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I personally (still) don't think rebutting Gartner/whoever's "report" is a particularly good use of valuable time, but -- for those who care about such things -- Paul Ferris has bothered, and did an excellent job: http://linuxtoday.com/stories/10912.html

Nevertheless, if I had to pick *one* large company right now that "gets" Open Source, and isn't attempting to cash in on it as a cynical ploy to get a lot of cannon fodder to throw at MS, it'd be IBM.

IBM is finally remembering that it is, and has always been, a service company, not a hardware, and not a software company. And, of course, there's the article over at Linux Today--I tipped /. off to it, but they haven't deigned to acknowledge the same: that IBM has ported Linux to the S/390. I know that some really smart people have been doing the same on their own: Linas Vepstas and friends. IBM would gain a lot from bundling Linux with a VM distribution, of course: that would stanch some of the flow of people off mainframes onto Unix boxes. Further: what are mainframes good at? That's right, I/O. What do you need for a heavily trafficked web site? Hunh. Funny thing that. An S/390 running Apache would be something to see. And for those of us who much prefer VM to OS/390...well, it'd be pretty nice if Linux/390 sat on top of VM but not OS/390. Especially if it could also run on the bare iron, so those of us with Linux boxes plus Hercules could run it at home, just for the "hey, wow!" factor.

I view Sun's latching on to Open Source as a self-evidently cynical ploy to get some attention. But as long as they are primarily software/hardware providers, they can't *really* get behind the penguin, because it's going to cut into their Solaris market. Watch: I give Star Office six months, and then they kill the standalone versions and only develop the Java client, which you can only use with the (Solaris-only, I bet) server piece, which will cost real money.

IBM, on the other hand, makes most of its money on service. Open Source is great for them, since it means they don't need to pay developers to write the stuff. They've got an army of people doing it for them, for free. And since their plan wasn't to make money selling the software in the first place, then it doesn't hurt them to give it away. They still sell you the service on it.

I don't trust Sun. They have every reason to turn around and screw us when the opportunity strikes. IBM, at least, has fewer such reasons.

Adam

Some people in this discussion are asking what's new in 2.4. Well, Joe Pranevich seems to be the de facto source for whats new and exciting in kernel releases, so see his The Wonderful World of Linux 2.4 for more info.

Breaking Microsoft up is not the answer. Competition is the answer. Until we have competition in the marketplace, nothing else is going to help.

There was a very well balanced article written by Richard Stallman on this over at linuxtoday.com.

I do think, however, that there needs to be a stronger financial penalty to Microsoft IF Microsoft publishes incorrect documentation.

This documentation would allow the development of competing products. Including furthering the development of WINE. Which would, in turn, lead to the necessary marketplace competition.

Breaking Microsoft up is not the answer. Competition is the answer. Until we have competition in the marketplace, nothing else is going to help.

There was a very well balanced article written by Richard Stallman on this over at linuxtoday.com.

I do think, however, that there needs to be a stronger financial penalty to Microsoft IF Microsoft publishes incorrect documentation.

This documentation would allow the development of competing products. Including furthering the development of WINE. Which would, in turn, lead to the necessary marketplace competition.

Ghods. Where do I start...? There have been so many, starting with his vicious attack on Tim O'Reilly last fall...

See http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4179.html. That lovely little denunciamento did our negotiations with Apple very serious damage. Going public with it instead of approaching me or OSI or Apple privately caused a whole lot of unnecessary grief and flamage within the community as well.

Simply going off on a tear might have been forgiveable, except that Bruce's analysis of the APSL was just plain wrong. He's not a lawyer, he didn't have advice from people competent to reaf legalese, and the problems he thought he'd detected were all bullshit and vapor.

The only real problem with the license a technical glitch in the export clause that Bruce never noticed. (To be fair, we at OSI missed it too until Seth Schoen pointed it out. Seth now does all our first-pass license evaluations.)

The fallout from Bruce's public grandstanding still hasn't settled out. There are still people who think (mistakenly) that APSL 1.1 is not OSD-conformant and is a broken license.

Bruce is not an idiot; he had to have known that the effect of splitting the community over APSL would be to damage OSI's negotiating leverage with other big corporations, thus making it harder for us to head off truly bad licenses like the SCSL.

