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OK you got 1 of 6 correct. You fail.

Linux and FreeBSD kernels, which
1. is the most SMP scalable (parallel)

Linux. (Linux and FreeBSD both started with a BKL about 5 years ago. Linux is now being used on 512 processor machines, FreeBSD doesn't scale past 4 CPUs for all their research).

2. is the most algorithmically scalable
Linux

3. has fastest single threaded performance
Linux (from the horse's proverbial mouth).

4. runs on more architectures
Linux. See here and here (The Linux Kernel supports more architectures than the NetBSD kernel, idiot).

5. supports the most hardware
Linux. See here and here (NetBSD is actually the one that prides themselves as running on toasters. And nobody cares about your shitty DEC Alphas. IA64, POWER are where its at now).

6. has the fastest TCP/IP stack
Linux

See you again next year.

APT4RPM was developed (ported to RPM systems would be more accurate) by Conectiva about three years ago and was adopted officially on Conectiva Linux 6.0.

It's very mature by now, has a strong community (check the project page and the mailing list) and has a lot of cool features that are not (yet?) available on Debian systems (like LUA scriptable interface, apt-shell, meta-repositories, instalation of packages by filenames, etc.).

There's an article on LWN about it in particular which is worth reading for anyone who already knows it from Debian: "New features in APT-RPM".

> If anyone asks you what this sco fiaSCO is about, you can direct them to this article.

AND THEN you direct them to these published Novell vs. SCO correspondances, Make sure to point out McBride's (SCO's) intentions as stated in their own words back in 2002 compared to his open letter a year later. It shouldn't be too hard for anyone not keeping up with /. to come to the conclusions that SCO is seriously smoking Crack, CRaCK, CRACK!. Although, it may just be easier to point them to this simulated IRC chat which seems to epitomize the entire series of events leading to this big mess. Oh and supposedly SCO is suing trees now.

you mean like pasting the contents of the linux header files that those litigious bastards claim ownership of?

[...] Basic journalistic integrity [...]

People have been complaining about this since day 2 on slashdot. And it's been silly and ridiculous the whole time -- never "informative" or "insightful". If you want *journalism*, basic or otherwise, go to some representative of the press. For example, for serious g4ek-related journalism, I recommend LWN -- but that's *never* what Slashdot has been or even pretended to be. So, basically, quit whining.

We're talking about Linux vs FreeBSD here, clown, not to mention that you provided zero evidence. You got failed.

Linux and FreeBSD kernels, which
1. is the most SMP scalable (parallel)
Linux

2. is the most algorithmically scalable
Linux

3. has fastest single threaded performance
Linux

4. runs on more architectures
Linux. See here and here

5. supports the most hardware
Linux. See here and here

6. has the fastest TCP/IP stack
Linux

Hope this has been helpful. See you again next year.

Btw, there's an interesting article about her speech on the BBC's website. I noticed it over on LWN.Net earlier today. It was one of the few I've seen from the Consumer Electronics show that went much beyond "I saw shiny things. I drooled."

>Maybe you should be?

OR maybe SCO is seriously smoking Crack, CRaCK, CRACK!

If MS is claiming any sort of meaningful result from a 5-year study, let's see ...

5 years ago, it was early 1999. Linux existed, and more than existed -- it was already nicely stable and robust, had inspired some print journals and ongoing festivals (ok, we call them "conventions" and "expos" but c'mon ;)), and the X Window System was happily doing what X did on Suns and SGI machines. Some google searching finds that January 5 years ago is when the "The first 2.2 prerelease kernels appear, starting the final push toward the release of the long-awaited 2.2 kernel."

Now, not that the curves are easy to define, but if you could match up (in your own domain, naturally) the Windows curve of improvement vs. the Linux curve, what would you find? Has Windows gotten better as quickly (for your uses) as Linux has? Do you believe that in another (1,3,5) years that Windows will either remain or have become "better" than Linux for your application?

And Yes, I mean "GNU/Linux" and more to the point GNU/Linux/X/Apache/Perl/Python/KDE/GNOME/OpenOffic e.org/MPlayer/MySQL/etc etc. That is, systems running software to do stuff.

This ignores Mac OS X or other Unix varieties of course, and does not get into the fact that "Windows" describes a gurgling sea of related, slightly different operating systems ... I'm looking at an over-simplified black and white world for the purposes of illustration :)

timothy

In terms of Common Criteria evaluation, please consider this link.
This should address certifications questions.

