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Linux is like an ecosystem , with some companies at the top of thew food chain and others who are forced to live underneath them.

What you THINK is Linus is at the top of that foodchain. In reality, Redhat is at the top of that foodchain, and Linus, Mark and everyone else - all other distros -get a lot of code RedHat writes forced onto them whether they like it or not. They are by far the biggest, most well funded, most prolific and most influential Linux distro Plenty of core functionality issues out of them, and because so many other device makers and 3rd party software makers write code which depends on their code, all other Linux distros are forced to follow suit.

Fo course, once code is depended-upon by a large number of 3rd parties, that dependency spreads like a cancer and all Linux distros are forced to include that depended upon code.

And what makes RedHat so sucessful, what lets them maintain their position as top dog / ecosystem dictator? One thing- the contracts it has with the US government.

And what code might I be talking about? I might be talking about Systemd.

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

You can read about it at this link and especially the ones below but tldr; It Came From Redhat and provoked nonthing less than a civil war in Linux over whether it will be included.

Shuttleworth proclaimed it would never be included in Ubuntu and Linus railed against it, but to no avail. In the end they both submitted to the power wielded by Redhat.

True, there's only a 99% chance this inscrutable mess of code, which has staged violent coup after violent coup against the territory previously held by nicely isolated and well understood parts of Linux *at the lowest levels* isn't a government sponsered backdoor-via-oopsie-a'lookie-at-that-bug-we-wrote ! but that's small comfort to the rest of us who need somewhere to run from the privacy-raping, eavesdropping, keystroke-logging, backdoored piece of shit Torjan known as Windows 10 when Windows 7 stops being habitable.

So yeah, the guy who has root on every Ubuntu installation in the world and was publicly submitted into bowing before and pledging his eternal allegience and fealty to His Majesty the King wants everyone to know that King's clothes are marvelous and all this talk of a naked King is just bunk.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/1...

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/fea...

The basic tension here is the use of technology by Bad Guys gives them preternatural power to do bad things in big ways. OTOH , the state sponsored panopticon which is deployed, in all earnestness- let us not pretend otherwise, seriously, I don't question their motives even a little - is a known recipe for the destruction of democracy, dissent and a death sentence for a healthy society. But only a free and healthy society has any hope to counter terrorism. Absent freedom of thought and freedom from intimidation, short-term, parochial local incentives borns of personal fiefdoms take over policy making completely and that society is doomed to fall, just like Rome.

We cannot allow ourselves to become Rome. The only way to do that is to prevent the government from deploying a system which could be used by future governments to crush dissent and independent thought. That is, to crush anonymous speech and the freedom to explore ideas and voicing opinions which run counter to powerful interests.

It not that terrorism doesn't have the potential to bring a doomsday to us all, they most certainly do, it's that through an indirect process which is nevertheless guaranteed to be realized, that potential turns into an absolute certainty if the government is able to get root on all our keystrokes.

So

Linux Magazine
Linux Format
Linux Journal
Linux User and Developer
Ubuntu User

weren't enough paper Linux magazines?

I never said that my reason was THE reason JPM chose to extend XP Embedded. I simply one possible viewpoint to consider. I posed the question and people are going off on the thread as if I'm loading the question, I'm not. I agree with you that JPM's decision to extend is more about any change rather than upgrade cycles.

As far as the FUD viewpoint I'll quote This post that sums up what I'm getting at: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/the-litigation-business-the-free-software-column

"In many cases, the cost of contesting a patent, searching for prior art and the recruitment of lawyers, is prohibitive and a distraction, so a settlement is made without recourse to the law and the validity of the patent is never contested.

Owning your own patents as a bargaining chip is no defence against a troll. Far from encouraging openness and the spread of ideas, the cumulative effect of the patent industry is to stifle innovation â" and to limit technological exploration to those who can afford a roomful of lawyers."