Even leaving out his personal attacks against me (representing the OSI decision as though I had gone into some kind of reckless cowboy mode instead of having the unanimous approval of the OSI Board -- and that was the least of them) I can't forgive him for needlessly damaging OSI's credibility and usefulness to the community when a single exchange of email with me or anybody else on the inside of the negotiations would have prevented any problem.

It's not smelling funny: there's a Debian GNU/Hurd port in progress; see Kernel Cousin debian-hurd for progress info.

The Hurd still has some very neat ideas that appeal to kernel hackers. I really don't know if it will be successful, it's still in early development. If it picks up enough steam, it may well make it, as it can run just about everything Linux runs.

"Many Linux users found that their Real Player G2 programs stopped working this morning. Apparently Real Networks encoded an expiration date in the code. After some quick calls to Real Networks and some fast foot work by their technical people, the Linux G2 player has been patched so that it will not be expired. "

from linuxtoday

Okay, this post is partly off-topic for this sub-thread, but I wanted to get it in near the top of the discussion when sorting by Score.

Linux Today has more information about this, including:

This is not a port of Delphi or C++Builder, but rather, a completely new product.

Read the details about "Kylix" at Linux Today!

(I would post a complete copy, but that would be stealing from LT. Don't wanna do that.)

Stallman wrote a feature for Linux Today over a month ago on this subject here. As you might expect, he's strongly in favor of open databases.

I certainly understand why someone who compiled a data base would feel ripped off if someone copied it for profit, or maintained an out of date mirror that caused harm. On the other hand you can see how great public good can come from free availability of certain databases. Perhaps the government should exercise eminent domain over the databases that need to be public?

See e.g. the SuSE announcement.

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

A text described as an internal memo has been posted at Linux Today.

In it, Compaq says,

To increase our focus on Windows NT in the enterprise, we will continue to partner aggressively with Microsoft on development of 64-bit Windows NT. Alpha is the development platform for 64-bit Windows NT.

What isn't clear is who is doing the development.

It may be that we've been overinterpreting the announcement, e.g. it might just be that Compaq's $$$ troubles forced them to dump the work in Micro$$$'s lap. (But even if that is the case, the move is likely to be seen as bad PR by users of Alpha/NT, who will understandably be feeling some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the future right now.)

Interestingly, a few paragraphs later they seem to be more gung-ho about Tru64 and Linux than what you can easily read into those two lines about 64-bit NT. But mostly they seem to be saying that Alpha itself has a bright future for itself.

Also, on re-reading it they seem to be saying that Proliant is the way to go for NT users. Truly a bag of mixed signals; classic corporate doublespeak.

Here's the link.

--Kit

The nominees were selected by their names being submitted to Vovida Networks on their web page. The information appeared on several web sites, including LinuxToday, Freshmeat, Linux Telephony, and others.

The press are picking up on this, including some non-IT rags (see Linux Today). This is going to be a PR disaster of the finest water.

Expect a(nother) name change for NT5/W2K sometime during the fall. That'll let them pretend it's a different product.

We are currently running several Solaris systems with a 3rd-party FCAL SAN-in-a-box from XIOtech. We have a second one serving our Netware servers. If you're serious about getting the benefits promised by SANs today, I'd recommend checking them out. They allow you to create virtual disks in various RAID configurations, move the virtual drives between different virtual clusters, and copy and swap virtual drives on the fly.

Lans Carstensen - lans@carstensen.cx

Links
XIOTech press release on LinuxToday
The Global Filesystem Group
The High Availability Linux Project
RSi's RSF-1 high availability software, available for trial download

The ten cities are: "New York, Toronto, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Irvine/Los Angeles, Orlando, Virginia, and Wilmington, North Carolina" according to LinuxToday. I'm hoping (praying) that they go on a hiring spree in Canada!

Kernel 2.4 supposedly will support up to 8 IDE's.

From the LinuxToday story, it's been noted that the story was written by and reported by an Anthony Kilna. A whois query turns up a record for METAMIGA.COM, registered 17 July, 1999. The phone number listed, (619) 677-9830, responds with a "disconnected or no longer in service" message.

Which isn't to say this is a fake, but I'm dubious at present. There are details BTW at http://www.kilna.com/.

