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There is an interesting writeup about opensource music apps over at News Forge today. Just installed wxMusic and it looks excellent for large music collections.

There is an interesting writeup about opensource music apps over at News Forge today. Just installed wxMusic and it looks excellent for large music collections.

You forget that HP is so opposed to open source that it appears to have walked away from it's $470 million (what they paid) open-source-based software group out of fear of offending their proprietary software vendors. I think they'd sooner sign over the patents to MSFT than release it as open source.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision
No more Hewlett Packard name
No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.

If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.

Also information on Newsforge. The Newsforge web admins might want to somehow exclude the Sybase ads from accompanying that story. It was a tad surprising, to say the least, to see the Sybase "monster" slamming the guy's body from side to side or (on subsequent refreshes) pounding his head down with a club. Perhaps a neutral ad would be much more appropriate in such unfortunate circumstances.

The grandparent isn't summarizing on its own, it's quoting the creator of the code in question as quoted in the first of the two Newsforge stories. At the end of that article is a rebuttal by Emir Sakic (the coder) to the allegations made by Brian Connolly. The rebuttal contains the above five points.

and a reader replies
http://www.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=41095&op= &threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&tid=147&tid =29&pid=99698#99718/

While I would agree with the conclusion, I must disagree on the supporting arguments. I would agree with many other users' comments that most people would get by with OOo and never really care about missing features.

I think NewsForge summed it up reasonably well. It's the data that users care about. And since their data is in MSWord format, not ISO-standard XML format, why exactly would they care when everyone else uses MSWord format, too? Their data is safe and accessable by everyone who matters (mostly themselves).

A data format for a consumer product is rarely anything to get excited about. It's not going to get droves of users to convert. By itself, it is not something to warrant the conversion cost (time and/or money)

What it might do, however, is get the marketing drones at MS to want to put "ISO-compliant" on their boxes as if it were a selling feature. But I doubt it.

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that all Sun owns right now about the Java platform is their own implementation and the trademark. But that's not true: Sun has much strong intellectual property rights, and they have demonstrated time and again that they are not willing to give up those rights.

For example, you cannot write an open source implementation from Sun's specifications (see here for RMS's take on it). Furthermore, Sun has numerous patents on technologies related to Java; it looks like some of those patents are essential for writing a standards-compliant Java implementation.

The fact that some people have started independent (but so far woefully incomplete) efforts to create open source implementations of Java and have so far gotten away with it, unfortunately, doesn't show anything; Sun doesn't have to enforce their trade secret, patent, or copyright claims until it is convenient for them to do so. People didn't see LZW and GIF coming either. Sun may well eventually make SCO-like claims over open source Java implementations, and unlike SCO, Sun may have a pretty solid legal case.

1. Justice Department blocks M$'s acquisition of Intuit Quicken in 1994, fearing it would raise software prices and diminish innovation
   
2. embracing Sun's Java into their own Windows-specific API which resulted in a lawsuit that ended in Sun's favor
   
3. the infamous Halloween memos that outlined M$ strategy to blocking Linux from the market
4. The web browser war against Netscape now Mozilla
5. M$ was found to be bankrolling the SCO/IBM/Linux debacle against the open source movement
   
6. neutralizing w3c compliance by distributing Windows-eccentric webpage API libraries that lock Internet webpages into IE
7. ITEF rejecting M$ patent pending proprietary Sender-ID as too restrictive and puts too much control into M$'s hands
8. A list of M$ innovations^W plagliarisms
   

I think they're more likely to oppose HP because of their history of _not_ supporting linux printer drivers, _not_ having most laptops work with Linux, and _not_ supporting Bruce Perens.

Eric Raymond words it better than I so I'll quote what he told carly:

"You've talked the talk. Now, can you walk the walk?"...

He criticized HP for holding on to the source code for its printer drivers, and for not releasing printer interface specifications, thus hindering development of drivers ported to other operating systems, namely Linux and the BSDs.

Not only that, but he asked HP either to kill its HP-UX operating system and replace it with Linux, or just Open Source the Unix splinter. He finished up the letter with this warning: "You'll also find that we're rather cynical about ringing endorsements; we've heard those before without result, and they won't earn you a lot of cred by themselves without actions and commitments that back them up."

