The prices are ranging from 3749-4999$US.

I've been writing articles for Slashdot for an hour now, so forgive me for lumping these together guys- I need to do something else eventually. First, Kristian Köhntopp wrote in to tell us that Linux has claimed 2 of the top 10 books at many german book stores. Next, Alan wrote in to tell us about an InfoWorld letter praising Linux, written by the CEO of 4front. Finally This articleis from the UKs Computing Trade Magazine. Its good PR for Linux and Netscape, even if they did misspell Linus' name. Thanks to Mike Brodbelt for that one.

After bestowing awards upon Linux, Infoworld (we have a friend in business :-)) has given the NT version of Apache a warm review. That's good news in my book, as the more exposure system admins get to open source software, the more they trust and like it.

After bestowing awards upon Linux, Infoworld (we have a friend in business :-)) has given the NT version of Apache a warm review. That's good news in my book, as the more exposure system admins get to open source software, the more they trust and like it.

All the good press InfoWorld has given Linux over the last few weeks has created a conversation about Linux on their discussion groups. Steven Borrelli wrote in to tell us about the discussion and said "The Linux momentum just keeps building! But also note the reasons why non-Linux users are hesitant to jump on the bandwagon..."

The US Department of Commerce has tightened restrictions on exporting certain type of high end machines to the the tier 3 nations, which include China, Israel and India, amongst others.

It's great to see that RedHat Linux has won InfoWorld's Product of the Year in the Operating System catagory for a second year in a row. And if that doesn't surprise you enough, the award for Best Tech Support was given to the Linux User Community. I bet a large number of readers of Slashdot deserve a part of this award. I know I'm amazed at the number of Linux Developers and Users that I can email and get help back within days. I only wish I could better help everyone that emailed me. Congrats to RedHat, and to Everyone Out There who made the other award happen. Let's make 98 even better.

It's great to see that RedHat Linux has won InfoWorld's Product of the Year in the Operating System catagory for a second year in a row. And if that doesn't surprise you enough, the award for Best Tech Support was given to the Linux User Community. I bet a large number of readers of Slashdot deserve a part of this award. I know I'm amazed at the number of Linux Developers and Users that I can email and get help back within days. I only wish I could better help everyone that emailed me. Congrats to RedHat, and to Everyone Out There who made the other award happen. Let's make 98 even better.

Apparently Caldera has been doing a lot better with Open/DR-DOS than they expected. Check out This InfoWorld Story sent to us by Ed for info on why this is. My guess is it's just people who want to play WarCraft II but don't want to run it under real DOS.

Check out this story to learn about Intel's new ad campaign. Basically if you make your site optimized for Intel chips and then they give you money. They have a billion bucks supposedly set aside for for this. Thanks to Sengan Baring-Gould.

Another cameo appearance of Linux in a mainstream mag comes to us from Amos Shapira. He sent in an article at inforworld about NT 5.0's hefty system requirements, and how Linux will "beat the living daylights out of it" on a system with less than 64 megs of RAM. Flattery like that is just the kinda publicity we like to hear.

Well the doomsayers are out preaching that Netscape may be dying. They apparently lost millions of dollars in Q4, and according to this article at inforworld they may be backing down out of the Browser market, and focus more on the commercial side. Thanks to Amos Shapira for that one. The issue may be with the death of Netscape, where do we turn? Opera? Mneomonic? Gzilla? It may get interesting.

Perhaps the solution to Netscape's problem is more obvious then they may realize. If they GPLd their code and gave it out to the world, we would have a slew of powerful browsers developed by the same programmers that have brought us all those other great GPL apps. That would jump start the free browser universe and maybe people would focus on a single browser instead of dividing their time amongst so many other free browser projects. And since it is free, people may choose it instead of MS. Just a thought...