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See this leaked HP memo revealing Microsoft's patent strategy with regard to Linux and Open Source. This is why we must reform the patent system.

Huh? Reports are that SCO is being investigated by the SEC...

See This story on Newsforge for some info about it, reported back in March...

Like many companies in tight spots, it simply does not tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It should, but it doesn't have to. This isn't a courtroom. Organizations always manage the information they choose to divulge, risking their own credibility with each statement. Journalists know this and factor it into the information mix. And readers choose to believe what they want to believe when they read the final report. Most of the time, the truth eventually filters through.

We at NewsForge and ITMJ simply research and publish IT information -- when we are satisfied that it is complete and useful to our readership.

/cp NewsForge and ITMJ/a>

According to newsforge, it took "barely a day" for Mozilla to release new builds and patches.

Seen this. Not so spooky.

I think you have a good arguement concerning volunteer work, however, I disagree with your statement that open source doesn't create jobs. That statement simply is not true.

Fujitsu will be paying developers on the Postgresql project to develop additional features for the open source database.

http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/07/01/07 21222.shtml?tid=72&tid=82

And that is just an example of open source developer jobs created due to the demand for open source software. I could give you lots of examples where open source software is creating new companies and jobs in various industries around the world because the free part of open source software makes the entry point much easier for those who are interested in entering the market.

burnin

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

NewsForge has an article on how to disable and replace IE. This is the sort of thing you want to pass on to your relatives/friends who still use Windows and IE.

So what's the story on the patent claims? Boycott Email caller id still seems wary, and I see no evidence that Eben Moglen's concerns (such as incompatibility with the GPL) have been addressed.

Any such patent application is likely to be granted, since Microsoft has lots of $$$ to press their case and the patent office has neither the knowledge or time to determine if they're obvious or in any other way counter them.

I remember the joys of dealing with GIF patents. We're better off without this combined approach if the patent applications will make it unworkable.

So, what's the situation?

When the windows desktop market was the size of the current linux desktop market (not in terms of percentage, of course, but numbers) there was a huge market for shareware. Why doesn't that market exist for linux today?

One reason could be the technology, which you've addressed, but IMHO the main reason is the economics. A while back, in a newsforge article I analyzed the situation and suggested how to create such a market. I was quite taken aback by the feedback, which consisted mainly of semi-coherent rants saying "shareware is teh evil!!!" and "kill anyone who dares to suggest proprietary software for linux!!" and so on, despite the fact that what I proposed would have the side effect more open source software getting written.

The linux landscape is changing, its going mainstream, and there are a lot linux users who don't like that. I must humbly suggest to such people that you cannot do anything about it, and you should therefore either accept the reality or start moving to another system where you can feel more "l33t".

How ironic... this gets posted just as finished reading Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article on dumping IE after seeing a link to it on NewsForge.

at the moment maybe... but just might be the kick in the pants to spur a mass influx of developers to get the Kaffe project up to speed and the get the GNU Classpath expanded, cos Stallman was certainly on target with his "Java trap" article... and there's an awfull lot of people who will not want something as special as this Looking Glass to have to rely on non-free java runtimes.

Another good rootkit checker, which seems to have a more active development cycle, is Rootkit Hunter. Here's a Newsforge article on it, with a few more details.

A few other comments:

Virus scanners won't help on jot against a custom hack (as Valve found out, for instance). They can be helpful, but don't put full reliance on them.

Running an Intrustion Detection/Prevention System such as Snort, Samhain, Prelude, etc. will help you manage the monitoring side of things; more than a few machines becomes a pain without additional help. Also take a look centralising all your logs on a syslogng server or something similar, if you don't already (note that there are various solutions out there to get Windows boxes to log to a syslog server).

A honeypot may distract the hacker from your production servers for long enough for you to identify that there's a problem.

Also take a look at "HoneyTokens": specifically created database records that trigger alarms if they're accessed - usually high profile fictious targets that would make excellent trophy hacks - there's more info on this over at SecurityFocus.

If you suspect that a machine has been compromised, as other have said, the ONLY WAY TO BE SURE is to rebuild the box from scratch. While this may be a real pain, hopefully it'll help you get the procedures in place to make this as painless as possible, so it's not all bad.

Perform security audits/pentests every now and again. Tools like Nessus help: here's a good series on using Nessus (part 2, part 3).

Get familiar with security tools such as the top 75 recommendations at Insecure.org (home of Nmap).

Remember that security is a PROCESS, so be thorough; get an entire plan together and cover all the bases that you can, taking special care to identify and cover the weak points. Your company's security is only as good as its weakest link; for instance, priviledge escalation of weak user account passwords is a good one.

Read SecurityFocus, PacketStorm, CERT and the like, and try to get involved in their communities; they can be invaluable! They're also got a lot of good tutorials, such as how to lock down Apache, IIS; securing PHP, ASP; etc.

This was linked from NoMachine's site, somehow I got to it before it died.
http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/07/10/2146247 .shtml?tid=11
from the article:
Thin client computing lets users run applications on a remote server and display the results locally. NX Client works something like VNC (see our recent story), but instead of using Remote Frame Buffer protocol, NX Client acts as an X Window server. Thin clients help contain costs by eliminating the need to install applications at each user's desktop, and improve security by limiting the availability of applications and data. The clients themselves can be dedicated hardware devices or regular computers running thin client software.

