Slashdot Mirror

Bogatyr writes "Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Briton Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990, says all Internet users should be licensed so surfers on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the road. " W3C has been working on such systems for years - unforgeable certificates which users must present to gain access to content, and which incidentally identify them uniquely and provide assorted marketing information. The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you.

Cave Newt writes "The Web3D Consortium just released the source code to Blaxxun's CC3D VRML browser, which Blaxxun kindly donated in order to seed the development of a fully conformant, completely open and preferably multi-platform VRML browser. Pretty darned cool. "

TuxDaddy writes "Jim Collas has resigned as president of Amiga-however no details are available yet. " Well, let the speculation machine run rampant-is Amiga serious? Is there anything happening with them?Update: 09/01 07:42 by H :Well, they've announced their new president as Tim Schmidt. Collas has left to "pursue personal interests".

Thanks to both danimal and Doc Technical for reviews of the latest and greatest O'Reilly book, Randy Jay Yarger, George Reese, and Tim King's MySQL and mSQL. An excellent book for those who are looking to do database development (and MySQL powers Slashdot!), click below for more details. MySQL & mSQL author Randy Jay Yarger, George Reese, and Tim King pages 506 publisher O'Reilly rating 8.5/10 reviewer Dan Weeks & DocTechnical ISBN summary A good introduction to the world of relational databases and an excellent reference for MySQLand mSQL. First Review: Doc Technical

This is certainly one of the more orthogonal books I've read of late. Besides the obvious axis of MySQL and mSQL, the book also covers the implementation of these databases on Unix, Windows 95 and Windows NT. And it covers a wide variety of programming languages, including perl, Python, PHP, Java, C, and C++.

While this is certainly a good book, in fact a very good book, this wide coverage means that the average reader may need to skip around a bit to get to the parts of the book they need. A Linux perl mSQL programmer will necessarily take a different path through the book then, say, a Windows NT mySQL database administrator.

Not that straying down the wrong path is always a bad thing. It was interesting to read about the quirky differences between different OS implementations.

"Windows 95 leaks about 200 bytes of main memory for each thread creation." [page 41]

"...[D]atabase and table names are case-sensitive under Unix and case-insensitive under Win32." [page 43]

The book is divided into three broad sections: "Getting Started with MySQL and mSQL", "Database Programming", and a final "Reference" section which spans fully half the book. O'Reilly's high standards for editing, layout, writing, and clarity are all evident throughout.

What I Liked Best For MySQL users, this book may appear to present a bit of a quandary. MySQL already comes with a 400+ page reference manual, and a quite nice one at that. But actually, the O'Reilly book covers much material the manual doesn't.

Chapter 2 covers relational database design, and serves as an excellent introduction for the uninitiated. Some college texts could learn a lesson on clarity from the authors' explanation of normal forms.

Chapter 6 has an interesting, short history of the development of SQL.

Chapter 7 describes some of the other free SQLs available, and also provides some insight into those features that MySQL/mSQL don't provide: things like stored procedures, triggers, transactions, and subselects. This chapter is useful for people trying to decide which SQL engine they need. If your sitting on the fence, trying to decide on MySQL/mSQL versus a commercial SQL offering, this chapter may help you decide.

The book's cover declares "Databases for Moderate-Sized Organizations & Web Sites", and the book delivers on this promise by including web-oriented sections on general CGI programming, Perl, and PHP.

The second half of the book provides a good reference to the MySQL/mSQL API's for several languages, as well as the MySQL/mSQL utilities, and a good reference for SQL itself. Most of this information is available elsewhere, and in more detail, but it's useful seeing the various language APIs presented side-by-side, particularly if you're not sure what language you might want to use. I've been contemplating Python programming for a while, and the simplicity of its MySQL API is certainly seductive.

What's Missing It's hard to find fault with the material included in the book, but I was surprised by some of the things that were left out.

There really is no ground-zero, simple mySQL/mSQL tutorial. For people beginning with a new SQL engine, it would be helpful to have a chapter that holds their hand, showing them how to create a database, then create a simple table, the insert records into the table, using the mysql utility. Tutorials are available for MySQL on the net (see www.mysql.com) and one is provided in the MySQL Reference Manual.