• fired Perens
• leveraged SCO fud by asking protection money that cost even more than SCO asked,
• and decided to sell out their future with open source "agreed on a new patent cross license with Microsoft that protects HP in the short term, but it has significant impact on HP's use of Open Source software in the long term." is the way they put it

Since HP killed thier Open Source strategy thanks to signing "new patent cross license with Microsoft that protects HP in the sort term", they've been nothing but a mouthpiece for MSFT fud.

Remember, HP are the guys who saw the SCO opportunity as a way of trying to scare people into paying HP more for "indemnification from SCO" than SCO was even asking for! And they had the gall to claim that this extortion fee was "support" of linux and accused IBM of not doing the same.

IBM certainly won my respect, thanks to their respect of the GPL.

There are a number of variables involved when one compares the security of software such as Microsoft Windows operating systems to Open Source UNIX-like operating systems including the disparity in their market share, the requirements and dispensations of their user base, and the differences in system design. To better compare the impact of source code licensing on the security of the software, it is wise to reduce the number of variables that will skew the conclusion. To this effect it is best to compare software with similar system design and user base than comparing software applications that are significantly distinct.

The belief in the "inherent security" of Open Source software in a fallacy. Instead, we need to point to a truer means of ensuring the quality of the security of a piece software is high.

Java 'Highly proprietary'? Ah - I guess that is why the spec is published,

The Java spec isn't "published", it is available only under license. It just happens to be the case that it is dangerously easy to accept the license conditions. But the license is printed for you to read on Sun's Java specs, as well as the specs produced under the Java Community Process, and it states that the spec is owned by Sun and that you cannot implement it unless you meet specific conditions.

and why GNU can implement Java;

You can read what the GNU folks have to say about Java here. It's no accident that RMS calls Java "a trap". Besides, GNU hasn't really implemented Java, and just because they haven't been sued yet by Sun doesn't mean that they aren't in violation of lots of licenses, copyrights, and patents.

why Java is the most in-demand language for IT jobs,

So? Is Windows "open" because there are lots of job postings for it?

There is nothing proprietary about Java, only the name, which you must pass compatibility tests to use.

Many Java specs are proprietary and available only under license, and in addition Sun has lots of patents on parts of Java. That makes the Java platform proprietary.

Without these compatibility tests, Java would have fragmented years ago.

The irony is that Java is not only proprietary, it is already fragmented. One dialect of Java, namely C#, is just different enough to try to work around all of Sun's license requirements and patents. And all the attempts at open source implementations are wildly incompatible.

Basically, with people like you, I can't figure out whether you are just too lazy to read Sun's licenses, or whether you have a stake in Java and are lying through your teeth. But the truth is easy enough for anybody to see: just read the licenses at the beginning of the Java and JCP specs and search on the USPTO site for Sun patents related to Java. Or just read RMS's article.

Use Java if you like. But don't keep pretending that it's an "open" platform. Using Java is just like using Windows: you are using a single-vendor, proprietary platform.

The Term "Intellectual Property" is misleading. See what I wrote in a Newsforge article about it. To sum up, IP consists of copyrights, trademarks and patents, which are different legal tools for different purposes and should not be grouped together. Furthermore, Intellectual Property is not property. It is a contract between the originator and the public, and violating it, does not damage the well-being of his tangible property as crimes such as theft or sabotage do.

this article is remarkably similar in many respects to the recent one of Joe Barr at linuxworld. But he makes a more linuxy point -- linux cannot/should not compete against the non-existent figment of microsoft's imagination.

Take a gander over here.

Basically same article. And yup, d-e-l-a-y-e-d.

As someone in an organization which has several hundred installed servers, we looked things over in the past year, and are choosing Debian as the next platform for us. Debian stable is the best choice in organizations that can control their application environment. We are lucky, in that most of our apps are in-house, and we have reasonable corporate memory and support in place.

The main attraction of redhat used to be that their software was newer than debian, and that their installation was easier. if you assume a reasonable level of expertise, the installation is a non-issue. Since we were standardized on redhat 7.x, we were having to backstitch things to just install the latest hardware, so the latest and greatest was not helping us at all.