Newsforge article

Potential source for FreeNX Server

I am thinking about setting up my own personal mail server for my small business

I'm planning on doing the same thing. When I was hunting for information I found this link, it has plenty of resource information. Maybe it will help you too.

I'd like to think that, money, and in general the neccessity need to trade items of equal value, is what I object to, rather than capitalism or communism or any particular economic model.

I find it sad that this exchange economy mentality that prevails... But (a) it obviously works (b) because it prevails over so many millenia of attempts at other systems.

Nonetheless, that's mostly in the world of physical things -- but the world of knowledge and thought is slowly succumbing to this mentality as well.

See "The gift economy and free software", an adequate essay that approximately parallels my opinion.

But you need not care. My opinion is but one among an ocean of millions, all different.

There was a story on NewsForge about the Splintering Linux Community.

As far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier! While new users might be confused (I dont even have my new computer yet, and I've already downloaded 4 varieties of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and now I'm getting Debian...), they'll find that they want in a distro if they just look long enough. What needs to quit is this "haha, that gentoo zealot would reply, but he's too busy compiling his response!" or "FreeBSDZ R DYING!". I know that *BSD has little to do with GNU/Linux, but its still Free Software, and we have common goals.

Also, the schooltux is really cute!

They're waiting for Ken Brown's book to come out..

Looks like another blunder by shitdots editors. This was already seen on newsforge here
and also on redat for some reason right here

--
Just pointing out the obvious that some readers may not have noticed.

I think he was referring to this.

To quote Linus Torvalds:

People have been pretty good (understatement of the year) at debunking those claims, but the fact is that part of that debunking involved searching kernel mailing list archives from 1992 etc. Not much fun.

Unlike early post BSDi development of the "free" BSD's, almost all of the Linux kernel development took place in the open and over the internet.

In comparison Microsoft has "lost" the source to MSDOS and "deleted" CEOs email from it's servers. There is NO real public provenance to the source code to most of Microsoft's products. If this is, like the threat from patents is an issue then Linux is in a better postion than its competitors in the market.

Article is mirrored at Newsforge.

The link of the OP:
Anti-Open Source lobbyists need love, too

That's right. In November 2003, there was an unsuccessful Trojan-CVS attack on the Linux kernel.

Linux kernel development process thwarts subversion attempt

The attack failed because, basically, the CVS repositories for the linux kernel are not the real source trees -- they are just mirrors of people's bitkeeper trees.

And here is a Trojan FTP attack. Of course CVS and FTP are different protocols, but the idea is similar -- inject malware into the OSS development stream.

This article, Interview With the People Behind JFS, ReiserFS & XFS asks the developers directly about fragmentation. XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS are extent-based file systems, which keep fragmentation to a minimum.

In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament to curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers on Monday, May 17, without further debate!

Little off topic but ther is a good article about Linux emulation on NetBSD over at Newsforge

"un-democratic european nightmare inflicts more total garbage legislation"

Oh come now, it's not that undemocratic. If it was we wouldn't have been able to lobby against the corporations and win. Compare this with what happened in the US, where the govt bended over backwards to help the corporations.

There's a Newsforge story about Howard County Public Library. They were also written up in an ALA publication.

Why do you think Microsoft would have anything to do with it?

What hold you think Microsoft might have over Kodak?

Do you think Kodak owes Microsoft any favors?

I recall Newsforge doing stories on this city that made the switch. Here's the link. Newsforge and Linux.com are good places to look for this sort of thing. From a research perspective, you may be able to find stories, but you'll probably have to document them yourself.

You may want to ask voters with disabilities what they think, then ask Caltech and MIT what they have to say on the topic, then investigate other options. Just a suggestion.

Why not push for a solution that could work for everyone, in addition to your current campaign?

Biggest Windows vulnerability ever, again. How many times have we said that this year? At work, it's begining to feel a bit like a duck and cover drill.

Stacey Quandt joined OSDL as principal analyst in September 2003 - press release.

LWN coverage of the appointment.

Quandt appears to no longer work for OSDL as she is credited in the featured article as "Stacey Quandt Industry Analyst, Quandt Analytics". Her bio at the bottom of this newsforge story also describes her as no longer working for OSDL. Would be interesting to know her reasons for leaving.

"There will be a transition back to Solaris," he said

The "fad will wear off, and big business will come back to slowaris".

"There will be a transition back to Solaris," he said

The "fad will wear off, and big business will come back to slowaris".

You are totally correct. This is FAR WORSE than anything going on in Linux today. It's absolutely EVIL and needs to be stopped. Bruce Perens wrote an open letter to Michael Robertson last time he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. There is more of this going on. Lindows subverts the GPL with CNR. Look into it. You lose the ability to use the programs if you don't pay for the "free" trial or you unsubscribe from CNR. Theft. Breaking the GPL. WRONG.

STOP THE LINDOWS IPO.