The book covers programming using a wide range of languages, but arguably one of the most popular languages, C, seems to get comparitively little coverage. There are only about six pages devoted to C programming, and one of those is a list of API functions. I would have welcomed more. [Admittedly, there is more on C in the book's Reference section, but this covers individual API calls, and doesn't provide any longer examples.]

There were a few rare cases in the book where I disagreed with the authors, or at least thought they needed to add a bit of additional amplification. On page 109, they state that:

"If you know that a lot of clients will be asking for the same summary information often... just create a new table containing that information and keep it up to date as the original table changes."

I have a bit of a nit to pick with this, as seven pages later they discuss the lack of a feature called triggers that would greatly simplify keeping a summary table in sync. Without a trigger, you'll have to devise your own method for keeping a summary table in step with the original table, which may be non-trivial depending on how often the original table changes and how often the summary table is accessed.

Summary This book tries to cover a lot of ground, and so it necessarily hits turf that some subset of readers won't care about.

For the seasoned MySQL programmer or database administrator, this book is a fine companion to the Reference Manual. With its clear introduction to SQL and relational database design, it also makes a good introduction to new SQL users in general.

Second Review - Dan Weeks

The Scenario There comes a time in every project when storing and retrieving data from flat files or proprietary formats (i.e., MS Excel) is no longer feasible. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) would be great, but Oracle, Sybase, and Informix can't be justified because of the cost. Along comes MySQL and mSQL, two of many freely available Database Management Systems. While neither of these DBMS's are as full featured and robust as their more mature brethren, they can definitely hold their own in the world of databases. For small and medium sized organizations and web sites either of these DBMS's can provide a sufficient level of functionality and flexibility to store and retrieve your data. What's Bad? The only shortfall I could find is the lack of references to other, more advanced books on the subject of database design and normalization (although that probably doesn't fit in with the publishers motives, but it would be nice). The book is well rounded and all of the authors are very knowledgeable and well written. What's Good? The first thing that struck me as absolutely wonderful about this book is the structure. By breaking the book into three sections the authors have allowed for many different database users to find this book valuable. Getting Started with MySQL and mSQL The first section, Getting Started with MySQL and mSQL has everything the novice needs to at least get one of the packages up and running so that they can experiment with a database system. The authors do a great job of making sure that the reader can skip sections if they don't pertain to them. Introductory topics like What is a Database? and History of MySQL are essential in making sure the subject matter is well rounded and accessible to everyone (especially to people like myself that did not take database classes at university). Later chapters explain and detail database design and normalization in a manner that is easy to understand so that the first databases you build won't suffer from repetition and data inconsistencies. The authors also do a good job of explaining SQL and specifically the variants that MySQL and mSQL use.

One of the high notes is the single chapter, Other Mid-Range Database Engines. Not only do the authors recognize that there are other database engines out there, they also point out what features MySQL and mSQL lack.

Making it Go The second section of the book, Database Programming, is a well written set of chapters that start off with the architecture of databases and client-server application and how they relate to data processing. The authors then quickly take you into the guts of interfacing with the database. They cover CGI, Perl, Python, PHP and other embedded HTML styles, C/C++, and Java. While I have only ever used Perl, Python, and C to interface to a database I can say that the chapters on the other API's seem to do just as good a job and at least allowed me to understand (if even in the most simple of terms) how those languages function in relation to your database engine of choice.

We all love our nutshell books, especially the XXX In A Nutshell series because they are great references. The foresight of the authors is incredibly prevalent in the third section, Reference. The authors actually took the time to make a ...In A Nutshell type of reference and then stick it into the book. Reference chapters that i have found invaluable so far are SQL (which includes separate sections for MySQL and mSQL's variations), and MySQL and mSQL System Variables. Other sections include C, PHP and Lite, Python, Perl, JDBC, and programs and utilities associated with MySQL and mSQL.

So What's In It For Me? If you are at all interested in database programming or you run a database at a small- to mid-sized organization or web site then this book is a must have. For those people that are in need of a little instruction on database design and normalization this book would be a good start. If you have been working with either MySQL or mSQL for a while then this book may be a bit basic for you, but the reference chapters will more than make up for the cost of the book.