At the heart of the MinnowBoard is one of Intel’s less powerful processors: the Atom E640T. Running at 1GHz, the single-core chip offers a 32-bit x86 implementation – already putting it on the back foot compared to the dual-core 64-bit APU found on rival AMD’s Gizmo, the closest device for comparison – while generating a surprisingly small amount of heat, allowing for passive cooling through a compact heat sink.

Source

Basically, MinnowBoard has been outdated for some time now. Not sure why this spam is on the front page.

Full disclosure: I almost got the GizmoBoard as an HTPC, but the 2GB RAM and lack of HDMI really turned me off. HDMI can be cobbled together (there's a high-speed connector that actually exposes HDMI lines, but you'd have to wire it to a female connector yourself), but swapping out four 96-FBGA surface-mount packages to upgrade the RAM to 4GB just seemed like more rework than I wanted to sign up for.

This had Unity on by default, doesn't it? Epic fail.

We can almost hear one of one Redmond’s richest residents rubbing his hands together with glee.

Unity is almost as relevant to Ubuntu 12.04 as ASIMO is to Honda’s latest hatchback.

I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed for a short time and HATED it as well. The overall look and feel of the default Unity desktop manager is like it is trying to be a hybrid desktop/tablet OS and doing a half assed job at both. It managed to combine annoying, confusing and pandering on a level almost up there with Microsoft Bob. One wonders if this is a surreptitious reverse advertisement for Windows 8.

This had Unity on by default, doesn't it? Epic fail.

We can almost hear one of one Redmond’s richest residents rubbing his hands together with glee.

Unity is almost as relevant to Ubuntu 12.04 as ASIMO is to Honda’s latest hatchback.

I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed for a short time and HATED it as well. The overall look and feel of the default Unity desktop manager is like it is trying to be a hybrid desktop/tablet OS and doing a half assed job at both. It managed to combine annoying, confusing and pandering on a level almost up there with Microsoft Bob. One wonders if this is a surreptitious reverse advertisement for Windows 8.

Did not RedHat secure a Microsoft key? Ditto for Ubuntu (although they may be simply using RedHat's); the bootloader shim was written some time back, all that was lacking was the key. The links below are fairly old and I haven't been keeping tabs on the matter since I'm not going to be doing a build soon. Last thing I recall reading, tho, indicated the whole thing was a done deal and that if one wanted to install a Linux distro it wouldn't be a problem, just a bit of hassle.

Or here: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/uefi-secure-boot-key-provided-by-linux-foundation from Oct. 11 last year.
Or here: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/UEFI-and-Secure-Boot
Or here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html-single/UEFI_Secure_Boot_Guide/index.html

Btw, the key itself comes from Verisign; you can get your own for $99 just like everyone else; or use any of the other approaches as above. Unless the OEM completely locks down it's board, you can also simply bypass the UEFI signing altogether, as required in the spec, as I understand it.

"After nearly three years of development, Invisible Things Labs has finally released Qubes 1.0, a Fedora 17-based Linux distribution that tries to be as secure as possible by isolating various applications in their own virtual machines using Xen. If one of the applications is compromised, the damage is isolated to the domain it's running in" link

By the way, the synopsis of the article given at http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/content/view/60/0/ is a bit misleading. The picture is more like it. One of the major points made is that nanotechnology is brand new, and that as such there are no real ways to test for health benefits. For example, a substance that in larger sizes is non-toxic and is kept out of the cell by the usual chemistry/physics can pass into the cell when it is nanosized. Thus, the current safety sheets tend to mean little when a substance is at this scale. I think there is little argument that if these things prove to be safe, there are some real benefits to be had.

If you are bandwidth challenged (as I was until recently) then you have a number of options.

• Go with a distro that lets you do a netinstall and only download what you need.
• Go with a smaller distro. This is linux. You have the choice. Choose a distro that comes with everything. Choose a distro that fits on one CDROM. Choose!
• Work with the Fedora team to produce a netinstall version of Fedora (or pay someone else to do it for you.
• Get a friend with a faster internet connection to download it for you
• Pay somebody or another somebody to download it for you
• Buy a magazine that has a cover disc with the distro on it.