I've emailed Anthony for more information, we'll have to wait and see what turns up.

Part of the problem is that discussions on /. can tend to hysteria, causing authors to be bombarded with flames. So, Rob, why not simply drop such items, since other places are doing better jobs, and concentrate on what /. does best -- amusing and interesting stuff that's off the beaten path? Discussions of technical topics on Slashdot are still often quite good, modulo the occasional flamewar over GNOME/KDE or Linux/*BSD.

I'd guess that this can answer some of your questions :)

I tried submitting this to slashdot, but no joy so far, anyone want to slashdot /. with some submissions?

The Linux hardware vendors are some of the best corporate citizens I've seen in any industry. They wholeheartedly support the Linux community, because they realise that without it they wouldn't exist in the first place. I like the fact that Penguin Computing is providing servers for sites such as Linux Online, 32 Bits Online, and LinuxToday. Then you've got VA Linux Systems taking the time to ensure Linux.com doesn't get run over by corporate interests, but instead makes it a community interest site. Not to mention hosting Debian, GNU, and Themes.org. You've got to hand it to the Linux Store for pushing the envelope for low-cost systems.

The Linux hardware vendors have shown a dedication to the community and customers that is rarely seen in this generally cruel marketplace. I sincerely hope they keep it up.

The lack of respect shown towards MSFT is the free software community's Achilles' heel. There are a couple aspects to this crisis.

First, although there is much to ridicule about their technologies, they actually have produced good things. The interview with International GNOME support contains a good argument for the respect free software developers should show here. Please, I am not saying that MSFT is a good company, but that they have tons of cash, have hired plenty of smart people, and that some good technology has come out of it.

Second, and much more importantly, while the community laughs in disrespect about MSFT, they are plotting to undermine us in serious ways. Yes, it is fun to ridicule them. :) The DOJ trial, while it has brought welcome scrutiny upon MSFT, does not really hinder most of their tactical ability. Gates' tactical brilliance is woefully underestimated by the free software community. Look for MSFT to do everthing in its power to discredit and totally annihilate the likes of RedHat. This should concern even those who do not like RedHat. After all, in the public's eye, they are strongly identified with GNU/Linux.

In short, let's please respect MSFT as the predator that it is. Know thy enemy.

By the way, (and I'll admit tagging this on here so that my post will get read as well), The president of Metro Werks replied to the original article with a clarification of their position on RH linux, which is that "Metrowerks validated and QAed the first version of CodeWarrior for Linux GNU Edition against the RedHat distro. Metrowerks is also currently validating against other distros...", mentioning SUSE and Caldera as in process.

So while RH Linux is the only distro which they are supporting so far, the ultimately goal is to support all of the major distributions. So give MW credit and maybe even a pat on the back for taking the time to make sure their product works on each and every platform, one step at a time.

Bet they wish they'd made it clear that that's what they were doing earlier, however. :-)

My story has been posted on Linux Today and has drawn a good bit of attention. I've received many emails from people who've written to BS, provided suggestions for me, etc. A reporter from an online new source has contacted me, with plans to do a story about problems in general with telcos, linux, and DSL. Hopefully, BellSouth will see the light of day soon.

"Young Computer Genius One of This Year's Honorary Doctors

This year's honorary doctors at Stockholm University have been awarded. Among them is the merely 29 year old Finnish-Swede Linus Torvalds, who, among other things, created the world famous Linux operating system.

Torvalds resides in Santa Clara, USA...

The honorary doctorates are going to be formally awarded at a ceremony in Bla Hallen in the Stockholm City Hall on Friday the 24th of September..."

Found it on LinuxToday.

These benchmarks weren't a complete loss to all of those. Hidden in those benchmarks was a rather interesting admission found in this story on Linux Today (note, I don't work for them, but they do have some good stories sometimes):

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5906.html

This story reveals that Linux with Samba achieved 197Mbps, which was significantly higher than the Mindcraft benchmarks, severely invalidating the original Mindcraft benchmarks. Also, Apache did MUCH better on these benchmarks than on the original Mindcraft tests.

The article also shows that NT achieved only 150Mbps against NT clients, 31% slower than Linux. In tests with 60 clients, Windows NT managed only 110Mbbps throughput, compared with 183Mbps for Samba.