'The SCO Group cannot expect to win any case based upon application interfaces which it's AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors relased in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability.

signal.h, errorno.h,and ioctl are all parts of many released standards including The Open Group and IEEE POSIX Base Specifications and the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 151-2.

Note that The SCO Group does not own the copyrights on any of those standards and it does not own clear title to the copyrights on most of the AT&T Unix base.

From 1989, the then SCO activity pushed for the adoption of the iBCS Intel Binary Compatibility Specifications across *all* i386 Unix vendors

For the benefit of the entire user base, as well as the industry as awhole, SCO encourages all UNIX System vendors for Intel processors to join SCO, USL, Intel, ISC and OSF in supporting the iBCS-2 standard for x86 applications.

Even SCO admits, no requries these definitions to be present in order to be standards compliant.

Someone at Groklaw pointed out that the MS Word version, hosted at LWN, still has the good ol' properties saved. Kevin McBride apparently created the document, with the last modification being made by "bstowell"--presumably, Blake Stowell.

Nice to see that $9 million in legal fees is going to great use.

It asserts files like errno.h are infringing. It acknowledges these files were part of the BSDI/USL settlement but says that their use in GPL'ed software was not allowed by the settlement.

Linux Weekly News has a copy of the letter. The 65 files don't sound quite as threatening when you discover the first 17 of them are errno.h. Quick, someone go warn the IEEE!

You can find it here.

The gist of it seems to be numerous copies of 'errno.h', 'signal.h', and 'ioctl*.h' in the various platform-specific ASM source files, 'bsderrno.h' and 'solerrno.h' in the sparc/sparc64 ASM sources, as well as the following files:

include/linux/ipc.h
include/linux/acct.h
inclu de/asm-sparc/a.out.h
include/linux/a.out.h
arch/ mips/boot/ecoff.h
include/linux/stat.h
include/l inux/ctype.h
lib/ctype.c

I need to do some code-reading myself, but as far as I'm aware all of those are part of the POSIX standard. I could be wrong, and even if they are in the POSIX standard, the files could be copies, but we'll have to wait and see from an official response from the kernel developers to see where these files come from.

The next reason has to do with "Michael Surkan". Do a google search on the name and you will find it synonymous with FUD, insult and cluelessnes. The most damning quotes atributed to him are:

• If nothing else, the Linux community has an influence beyond its numbers, and getting on its good side might help sales elsewhere. As long as Linux remains a religion of freeware fanatics, Microsoft (and other NOS vendors) have nothing to worry about. This quote made it into people's sigs all over the place.
• If Microsoft is forced to take Internet Explorer out of Windows 95 or Windows NT, then by all rights Sun should have to stop shipping Solaris 2.6 with the HotJava browser

Additionally, he denied official backing from Microsoft in his letter to the gslug list maintainers, "P.S. This report is a skunkworks project of mine, and really doesn't have anything to do with my "day job". As if any Microsoft employee were free say what they think. Such typical Microsoft.

I have yet to look for Frank, but I imagine another blast of BS awaits anyone who does. Oh, hell, I'll look.

Don't waste much time on the survey. The answer is sure to be, "Remember to eat our dog food".

An Evening with Bruce Perens

it was secretly revealed that Saddam Hussein transferred billions into these suspicious looking stock accounts before he was arrested. MSFT and SCOX and Darl McBride is one of his body doubles that made those transactions by proxy. McBrides battle song.

Hang on a sec... I thought I was wearing my tinfoil hat, but the box says it is actually made from aluminium foil! aaagggh my brain, my brain.....

It could have been worse - he could have landed in the Norwegian zone of Antartica and been prosecuted again for writing DeCSS.

LWN.net do some great coverage of this issue in these articles:
http://lwn.net/Articles/53780/
http://lwn.net/Articles/51561/
These two articles are in relation to Linksys, but they cover the general issue. There have been some other great GPL-related articles on LWN.net if anyone wants to search the site.

LWN.net do some great coverage of this issue in these articles:
http://lwn.net/Articles/53780/
http://lwn.net/Articles/51561/
These two articles are in relation to Linksys, but they cover the general issue. There have been some other great GPL-related articles on LWN.net if anyone wants to search the site.