Purchase this book at Amazon.com

Table of Contents

Preface
I. Getting Started with MySQL and mSQL
   1. Introduction to Relational Databases
   2. Database Design
   3. Installation
   4. MySQL
   5. mSQL
   6. SQL According to MySQL and mSQL
   7. Other Mid-Range Database Engines
II. Database Programming     121
   8. Database Application Architectures   9. CGI Programming
   10. Perl
   11. Python
   12. PHP and Other Support for Database-driven HTML
   13. C and C++
   14. Java and JDBC
III. Reference     229
   15. SQL Reference
   16. MySQL and mSQL System Variables
   17. MySQL and mSQL Programs and Utilities
   18. PHP and Lite Reference
   19. C Reference
   20. Python Reference
   21. Perl Reference
   22. JDBC Reference
Index

Scott Hutton writes "CNN is carrying a story that states that AOL is exploiting a buffer overflow in their own client in order to detect and lock out Microsoft AIM clients. That's the first time I've seen someone use a buffer overflow to 'enhance' security."

Sit back and get jiggy with tonights Quickies: First up, jamiemccarthy sent us a Magic 8-Ball that claims to be operated by Legos. And if you're into those remote control legos, Paddy noted that there is new stuff on the lego website. Todays stranges item comes from Chris Henesy who sent us official NASA procedure for Viking Raids. Michael Van Vertloo sent us linkage to a webcam from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depositoryso you conspiracy theorists can keep an eye on it. Bogatyr noted that there now is actually a website selling stuff from the matrix. No, not the minigun, but sunglasses and stuff. tj2sent us linkage to an interview where George Lucas blaims the internet for Jar Jar sucking so badly. Mike sent us a page that tracks Strange things sold on ebay. Finally, markhb sent us a Washington Post profile of Marc Andreeson where he talks about assorted things, and even plugs Slashdot as one of his favorite sites (thanks Marc!) And finally, to bookend this Fresh block of quickies, harb sent us lyrics to the classic (cough) Will Smith Song "Men in Black" for Linux geeks.

iceT writes "Jupiter Communications released a report that recommends that the Music Industry exploit MP3's rather than fight them. They also forcast that online digital sales will rise from 1.1% to 14% by 2003. Now, if the Music Industry will only listen." For those you not in the know, Jupiter is a bigwig research agency, and sponsers events like the annual Plug.In musical forum.

Havoc Pennington (the guy who does those weekly GNOME summaries, among other things) writes "I've just completed a book on GTK+/GNOME programming to be released under a free license. You can pre-order from Amazon now; it should be available in a couple months. The full announcement is on www.gnome.org. "

Greg Roelofs, author of PNG: The Definitive Guide, has written a feature on the PNG graphic format. The format has many technical advantages, yet it still isn't gaining acceptance. Personally, I just want a real alpha channel on web pages (well, and anti-aliased fonts, but lets cross one bridge at a time), Anyway, read what Greg has to say on the subject of PNG:

I hadn't intended to write anything up so soon, but lately there's been a lot of FUD and some general cluelessness about the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, so here's an update from somebody who knows a tiny bit about it.

First of all, PNG is certainly not dead, although it obviously has not taken the Widely Webbed World completely by storm (which, in the eyes of the esteemed Mr. Veen, amounts to the same thing). For better or for worse, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer pretty much define what counts as acceptable Web technology, and they only began supporting PNG natively in the autumn of 1997 (versions 4.04 and 4.0, respectively). As various Slashdotters have noted, neither one really supports PNG well yet, at least with respect to alpha transparency and gamma correction, but that's coming; let me return to that issue in a moment.

PNG has been making steady progress, however, particularly in non-Web applications. It has advanced from being a newsworthy ``extra'' to being an expected, standard component of image applications; in other words, a viewer or editor that ships without PNG support is considered deficient by both consumers and the trade press. That's a moderately subtle point--it doesn't necessarily leap right out at you and scream, PNG has arrived, dammit!, but it's nevertheless quite a significant milestone for any new technology. Mundane can be good. (By the way, I maintain the PNG home site and list known PNG-supporting applications of various persuasions on half a dozen pages; stop by if you're in need of something, and please let me know if I've missed any!)