So, we got something out of these benchmarks. Linux serves Samba to NT clients 31% faster than NT on high end hardware!

Now, if we only tested IIS against Zeus to make a more fair benchmark for static tests, Linux wouldn't look so bad after all overall.

I don't see how these new benchmarks validate Mindcraft at all.

Are you talking about performance of an application on hardware you'd never actually use for those things? Who uses a quad xeon to serve static pages? Why didn't they test Linux using a web server that's optimized for static pages?

Also, there was an article in http://www.linuxtoday.com that exposes the fact that Samba under Linux actually performed better than Windows NT on the PCWeek tests when using NT clients than NT did. This is something that everyone should know.

The PCWeek numbers were also much higher than the Mindcraft numbers, attacking the credibility of Mindcraft even more.

Another funny thing, if anyone follows http://lwn.net, they had a story that mentioned why Apache may have done so badly, and how we can modify the scheduler to make the problem go away.

If anything, we should thank MS for the Mindcraft tests. It may end up making Linux better in the end.

I don't think Linux did as bad as people think, and I'm sure that static web serving performance or Samba performance is irrelevant in a router.

Are you talking about performance of an application on hardware you'd never actually use for those things? Who uses a quad xeon to serve static pages? Why didn't they test Linux using a web server that's optimized for static pages?

Also, there was an article in http://www.linuxtoday.com that exposes the fact that Samba under Linux actually performed better than Windows NT on the PCWeek tests when using NT clients than NT did. This is something that everyone should know.

The PCWeek numbers were also much higher than the Mindcraft numbers, attacking the credibility of Mindcraft even more.

Another funny thing, if anyone follows http://lwn.net, they had a story that mentioned why Apache may have done so badly, and how we can modify the scheduler to make the problem go away.

If anything, we should thank MS for the Mindcraft tests. It may end up making Linux better in the end.

I don't think Linux did as bad as people think, and I'm sure that static web serving performance or Samba performance is irrelevant in a router.

I could point out the many problems with the article, but that has already been done. Take a look at the comments at Linux Today. There are a lot of interesting comments there.

No one can claim that GPL is communistic, when we have both commercial entities and cooperative groups using the licence for their produces. And a lot of the uncertainty about the clauses in the GPL, where there is uncertainty, you usually find a clarification as an exception/addition to the licence.

I really hope this article is not representative of the opinions of the BSD community as a whole.

Very good read. :-) I like the language it was written in. It doesn't look like some zealot wrote it, and that's an important thing to remember when trying to counter FUD by Microsoft.

On a slightly related note, I ran into an article on LinuxToday, in case some others haven't seen it yet, that show that NT on a Quad Pentium Xeon is a "Weak Value Proposition" as compaired to Linux/FreeBSD. Now, where have we heard the phrase, "Weak Value Proposition" before? :-)

This might be useful to those of you trying to fight those that blindly trumpet the Mindcraft results:

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5688.html

Oh... boy...

American Megatrends today released a new multithreaded driver for their MegaRAID controllers.

Check out www.linuxtoday.com or look here.

Sigh... The irony...

All this will be a fair enough. After all, who would seriously recommend a 4-way Xeon with 4 high-performance netcards to run Linux??? Linux, as I see it, does not yet have its strength here. If you would like to use Linux, tailor some other high-end solution, e.g. with multiple servers. If not, then buy expensive hardware from Sun and run Solaris on it! Just don't think that NT is your only alternative.

Others have pointed out that the NT Server configuration is highly optimised to the particular test. Taking advantage of the fact that a fairly small amount of static-only pages will be served, the NT is configured to keep it all in its cache.

While, as Alan cox, among many other things points out, using the (apparently commercial) Zeus webserver might up the Linux webserver performance, but virtually anyone installing a Linux webserver are going to use Apache, so I find find it reasonable to tune Apache instead. But it must be possible for the experts to similarly tune Apache/Linux to take advantage of the nature of the test.

If you think anyone had any real input into the second set of Mindcraft benchmarks, go have a look at AC's commentary, entitled "Bruce Weiner: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics":

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5631.html

Alan Cox brought up a few points about the tests here:

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5631.html

He mentions that we really should be benchmarking Zeus or a faster web server under Linux versus IIS if we want to find out how fast the OS can serve static web pages. IIS is the fastest web server for NT, so we should be able to use the fastest web server for Linux for the tests. If you want to compare NT versus Linux, then get the fastest web server for both.