This article claims it was announced by Linux International a long time ago.

Also you can find posts by Jon Hall on usenet archives about it too.

If you read the LWI site you'd see "Website maintained courtesy of the law firm of Terra Law L.L.P. and AtreNet. Copyright 2000 Linux Mark Institute" .. Obviously that Monterey address is for the maintainer of the website.

It is well known that Linus does not want to be involved in the trademark issues of Linux.

Kernel.org is for source code, not for legal information.

Newsforge reports on why OpenOffice will never catch up to Microsoft Office. Worth a read!

If we really wanted .Net functionality on Linux, we would make peace with Sun and pull Java into the OSS world.

As far as I can tell, the fact that Linux is a viable platform for running Java applications is one of the things keeping Java in the running.

So what exactly does the Linux community have to "make peace" with Sun over?

Is it the fact that the Java platform is "non-free" according to Richard Stallman? That's not something we did to Sun; some recent Slashdot articles have covered IBM's offer to help Sun open-source Java. Although talks may still be going on, Scott McNealy has said there will be no open-source Java -- at least, not one coming from Sun.

Any issues with "pulling Java into the OSS world" are Sun's issues, not the Linux community's.

Jay (=

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

I thought Microsoft was secretly SCO's biggest investor, at least that's what everyone else still believes.

AstroDrabb has made the contention five or so different times in this forum (mostly below this one) that Linux maintains a 2.8% share of the desktop, thoughtfully providing a link to ITfacts, a IT news outlet of dubious reliability in some of its other assertions. Following the link given by IT Facts, the 2.8% figure is actually from a story in Telegraph.co.uk, which is itself citing a new study by the research and marketing firm IDC. A pretty convoluted chain of evidence, to say the least.

If you actually care to read the study on which the whole house of cards rests, which AstroDrabb evidently has not, you would find that it relied in its figures on a survey administered to a geographically isolated population in North America, and does not claim that the 2.8% figure is extensible to the global market; rather, it is provided to demonstrate Linux's proliferation over time in a very circumscribed market. Moreover, the survey relied on self-reports, and admits that its results are not empirically sound; they are intended to provide a "snapshot of Linux's market presence." Finally, the study does not discriminate between various implementations of Linux, nor does it even differentiate well between Linux and UNIX users in its questionaire. The authors concede that the sample "may include some UNIX platforms as well."

In short: The 2.8% figure AstroDrabb has posted over, and over, and over again in this forum is simply incorrect. It relies on a information collecting method that the surveyors conceded is unsound and certainly not globally extensible, and embraces not only mutually incompatible implementations of Linux, but some UNIX users as well.

Well-meaning Slashdotters should check their data more thoroughly before relying on it as naively as AstroDrabb has. Or perhaps he did so because it was simply what he wanted to hear.

There's a lot of contention among surveys. For example, while AstroDrabb's precious study found that 25% of the new servers bought ran Linux, The Register reports that the figure among servers actually in use is 8.6%. (The author of the piece is a NewsForge columnist and a Linux user herself.

My point is simply to remind everyone of Benjamin Disraeli's famous aphorism: "There are three kind of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." You can always find a percentage that makes you right and/or happier, but that doesn't make it true. Linux is a fine OS that is on the grow, but Apple is quite right not to consider it a direct rival to its core business at this stage. All of the percentages in the world aren't going to change that.

Let's face it, the linux center of mass in the Pacific Northwest is decidedly south of BC. Where is OSDL? Where are the West Coast linux strategists for IBM and Intel? Where is the 2nd fastest linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer in the world? Where is there a large Debian based distro aimed at homes and offices? Which Pacific Northwest city has new lugs sprouting up? Which prominent lug in the north did not participate at all in LFNW 2003, the largest LFNW to that date?

The triangle of Seattle, Portland, Richland (PNL puts it on the map) is the center of mass of Linux in the Northwest. Hopefully LFNW will take this into account in the future.

I think it's interesting your take on that statement, but I see something different at work.

Slashdot does not produce or report news. So, just as the editorial section of a newspaper, by default, gets to say whatever the editor wants to say, regardless of fact or spin - the same is true for a blog.

If newsforge (slashdot's sister site) tries to run opinions and not facts - then we'd have a question to be had.

Is a newspaper the place to run opinion fodder? Well, that's up for debate. So far the only legal remedy to printed lies is to file a libel suit. And the criteria for libel is the same regardless of the medium (unless you are doing a parody).

True there are no direct connections with Baystar and Paul Allen, but keep this in mind:
...the managing partner of BayStar Capital of Larkspur, Calif., did admit that senior executives from Microsoft approached him to ask BayStar to make such an investment....

From here
'As for Richard Stallman's "Free but shackled: The Java trap," it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved)' As for Richard Stallman's references to "non-free" they may "seem" to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics, but non the less he brings up a good point. With all the trouble and mysteries behind Java at this point, it's not a bad idea to Develop the GNU Classpath. Right now Sun seems to have a hidden agenda which we can't decifer at this point...no one knows if, when the time comes, java will remain "non-free" and move on to "pay-me-now".