• We didn't "leave because we don't like CMSs" (Phil Hughes's claim)

• It wasn't "some of the volunteers" (Phil Hughes's claim) but rather 100% of the staff by unanimous decision

• We didn't spring the decision to move on SSC by surprise at the last minute (Phil Hughes's claim), but rather had warned them for months about what would happen if they went ahead with their plan.

• The editors moved LG to new quarters in part because SSC had said the monthly magazine would cease to exist entirely. (We had no idea SSC would change its mind later and direct uncredited SSC employees to resume producing issues at our old site.) I.e., we actually don't think it's OK to "open up a new site under exactly the same name, even using the same logo", nor were we starting "a spinoff under the same name"; it was a question of move the magazine or let SSC kill the magazine by corporate decree, according to everything they'd told us.

• Founder John M. Fisk, in 1996, transferred custody LG to SSC explicitly as a free magazine to be run in harmony with SSC's commercial magazine, Linux Journal. It was explicitly not to be a commercial property.

• You cannot "own a name": You can own a commercial brand identity, but Linux Gazette has never been a commercial offering. SSC's assertion to the contrary in its USPTO filing is materially false.

• Ownership of everything in LG is retained by each individual contributor, and issued to the public under an open-source licence -- just like with the Linux kernel

• Even successful assertion of a trademark that you prove you own lets you enjoin only competing commercial goods or services using your mark in ways likely to confuse your customers into thinking those are your offerings. SSC's attempt to misuse trademark law -- in which they showed no interest for seven years until the very day we told them we were moving the magazine -- against our volunteer magazine seems to assume we're clueless techies and ignorant of trademark law fundamentals.

Discussion of the matter has been occurring at LWN. Here are my two recent posts:

"Chilling Effects" letter received from SSC, Inc.
(Posted Dec 5, 2003 9:05 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen) (Post reply)

Alan Cox wrote:

John Fisk founded Linux Gazette in 1995. He's not visibly part of either side of the argument which begs the question who did he give it to.

It's a fair question, and the top-level answer is that copyright over all content belongs to the individual authors, being published by each of them under an open-source licence (in LG's case, OPL v. 1.0, and two predecessor open-source licences for very early issues). Alan's no doubt very familiar with this concept. {grin}

Alan is of course thinking of some concept of ownership over the magazine as a whole, and that too is a fair question: The answer is that there's really nothing of that sort to own. The compilation copyright (if any) would likewise be OPL-licensed, and LG was from its inception explicitly a community, non-profit effort.

And that leaves an equally fair third question: What was it that John M. Fisk entrusted to SSC, Inc. -- subject to the promise to keep it non-commercial -- when medical school was keeping him too busy to keep things going? Please read again what John wrote: Phil Hughes and SSC, Inc. willingly assumed (and carried out admirably for many years) an obligation, a volunteer job, a custodianship.

And explicitly not over a corporate balance sheet asset, a lesson that Mr. Hughes seems to have f

You can always resubscribe.

Or, better, you can *not* resubscribe. Linux Magazine and Linux Format (in the UK, but relevant anywhere) are both better publications.

And if I had to choose just one Linux information source, it'd have to be Linux Weekly News -- high quality journalism and analysis in a very timely fashion, written by people who know what they're talking about.

Word Mark LINUX GAZETTE
Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Publication of Journal. FIRST USE: 19950701. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19960801
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 78319880
Filing Date October 28, 2003
Current Filing Basis 1A
Original Filing Basis 1A
Owner (APPLICANT) Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. CORPORATION 2208 NW Market St Suite 407 Seattle WASHINGTON 98107
Type of Mark SERVICE MARK
Register PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator LIVE

There is a trademark registered to SSC. But the application date was Oct 28,2003. The very same day that Rick Moen notified Phil Hugh that they were moving the magazine accord to the LWN article [lwn.net].

SSC is playing dirty pool not the other around.

But because 2.5 wasn't immediately opened, there wasn't an experimental kernel on which experimental ideas could be tried. This led to experimental patches being applied to 2.4 kernels, the so-called stable kernels. Like in 2.4.10, when the whole virtual memory manager was rewritten.

When I read about the December EOL for RH7.x (currently in use on our two large DNS & DHCP boxes) I was a bit miffed - some slightly more advanced notification would have been nice through the usual Red Hat channels.

SOMEBODY TYPED THAT IN TO BEGIN WITH! My guess is that someone googled a definition of binary code and misread the text of the definition.

With apologies for the original state of the posting, here is a new, revised one with full links (at least, most of them).