We started to look longingly at Debian stable... 3 years since the last release, only updates in that time... free... decent kde via backports...

Remember what redhat did last year? Any clue how many corporations were running thousands of instances of free redhat 7.x, getting only patches from RH, who were suddenly SOL as of last December? Did you perchance notice a passing similarity between the plans for RHAS (5 year life cycle) and Debian stable (3 years so far)

apt-get wonderful not because of the ease of use of apt-get itself (which is wonderful nonetheless) but because there are tens of thousands of packages which are in the repositories, ready to go, far more packages than are available from any combination of dependency-hell + freshrpms.net + google. "redhat xx rpm" and far more simply installable.

Debian stable is what Redhat enterprise can only hope to become, but will never be, because they have priced themselves, slowly but surely, out of the market. Three things have happenned in the past year or two which will fundamentally alter things:

1. Debian sarge release with a new installer real soon now, so the stable version will not look so ancient, making it more attractive, and supporting 2.6 as an option (which redhat still doesn't), and with an installer that should reduce the major pain of the current installer down to minor grumbles.
   
2. KNOPPIX has made debian unstable for easy enough for anybody to try out and even install, so testdrives show that it ain't so bad
   
3. redhat's radical changes: discontinue free, re-continue as fedora, free as in beer, but controlled as in messed up KDE distribution has successfully rattled enough cages that folks are looking elsewhere and finding that debian "just works."
   

Within a year or two major ISV's will support debian (stable, at least), because the customers are going there.
And it ain't just me saying it and HP already does it from some telco's :

It is just the right answer. All that said, if your shop is committed to binary-ware, and you favourite bit-vendor won't support your chosen environment, you are toast. Do not go there.

Talk, cajole, encourage, convince, or switch vendor or plain drop the binary ware if you can afford to do it, but do not use the commercial software on an unsupported platform. That is the worst of both worlds: The free people don't use your package X so they can't help you, and the paid people go through their menus and hit "we don't support that, click!"

I felt at home with NetBSD
Nice and clean, and good docs.
Some info on Linux emulation on NetBSD

It is very likely that Sun, IBM and RedHat will reject Sender-ID as well. Here is a very interesting read on News Forge

The details here aren't as profound as I'd like but there is ample material there to thwart your arguemnt. Plus I don't have to type it all out.

According to this article SenderID in the agreed upon form is nothing new. Indeed it seems that MS has embeaced and extended someone else's IP and put their own claim to it.

Therefore, Apache maybe abandoning something that it needs not to abandon.

A few good articles on sender-ID controversy:

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,1761,a=134028 ,00.asp
http://www.circleid.com/article/730_0_1_0_C/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1639880,00.as p
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/01/1 555212
http://trends.newsforge.com/14/04/08/26/1326244.sh tml?tid=137

Also, here are the opinions of Eben Moglen of FSF and Larry Rosen of OSI:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg036 78.html

A few good articles on sender-ID controversy:

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,1761,a=134028 ,00.asp
http://www.circleid.com/article/730_0_1_0_C/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1639880,00.as p
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/01/1 555212
http://trends.newsforge.com/14/04/08/26/1326244.sh tml?tid=137

Also, here are the opinions of Eben Moglen of FSF and Larry Rosen of OSI:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg036 78.html

We will not cut corners on product excellence.

Right. That's why SP2 came out on time and with so few problems. Not only was it late, it came with new security problems.

I think Bill is just desperate to keep the press from noticing articles like this little tidbit at Newsforge.

As interesting some of the planned features are, they are still dancing around the most important issue: security and timely fixes.

Surely you can't be so naive as to let some FUD like a script utility distract you from the fact the security problems and perpetual scheduling delays!

(SCO-Microsoft connection)
Where is the source for this information?

Does this little lot help?

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.ht ml

http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/04/03/08/045725 9.shtml

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b05212003.h tm

Sorry to burst your fishy smelling bubble, but if SCO wins its case against IBM, they have already stated that BSD is next up.

