Slashdot Mirror

Gryphon sent us a link to a Linux Power article on Open Source causing more harm than good. Talks about OSI, ESR, the recent proliferation of "Open Source" and more things that are also being discussed fairly passionately in the article on ESR wanting to retire that we posted earlier. Update: 03/29 11:45 by S : In other reactions to the ESR story, AbiSource's Eric Sink argues replacing ESR is the wrong goal, and Bruce Perens says we need speakers not leaders. Thanks to LT and rokhed.

Skeezix sent us a San Jose Mercury article that reports on a $299 PC being sold by Microworkz. For the first time I guess, PCs cost about as much as TV. The computer in every home dream is getting closer to reality. " Update: 03/16 03:29 by S : In related news, PC Free is to ship Linux-based computers for $40 a month including Internet-Access, initially as a trial run. Link from LinuxToday

Linux Today has a translated transcription of a Danish Radio Interview with Bill Gates. How many of you think that Bill's "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." shows he caught himself before saying "No"? In the meantime Jean-Louis Gassee is dismissing Microsoft's new bedtime story that BeOS integrates the Browser into the OS. Here's a little more detail from Patrick Hajek. Finally, in related news, Bill had the opportunity to visit a German School which accepted a local company's offer to install Linux its PCs for the occasion

SEWilco writes "This CNN story on VA Research mentions that Intuit is looking to port Quicken to Linux. They'll really clean up with that. (Pointed out in LWN Daily , and is a PC Week story, but the link which IDG.net came up with was too messy to submit here) " Update: 02/06 12:33 by S : Intuit's disputing this claim. Link from LT.

Students at Stanford organised a peaceful Linux demonstration at a local career fair handing out flyers. David Weekly did a write-up on how it went. Link courtesy of LT.

Norm writes "Corel has agreed to transfer ownership of Corel Computer NetWinder to Hardware Canada Computer (HCC) for a 25% stake in their company. The article is here. Does anyone know anything about HCC? I hope this is good news. Maybe they can make the Netwinders cheaper. " Update: 01/21 03:03 by S : This open letter to netwinder.org participants clarifies that netwinder.org is not part of the transaction.

Linux Game tome is reporting that Heretic has been ported to Linux, specifically to GGI and X. Go get it here!. Link courtesy of LT. (Note: Due to my 28.8 modem I have not tested it yet).

Nicholas Petreley explains his recent InfoWorld statement that "Should Microsoft ultimately win the case, however, I guarantee vendors will abandon Linux faster than a rat out of an aqueduct". While his point that the war is not won is valid, he has missed some crucial details: home computer prices are collapsing making Microsoft's software a very expensive component. In the business world, Windows-terminals save money by reducing administration costs and reducing the number of software licenses that must be bought. Windows-terminals can run other OS's than Windows -- for instance, Linux with the Citrix client. Finally the enormous emerging market is the consumer appliance market which needs an idiot-proof UI -- not Windows compatibility. Some links from LT.

Emmanuel Marty of the ggi-project wrote to me saying "Thanks to announcements on LinuxToday and /., Paul Jones of UNC Chapel Hill contacted me to offer a new home to the GGI www and ftp servers on the best possible server we could dream of, MetaLab, "the site formerly known as sunsite.unc.edu". Thanks to the kindness of Paul and Adam Fuller, everything is now functional there (to a few minor exceptions), in time for the release. Thanks to everyone who emailed to offer their help, this makes us very proud to belong to the community. Promise, I'll answer every email, even though I've been drowning in them :)" Obviously when the full release comes out, we'll be posting it. In related news, libggi beta 1 is out so please hammer it.

Linux Today has this interesting piece by Prof Martin Vermeer (Finland) who argues that Unix is an essential part of computing literacy: Windows is made for the illiterate who need to know very little before using it. Unix on the other hand is designed to allow literate users to do anything they want. Therefore, Unix should be taught in every high school to ensure some level of computer literacy. I've heard similar points of view from canadian and french academics... I hope they are heard.

Linux Today has this interesting piece by Prof Martin Vermeer (Finland) who argues that Unix is an essential part of computing literacy: Windows is made for the illiterate who need to know very little before using it. Unix on the other hand is designed to allow literate users to do anything they want. Therefore, Unix should be taught in every high school to ensure some level of computer literacy. I've heard similar points of view from canadian and french academics... I hope they are heard.

Booker writes "I'm just wondering... did anyone notice that Enlightenment DR 0.15 was released with the Gnome 0.99 stuff? It's over at ftp.gnome.org, under the gnome directory. RPMs and debs, as well. The E page isn't updated yet, so perhaps this isn't the 0.15 release?" update Apparently, although LinuxToday also published this story earlier today, readers are stating that this is just a CVS snapshot of what will be DR 0.15. Oh well. Updated title accordingly. update 2: Mandrake has confirmed this is not DR-0.15. Updated title again.

Wingz and Wingz-Professional are the latest new tools to be brought to Linux. They appear to be spreadsheet applications with scripting capabilities which allow one to make HyperSheet applications which run on Linux, Windows and MacOS. It will be available at no cost on Linux, and other apps are to be ported. Link courtesy of Linux Today. update: changed title from "New advanced spreadsheet at zero-cost for Linux", since it's not new to other platforms.

update: Apparently it's not new..., so I changed the title again. Thanks to the AC who posted this. Is the professional version new then?