Summary:
1. Linuxgazette.com - originally founded by a group of volunteers.
2. SSC offered to host them, very generous and kind.
3. SSC voluntarily took over editing at some point.
4. Recently, SSC changed the entire look/feel of the site, trashed the articles at will, and basically started locking out the original founders.
5. the founders took their content to linuxgazette.net
6. SSC, in the form of linuxgazette.com, is unhappy with the .net folks for continuing to use the name. Sadly, SSC tried to trademark the name on Oct 23, 2003, the same day the founders announced the Fork.

LWN: The Linux Gazette Forks

LWN: Linux Gazette

LG: Linux Gazette, Reborn

LG: Histoy of Linux Gazette

SSC: Publisher's comments

SSC: Reply to publisher's comments

SSC: Forum: Anyone prefer the old site?

SSC: Forum: New Site!

Note on the forum links, to change the sort method, you have to edit the URL. The sort the link goes to is the standard one, to change it to the expanded list, use mode=2, etc.

With apologies for the original state of the posting, here is a new, revised one with full links (at least, most of them).

Summary:
1. Linuxgazette.com - originally founded by a group of volunteers.
2. SSC offered to host them, very generous and kind.
3. SSC voluntarily took over editing at some point.
4. Recently, SSC changed the entire look/feel of the site, trashed the articles at will, and basically started locking out the original founders.
5. the founders took their content to linuxgazette.net
6. SSC, in the form of linuxgazette.com, is unhappy with the .net folks for continuing to use the name. Sadly, SSC tried to trademark the name on Oct 23, 2003, the same day the founders announced the Fork.

LWN: The Linux Gazette Forks

LWN: Linux Gazette

LG: Linux Gazette, Reborn

LG: Histoy of Linux Gazette

SSC: Publisher's comments

SSC: Reply to publisher's comments

SSC: Forum: Anyone prefer the old site?

SSC: Forum: New Site!

Note on the forum links, to change the sort method, you have to edit the URL. The sort the link goes to is the standard one, to change it to the expanded list, use mode=2, etc.

Another LWN article

History of this problem

As posted below, more info is found here : http://lwn.net/Articles/58065/

A lot of people aren't reading the links - here is a summary (again) :

Linuxgazette.com - originally founded by a group of volunteers.

SSC offered to host them, whee - works great.

SSC took over editing at some point

SSC changed the entire look/feel of the site, trashed the articles at will, and basically started locking out the original founders.

the founders took their content to linuxgazette.net

SSC, in the form of linuxgazette.com, is unhappy with the .net folks for continuing to use the name.

IMHO - SSC should be ashamed for its bullying tactics. They should change the name of linuxgazette.com to something else, and give it back to the founders.

Word Mark LINUX GAZETTE
Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Publication of Journal. FIRST USE: 19950701. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19960801
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 78319880
Filing Date October 28, 2003
Current Filing Basis 1A
Original Filing Basis 1A
Owner (APPLICANT) Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. CORPORATION 2208 NW Market St Suite 407 Seattle WASHINGTON 98107
Type of Mark SERVICE MARK
Register PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator LIVE

There is a trademark registered to SSC. But the application date was Oct 28,2003. The very same day that Rick Moen notified Phil Hugh that they were moving the magazine accord to the LWN article.

SSC is playing dirty pool not the other around.

There's more to it. Linuxgazette was not a creation of SSC, and it's not a 'dissident group' leaving. Linuxgazette was a volunteer organisation from the beginning, and SSC picked it up and hosted it after it had been around some time. Apparently their business got intermixed over that period, and now both SSC and the Linuxgazette staff think they own the name and design and so forth. The entire staff of Linuxgazette have left, and are continuing Linuxgazette as it's always been from a new location, while SSC intends to use the brand for an entirely different sort of site and is threatening them with legal action.

Here's the other side of it on LWN. Of course who actually owns the trademark is something the lawyers will probably have to argue over.

A few tidbits from the other side.

Perhaps you'd like to read their side of the story?

• "2.6 is almost here!"
  
• "2.4.23 is out!" Remember that tree? It's still there!
  
• "2.2.25 is out!" complete with people bitching about how much stuff 2.4.x broke (insert VM whine here)
  
• "2.0.39 is out!" with people posting about how they haven't rebooted their linux box since 1996 ...
  

• "2.7 branch created! Let's have a look at what's to come ..."
  