If I'm not mistaken /. ran a previous story about him getting tossed from DefCon. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 8/03/1617215&tid=156&tid=172&tid=95&tid=21 8
The report from newsforge is under Hacktivism.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/08/02/1 426209
I swear this sounds like a guy whose site I used to work on. I saw someone had posted a code snippet from their supposed DoS tool. The code looks like their caliber, shoddy. They are nothing more than an army of spotty faced kids who grew up in suburban areas, and are pissed because mommy and daddy didn't buy them a pony for their 5th birthday.

If I do find it is the same guy, I will post the URL to the Slashdot community, and you guys can sound off on their forums about what you think of their politics.

"Would you be more likely or less likely to install Linux as a Server OS if you knew Linux has copied source code from SCO?"

The articles:

http://os.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=04/05/03/1520 209
http://www.libraryplanet.com/2004/05/lumixis
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA4060 08

are about a distro based on "Linux From Scratch" that was specificly created for public access terminal use in a library. It has been deployed and is loved by everyone, the public and library management included. I have not used it myself, I heard about it at a user's group meeting. You might want to contact the author and get a copy. ljsalazar(at)comcast.net The project website http://www.lumixtech.com/ seems to be down.

As Auger recently wrote in an article for Library Journal: "Our two Linux luminaries, Michael Ricksecker (network specialist) and Luis Salazar (network engineer), created a kernel and resulting user desktop that closely mimic not only the look and feel of a Windows desktop and browser but lack the unnecessary bells and whistles that come with a standard Windows installation."

Using LFS as a starting point, Luis and Mike were able to build a minimal Linux kernel that included only the functionality required by the "kiosk style" machines. They added the Gnome desktop environment, the Mozilla browser, and OpenOffice.org to complete the picture. They call the new distribution "Lumix."

Anywho, give that a try --

Article From Newsforge-
http://www.newsforge.com/os/04/05/03/1520209.shtml

LumixTech (link from article doesn't work...give this a try or google it)
http://www.lumixtech.com/

Good luck with your new library!

-thewldisntenuff

Sure. Since about march the Slony replication project has had its 1.0 release out. This replication project is used for a while by Afilias to run the .org and .info domains. [best quote from that one "but Oracle was not happy"]

I just wanted to say thanks to Fujitsu for helping pay for this

Fujitsu foots the bill for new PostgreSQL database features
Thursday July 01, 2004 (07:04 AM GMT)
...
Berkus described the new Fujitsu-formed features as follows:

* Tablespaces is a means of partitioning large amounts of data easily and efficiently on separate storage devices, a key requirement for maintaining PostgreSQL's performance on large databases in the hundreds of gigabytes, and terabyte range;
* Nested Transactions allows application developers a very granular level of control over database commits and rollbacks, which is particularly significant for maintaining data integrity and porting applications from other database platforms;
* Robust support for stored procedures in Java that exceeds the goals of the SQLJ specification in the ANSI SQL99 standard.

More recently, .org and .info domain registry company Afilias has sponsored developer Jan Wieck to work full time on developing a new, enterprise-class replication system for PostgreSQL called Slony-I, to be presented next month at OSCON in Portland, Ore.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/1 513218

I'm sorry to tell you... Microsoft will never release all source code, but also is looking foward to destroy linux.
IBM is the first BIG company that supports linux, but be carefull, it still holds the ownership of the patents.
HP memo forecasts MS patent attacks on free software
This was also published in Znet

It's time to take a release of the 2.6.x Linux kernel and get the CEOs of IBM,Sun,Novell,Redhat,Mandrake and any other organizations who which to join in, to distribute a copy of the source of the Linux kernel to each other and to Linus/OSDN for a token monetary amount. This would formally enact the terms of the GPL license, which effectively ensures that upstream distributers grant an implicit license to downstream recipients to use any intellectual property, patents or trade secrets the Linux kernel uses under the terms of the GPL.

Seems to me that people switch, are happy, and go back to their business. "Business has computers" isn't much of a story, the switch is.

--
Evan

Applying game theory to long term software industry market, for both open and proprietary vendors, based on software patents...

1) Small software developers are unlikely to benefit from the overall balance of payments from licensing of their own and other vendors software patent portfolios, since other software vendors are just as likely to hold other software patents that the developer uses in his own products.