If you want to compare capabilities, then use Apache, etc. Use the best product for the job.

Additionally, he does mention that we should use NT clients or at least a mixture of both, for the tests. At the company I did some consulting for, they are standardizing on NT. Microsoft's roadmap is all NT for the future. Why would you want to benchmark against a dead-end technology like Win9X?

Somehow I think these tests are rigged. Notice, Mindcraft only offered to rerun the tests after they ran a second one, which they didn't release the results of.

I think we need another party, that's neutral, to do some benchmarks, and take Mindcraft out of the picture altogether. They already admitted they fouled up, and they shouldn't be trusted to do the benchmarks again, because we will be giving them credibility they don't deserve.

Just my $.02

Ben

Correct Link here: http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5454.html

The $299 was the support program as I recall.

- |Daryll

RPM has been updated to verion 3.0, available here.
Christopher A. Bohn

Here's a Business Wire blurb story about Logitech's decision.


Also mentions USB mouse support.

The sold the NetWinder division to Hardware Canada Computing.

what distro does the netwinder run anyway?

IIRC, a modified Red Hat 4.2 port.

One of the things that made Corel look at Debian was the Debian-ARM port, by which they were impressed.

Samba 2.0.1 Configuration
wide links = no
That creates a bottleneck in Samba performance, see here

the following processes were running ... (kswapd), /sbin/kerneld,syslogd,
not sure if that means something, but why they run kerneld with 2.2 kernel ?

On NT side:

Tcpip\Parameters\Tcpwindowsize = 65535
that makes huge boost on network performance, but only on local network where packets don't get lost

Set Logging - "Next Log Time Period" = "When file size reaches 100 MB"
Logs on the F: drive (RAID) along with the WebBench data files So basically server does much less logging than Apache - and since it's many small requests, and since Apache writes logs on a non-RAID disk all together it'll be a big bottleneck

Anyone noted anything else wrong with this benchmark ?
From all my experience it looks like pure crap

P.S. Why they needed NFS ? inetd ?

According to a posting on Linux Today by Jeremy Alison of the Samba Team, it seems that the Mindcraft study crippled the Samba server in the tests:


From Andrew Trigell (original Author of Samba):

They set "widelinks = no" now I wonder why they did that :)

In case you haven't guessed, that will lower the performance enormously. It adds 3 chdir() calls and 3 getwd() calls to every filename lookup. That will especially hurt on a SMP system.

LinuxToday is even faster- they usually post an article within half an hour of you mailing it to them.
You should try LinuxHacker though. It has the headlines from all the best news sites on one page, which saves a lot of time.

It seems to me that a large part of the motivation for a free software contributor is the license under which the software is released. While Netscape was the first big-name corporation to release the source code to an important product, they were also the first to come up with a non-free open source license. There are still some ties to the corporation that birthed it, so contributors are basically unpaid developers for said corporation. If Netscape used the GPL instead of NPL, they may have attracted more outside developers. Many people enjoy contributing to the public good for free, but few enjoy lining the pockets of the stockholders for free.

I believe this issue will also haunt all of the other 'open-source' but not quite free software that is being made available on the net. These include Apple's APSL, Sun's CSL, TrollTech's new QT license, etc. Any license that even mentions the corporate donor/supporter will be shunned by free software developers everywhere.

I agree with many of Z's other conclusions, especially the fact that Netscape did not release the source code to a working, usable product. As a programmer, one definitely likes to see tangible results, not just X more lines of source in version control.

Finally, while the difficulties of Mozilla.org should not deter other companies from taking similar directions, others should definitely learn from their mistakes. Learn from the pioneers how to avoid the arrows in the back.

Cheers.

Linux Today at this point, they don't seem to be perpetuating any Hoaxes or Pranks at this point in time...

You nailed it (pica); I've been losing interest in /. since I saw a story I sent in (and I was logged in) posted a day later by one of the "in group". It's gotta be difficult, I'll submit, to administer /., but it's evidently too hard to do it fairly.

If you were reading this only for Linux, linux today is much better.

Opppps! I guess I get a (Score:-37,000)!