Disclaimer: Some options may be overly expensive or impractical due to your geographical location. Don't winge. Pick a different option.

The proper link is here. Slashcode always embeds a space if you paste in a long link without using the proper HTML.

The award was part of "Networking Industry Awards 2003", was for "best software" and did not represent that it was a judgement about the community involvement in the project. Maddog was there to get his own award. Organizations who give awards are usually in it to get publicity for themselves. Thus, don't read too much into them.

The list of OpenOffice project leads is here. Although some of the leads don't work for Sun, very few of them seem to be volunteers. The collab.net folks are Sun contractors, etc. It's difficult to judge who is behind an @openoffice.org address, and there are a lot of those.

Thanks

Bruce

The FSF does prosecute cases of abuses to the GPL in some cases. See this page

The requirement of course is that the auther of a project assigns copyright to the FSF.

The OSS movement itself may be doing the same thing, in cases where they are assigned copyright, and are informed of copyright violations.

There is a difference between the FOSS movement and the OSS movement. So long as the source code is available, the OSS movement is quite happy to approve the product as Open Source. FOSS, and or FSF or GNU requires the additional step that the software be unburdened of restrictions on the user, or developers who have access to that source code, beyond that products derivative of that source code retain the same/similar licence.

Additionally, while the FOSS movement would like developers to use an approved licence to distribute their own work, which may, or may not, access GPL software, it is not a requirement. Thus if you write a plug-in for the GIMP, you are not required to abide by the same licence that the GIMP uses.

I seem to recall that some licence out of Apple was the first licence that the OSS movement approved, that the FOSS movement did not.

Then again, I've been wrong before...

-Rusty

Small sample:

1. Air New Zealand replaces 150 Compaq servers with a single mainframe running zLinux.
2. Telia Net replaces 70 UNIX servers with a single mainframe running zLinux.
3. Banco Mercantile Venezuela replaces Windows and UNIX servers with zLinux mainframe.
4. SAIC moves application to Linux on the mainframe, for the stock exchanges.

Gartner says IBM had over 100 new mainframe customers in 2002 (according to one report I saw). Haven't seen 2003 data yet.

The Editor of Linux User & Developer
Richard Hillesley wrote a great article in issue 36 titled
"The Poetry of Programming".

In it he detailed the connection between E De joncourt,
Charles Babbage, Ada Augusta and Lord Byron.

Truely enlightening.

it seems to me that an electronic system can only be trusted if each and every voter can verify their vote in a published database of votes, and that each and every voter can use the entire database to verify the results for themselves
unfortunately this requires that a sufficiently large proportion of voters are prepared to check their vote and report any anomalies, i would love for a statistician to prove me wrong but i suspect that the voter apathy that currently applies to paper voting will make it a reasonable risk to publish a 'fixed' database of votes; even if the required number of checked votes necessary to reveal skullduggery is smaller than i might guess there remains the problem of the ballot being secret and preventing undue influence.
for further reading i recommend articles i read in linux user & developer in jan and feb this year here and here and also by a fellow called Jason Kitcat.
i have seen advocates of electronic voting use the current apathy of voters as a reason for introducing such voting, often with the claim that voting that can be done at home will result in greater participation,
i believe that vote rates may go up, but the checking afterwards? if voters were more prepared to be a part of local democracy, be an election volunteer, vote counter, whatever; if they were prepared to 'stay up all night' then i doubt there would be the perceived need for a 'new improved system'.
thus the wrong problem is being tackled, it's not 'how' people vote, it's 'why they don't want to'.
of course the discussion on that can go off on wild tangents so i won't start it :)