2) Larger software vendors are unlikely to benefit from payments from licensing of their software patent portfolio, as per above small sofware developers plus the software vendor is likely to hold the lion's share of the sofware target market, profit from software patent licensing will be much smaller in proportion to the overall sales of the vendors own products.

3) Third party intellectual property "holding companies", that do not actively participate in selling actual software, are the only class of organization that can benefit from licensing of their software patent portfolios. In most cases these entities have a very tenuous relationship to the ongoing development of the software methords patented

See Patents bad but also pushing interesting trend

Timeline Inc has won a US Washington Court of Appeal judgment against Microsoft for the right to sue Microsoft's customers, and subsequently sued Cognos. On February 13, 2004, Cognos settled at cost to Cognos totaling $1.75 million

In a lot of ways you are better with GPL licensed techology , which effectively grants all downstream users the right to use the patents from upstream developers under the terms of the GPL .

Software Patent are inherently bad but are also pushing an interesting trend. Pushing vendors towards adopting the GPL-like licensing as a form of simpler form of cross licensing arrangement.

Timeline Inc has won a US Washington Court of Appeal judgment against Microsoft for the right to sue Microsoft's customers, and subsequently sued Cognos. On February 13, 2004, Cognos settled at cost to Cognos totaling $1.75 million

In a lot of ways you are better with GPL licensed techology , which effectively grants all downstream users the right to use the patents from upstream developers under the terms of the GPL .

Software Patent are inherently bad but are also pushing an interesting trend. Pushing vendors towards adopting the GPL-like licensing as a form of simpler form of cross licensing arrangement.

Something like this?

-John Le'Brecage

Caller ID licensing for software developers
"If you are a software developer and are interested in implementing this specification in software, please review the terms of the Caller ID for E-Mail Implementation License before you begin, as the patent license discusses the rights that Microsoft would grant you or your organization."

Eben Moglen on Microsoft's Caller ID Patent License
"Note, however, that a developer could specifically *disclaim* the Microsoft patent license, which--since it does not actually identify any patent claims being licensed--could be said to be a nullity in any event. Such a developer could legitimately distribute under GPL, which would arguably be the wiser course."

Bill Gates Is A Thief
"We believe that, totally bereft of their own ideas and lacking any in-depth understanding of the issues, Mr. Gates and company were absolutely desperate to appear relevant in the struggle against SPAM, if nothing else to deflect culpability and bad press for the unrelated, clumsy, and manifestly irresponsible security issues and quality failings in virtually every Microsoft product to date. In an odd twist of the same logic that two weeks ago had them beating up a 17-year-old over his website MikeRoweSoft.com (because it merely sounded like Gate's company site), they presumed FailSafe Designs would be too small and too timid to stop them from taking yet something else they wanted that wasn't theirs (as has been Microsoft's habit since inception). Had they merely asked, we would have considered selling or licensing our products, trademarks, patent rights, and other intellectual and real property, but Mr. Gates never stoops to common decency whenever any opportunity to bludgeon someone avails itself."

My suspicion is that we could see this start very soon, or hold off for up to three years while MS establishes its commercial licensing program. If they wait to get about 10,000 licensees in their commercial program, they will be able to show in court that they license the patents "reasonably" and that will make them more difficult to fight.

As of April, 2002, more web sites across all web servers use PHP than use Microsoft's Active Server Pages.

Switched to linux and mozilla getting rid of NT and windows machines!
NewsForge

[U]sability is a relatively new matter for us. How we react [ ] is similar [ ] to phenomena we didn't understand. Lightning was explained by Thor's Hammer, the plague was a punishment from God, and so forth. In our case, we replace "God's will" with "Companies", "Reports" and "Experts." We don't understand usability, so we push responsibility for it onto someone else.

- Frans Englich, Open source usability is a technical problem we can solve on our own

I have reached the conclusion [ ] limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...

Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>

... but what about GNU/Linux's use in the military? For example, a member of the Los Angelas LUG resigned over the use of Linux in the military.

Do we really want the government using open source? We really dont want to limit it, because that would be a limit on the freedom, but do we want it being used for evil? Perplexing!

See this leaked HP memo regarding Microsoft's strategy to kill Open Source with patents. We need to fix the patent system now.