The Free Software Foundation states that the Wassenaar agreement does not apply to free-software. It'd be nice to know why. Is this a provision for research, or some sort of loophole? Link countesy of Linux Today.

Linux Today has another Comdex Report discussing Slackware, SuSe and FreeBSD. And Computer World has an exuberant article about Linux... which does however miss the point that Linux is growing very quickly, invalidating their argument that Linux Users are used to paying little for software. Many newcomers to Linux are used to paying for software. And while many older Linux users (ISPs, businesses, etc) will be happy to buy new apps, I expect a large number of specialist software companies' (think Oracle, Verilog, etc) customers will be migrating from Windows or another Unix.

Linux Today has another Comdex Report discussing Slackware, SuSe and FreeBSD. And Computer World has an exuberant article about Linux... which does however miss the point that Linux is growing very quickly, invalidating their argument that Linux Users are used to paying little for software. Many newcomers to Linux are used to paying for software. And while many older Linux users (ISPs, businesses, etc) will be happy to buy new apps, I expect a large number of specialist software companies' (think Oracle, Verilog, etc) customers will be migrating from Windows or another Unix.

Fuji Photo Company is to distribute its own Linux according to their website. Apparently it's targeted at server use. Any Japanese readers care to translate it for us?

The German Linux Organisation Linux Verband is reporting on recent Linux successes: 20 percent of Siemens PC-workstation customers are now buying with Linux pre-installed. The leader of Mercedes' car-electronics prototype development team reports he is very satisfied with the 30 Siemens workstations purchased so far, and that they are buying 10 more. In the previous 7 years they had run Windows workstations, which required constant supervision from a dedicated employee. Moreover the German Police in Stuttgart are using Linux as a server because of its high reliability. On the french side of things, a new Slashdot derivative is up and running. They are still under construction and will be posting article-sources soon. Links courtesy of LWD and LT. Translations can be provided by Babelfish".

Dan Gilmore of the San Jose Mercury News is suggesting that IBM should port SmartSuite and Lotus Notes to Linux, and make it open source instead of leaving it to lose market share by not aggressively marketing it. Link courtesy of Linux Today. Despite the previous report by Infoworld, I have had confirmation that as of this time there is no official such strategy at IBM to make SmartSuite or Lotus Notes open source.

Dave Whitinger of Linux Today wrote in to tell me of an article claiming that Linux and OSS would be hard to sue. It points out that Microsoft's strategy was to copy others' inventions which makes it hard for them to complain if the OSS community does the same. The second part of the article is the stronger, introducing the idea that Windows as a platform is likely to lose many innovative third-party products now that Microsoft's trend of absorbing the good ideas of smaller companies is becoming clear. updated.

Linux Today has a feature written by Steve Birch who is building a 200 processor distributed system using Linux. His customer, some government agency hired a consultant who asked them: Do you really want to base your system on "freeware?" There is no technical support, how will you get questions answered? Who are you going to blame? Read what happened next.... Seems like FUD is now returning to haunt its originators. Update: 11/12 06:23 by CT : I just found a bug in Slash! It accidentally deleted all the comments attached to this article! The funny part is that there were was tons of flames and insults (frankly the comments on this article were embarassing) but I'm sure everyone will just assume I did it because I'm censorship oriented demon. Untrue, but now I gotta go track this bug down before it strikes again. I'm really sorry to the dozen or so good posts that got nuked, hopefully this won't happen again. Update: 11/12 06:57 by CT : ok I tracked the bug down. It was a really odd glitch that I musta stuck in accidentally when writing the moderator code awhile back. It's squashed now, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Once again, I'm seriously sorry, this was a total accident. Unfortunate, because this article included one of the daily 'Rob is a Bastard and Slashdot is an unstable cespool' threads, so it would appear that I might have created this "bug" out of spite. This isn't the case. If you don't believe me, there isn't anything I can do about it. I'm just glad I fixed this bug before releasing Slash 0.3. That woulda been a pisser.

As an aside, the server has had an uptime of 10 days now. Mysql on the other hand... well I'm working on that one. It's still leaking. Now I need some food- nate made tacos. Yum.

Linux Today has a feature written by Steve Birch who is building a 200 processor distributed system using Linux. His customer, some government agency hired a consultant who asked them: Do you really want to base your system on "freeware?" There is no technical support, how will you get questions answered? Who are you going to blame? Read what happened next.... Seems like FUD is now returning to haunt its originators. Update: 11/12 06:23 by CT : I just found a bug in Slash! It accidentally deleted all the comments attached to this article! The funny part is that there were was tons of flames and insults (frankly the comments on this article were embarassing) but I'm sure everyone will just assume I did it because I'm censorship oriented demon. Untrue, but now I gotta go track this bug down before it strikes again. I'm really sorry to the dozen or so good posts that got nuked, hopefully this won't happen again. Update: 11/12 06:57 by CT : ok I tracked the bug down. It was a really odd glitch that I musta stuck in accidentally when writing the moderator code awhile back. It's squashed now, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Once again, I'm seriously sorry, this was a total accident. Unfortunate, because this article included one of the daily 'Rob is a Bastard and Slashdot is an unstable cespool' threads, so it would appear that I might have created this "bug" out of spite. This isn't the case. If you don't believe me, there isn't anything I can do about it. I'm just glad I fixed this bug before releasing Slash 0.3. That woulda been a pisser.

As an aside, the server has had an uptime of 10 days now. Mysql on the other hand... well I'm working on that one. It's still leaking. Now I need some food- nate made tacos. Yum.