it seems to me that an electronic system can only be trusted if each and every voter can verify their vote in a published database of votes, and that each and every voter can use the entire database to verify the results for themselves
unfortunately this requires that a sufficiently large proportion of voters are prepared to check their vote and report any anomalies, i would love for a statistician to prove me wrong but i suspect that the voter apathy that currently applies to paper voting will make it a reasonable risk to publish a 'fixed' database of votes; even if the required number of checked votes necessary to reveal skullduggery is smaller than i might guess there remains the problem of the ballot being secret and preventing undue influence.
for further reading i recommend articles i read in linux user & developer in jan and feb this year here and here and also by a fellow called Jason Kitcat.
i have seen advocates of electronic voting use the current apathy of voters as a reason for introducing such voting, often with the claim that voting that can be done at home will result in greater participation,
i believe that vote rates may go up, but the checking afterwards? if voters were more prepared to be a part of local democracy, be an election volunteer, vote counter, whatever; if they were prepared to 'stay up all night' then i doubt there would be the perceived need for a 'new improved system'.
thus the wrong problem is being tackled, it's not 'how' people vote, it's 'why they don't want to'.
of course the discussion on that can go off on wild tangents so i won't start it :)

it seems to me that an electronic system can only be trusted if each and every voter can verify their vote in a published database of votes, and that each and every voter can use the entire database to verify the results for themselves
unfortunately this requires that a sufficiently large proportion of voters are prepared to check their vote and report any anomalies, i would love for a statistician to prove me wrong but i suspect that the voter apathy that currently applies to paper voting will make it a reasonable risk to publish a 'fixed' database of votes; even if the required number of checked votes necessary to reveal skullduggery is smaller than i might guess there remains the problem of the ballot being secret and preventing undue influence.
for further reading i recommend articles i read in linux user & developer in jan and feb this year here and here and also by a fellow called Jason Kitcat.
i have seen advocates of electronic voting use the current apathy of voters as a reason for introducing such voting, often with the claim that voting that can be done at home will result in greater participation,
i believe that vote rates may go up, but the checking afterwards? if voters were more prepared to be a part of local democracy, be an election volunteer, vote counter, whatever; if they were prepared to 'stay up all night' then i doubt there would be the perceived need for a 'new improved system'.
thus the wrong problem is being tackled, it's not 'how' people vote, it's 'why they don't want to'.
of course the discussion on that can go off on wild tangents so i won't start it :)

Well, to begin with, there's the Halloween Documents, which include amongst other things the quote:

The effect of patents and copyright in combatting Linux remains to be investigated.

Examples from Here include:

ASF: changing copyright rules by means of patents Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software programmer from writing import/export filters for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The programmer wanted interoperability with a format that Microsoft is promoting. But for Microsoft, interoperability is in this case doubly disadvantageous: besides reducing the lock-in effect, on which Microsoft's platform strategy relies, it also can circumvent the locks on unauthorized copying, by which Microsoft wants to attract content providers to its ASF platform. Whereas in the DeCSS case a court ruling was necessary to enforce new draconian copyright provisions of the highly disputed Digital Millenium Act, in the ASF case a simple patent suffices to achieve the same legislative goal.

and

Microsoft bars GNU software from interoperating with CIFS During the 1st week of April 2002, Microsoft published a license for its new specification CIFS which it is trying to establish as a de facto communication standard. This license says that free software under GNU GPL, LGPL and similar licenses may not use CIFS. It bases this ban on two broad and trivial US patents with priority dates of 1989 and 1993. Preliminary search results suggst that these patents to not have EP (European Patent) counterparts. But there is nevertheless an EP patent which could possibly be used by MS for the same purpose. Critical network infrastructure such as Samba as well as new projects such as Mono seem to be affected.

There's also this account from Linux User (Warning: It's a pdf file):

Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."

There are, I'm sure, other examples which could be provided, but this is just a small sample of Microsoft attitudes with respect to Patents and Free Software.

I thought this information might be helpful so some load balancing can be done.

I thought this information might be helpful so some load balancing can be done.

here