• "2.6.1 is out! 2.6.2! 2.6.3!"
  
• "2.4.24!" It makes my head hurt....
  

All of the critical fixes from -mm are pushed into Linus's current tree. Just take a look at the "Merged" section immediately following "Latest Linus tree" here; repeat with the previous -testX-mmY patch announcements.

Now take a look at this under the "Andrew Morton" heading and notice how many of those patch headings ring a bell. Yessir, he has been kickin' arse and taking names.

http://lwn.net/Articles/59147/

sPh

This is Darl McBride. He hires bodyguards because people infringing on his "intellectual property", while in fact being very nice and harmless scare him. (There are more of them.) Am I really the only one not surprised?

• Remote file retrieval, administrative authentication bypass, authentication bypass, remote code execution
• SAP DB Privilege Escalation/Remote Code Execution

This gets me thinking about Nat Friedman's GNU-rope (Grope) project. I heard him talk at ALS back in '98 and then the project seemed to completely disappear. Searching on "gnu.rope" leads to a few mailing list postings asking "where'd it go", but no good information about the project.

The basic idea was to reorder the functions in an executable so that locality of reference was maximized and cache hits were increased. The result is less paging and better performance and memory usage.

The really interesting bit is that the optimization is based on the usage of the program being optimized-- that is to say that my Grope-optimized version of Mozilla might be different than yours based on my differences in usage (i.e. perhaps I browse with images turned off, etc).

The tie-in to the article here is that Nat's system, Grope, used simulated annealing to traverse the n-dimensional space of potential function arrangements and profiled the memory paging of the application as a fitness function of the new arrangement. It's not a GA-- but it's functionally similar.

So-- anybody know what happened to Grope? I'd imagine that a community would spring up around it fairly quickly given the relatively high number of "performance zealots" who are busy "tricking out" their Linux boxes by compiling everything from scratch (think Gentoo) optimized for their procesor. Now they can add the "spolier" or "racing stripe" of having exectuables specifically re-ordered for their personal usage patterns! *smirk*

"They also made numerous claims that copyright-based lawsuits will be initiated against Linux users in "the next 90 days. There were hints that HP customers could be targeted, as a result of that company's indemnification promise - as had been predicted previously."

Ahem, she did.

I subscribe to Linux Weekly News and have done so since they started offering. Subscriptions saved them from closing. I'm not sure what the status is, but they aren't exactly earning loads of money, but so far they have survived which is very cool since (IMHO) it's the absolute best Linux news site.

I subscribe to Linux Weekly News and have done so since they started offering. Subscriptions saved them from closing. I'm not sure what the status is, but they aren't exactly earning loads of money, but so far they have survived which is very cool since (IMHO) it's the absolute best Linux news site.

FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) provides a simple interface for
userspace programs to export a virtual filesystem to the Linux
kernel. FUSE also aims to provide a secure method for non
privileged users to create and mount their own filesystem
implementations.

But if they have an uptime of almost 400 days and are running Linux, it also means that they are still vulnerable to the ptrace vulnerability.

Not very smart :-(

Red Hat made public its end of life plans at the end of last year. Slashdot's big hoopla the other day was a leeetle delayed. See the original announcement. Anyone paying even a slight bit of attention shouldn't have been surprised -- there was even relatively-widespread analysis in the geek press.

Novell could be half a year behind and still have time for "months of negotiations". And it's a big company, so it's not suprising for something like this to take that long.

Admittedly, the "glider" was cool. Everybody played life, everyone knew that crosses were stable and gliders would fly till they impacted - it's a universal identifier for a lot of people.

But the BSD logo and the Linux logo are brands, they're symbols for a codebase, not a loosely and contentiously organized group which most people off the street would mistakenly identify as a word for computer criminals. This really doesn't make any sense- what are you branding yourself as? Are you an ESR/hacker? What if by some fluke you just never played life?

Anyway if we are going to give someone the responsiblity of branding an entire MOVEMENT, I'm not sure it should be some gun crazed wack job that would scare most moms out of the day care center.

In defence to IBM's counterclaims to it's lawsuit, SCO have made public a 21 page document, including 156 'answers'.
In the document the lawyers admit some facts submitted by Big Blue when it counterclaimed, but the important things are what it doesn't admit, of course.
It alleges that Linux is an "unathorized version of UNIX that is structured, assembled and designed to be technologically indistinguishable" from it.
I wonder how much the SCO lawyers are being paid.