But that's just one data point. Everybody's favorite technical publisher, O'Reilly and Associates, not only includes PNG chapters in a number of its books (including Web Design in a Nutshell and the soon-to-be-released Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software ), they also agreed to publish an entire 700-page book completely devoted to the Portable Network Graphics format: PNG: The Definitive Guide . It consists of around 300 pages of main text, 100 pages of program listings (both Unix/X and 32-bit Windows, under a BSDish license, freely downloadable soon), 250 pages of specifications, some fairly cool color figures, and assorted odds and ends; I happen to know because I wrote it. :-) (It just went into production on Monday, so it should hit the shelves in a few months, plug plug. I'll be updating the web page with dates and whatnot as soon as I find out myself.)

In addition, PNG has been published as an informational Internet RFC and a a W3C Recommendation (the very first one), and it's now wending its way through the slowly grinding gears of joint ISO/IEC standardization. That will all help ensure its longevity, but it's also fairly boring to most of you, I'm sure.

So getting back to the Web issue, let me briefly summarize PNG's basic capabilities:

• palette-based support (1, 2, 4, 8-bit), like GIF
• grayscale support (1, 2, 4, 8, 16-bit)
• truecolor support (24, 48-bit), like TIFF or (sort of) JPEG
• binary transparency, like GIF (except including grayscale and RGB modes, not just palette-based)
• alpha transparency (256 or 65536 levels of partial transparency), like TIFF
• alpha-palette transparency (that is, palette has RGBA entries, not just RGB), unlike anything else on the planet
• direct support for gamma correction and color correction
• lossless, unpatented compression
• 2D interlacing, somewhat like progressive JPEG
• no animation (but a closely related format called MNG)

The patent issue is largely history, except to shareware and freeware authors, for whom it's still quite real--Unisys lawyers continue their apparent crusade to kill all low-cost GIF-supporting software. What really matters to Web developers, however, is PNG's support for palette images (no, they don't all have to be really fat, 24-bit monsters); its support for alpha transparency even in palette images; its support for gamma and color correction; and the fact that its compression is lossless (which is why 24-bit PNG images are so fat, especially compared to lossy JPEG). In other words, for the same number of bytes as a binary-transparency GIF image, you can have a lovely alpha-palette PNG image that, thanks to gamma correction, will not look too light on Macs or too dark on PCs. The alpha support means it can be anti-aliased or drop-shadowed to look good against any background, not just a single, flat color. Note that MSIE 4.0 already supports gamma correction, and 5.0 is supposed to do full alpha transparency; we'll find out next month, I guess. Mozilla/Netscape 5.0 will also support both alpha and gamma, or else--I'm the nominal ``owner'' of Mozilla's PNG support, and now that the book is done, I intend to do some serious hacking. (Apologies for the 10-month delay!)

Since PNG pushes the envelope on a lot of image-related stuff--alpha transparency (no other Web formats), RGBA-palette images (no other format, period), gamma and color correction (almost no other formats), and even compression/filtering (it has a bunch of free parameters that one can tweak)--many of the current applications are somewhat behind in supporting some of the features. Be patient; things are steadily improving. I won't point fingers at any underperformers here, but I will note that the GIMP is quite strong in compression and 32-bit RGBA and should have fully working gamma code in the next release after 1.0.2; and Fireworks 1.0 is already partway there with RGBA-palette support and should be completely spiffy by version 2.1 or 3.0. (I didn't quite get my feedback in on time for it to affect the 2.0 release. If only they'd had a Linux version to try...)

I'm hopeful the book will help many of the others--it includes a lot of material aimed at helping programmers to improve their code, but also a lot of stuff to help users avoid problems and make the best of what options they've got. And if I have time while I'm working on Mozilla, I plan to release a free, automatic 32-bit to 8-bit (RGBA to RGBA-palette) converter to handle what seems to be the hardest PNG feature to support. Such conversion literally gives you a factor-of-four reduction in file size with essentially no visible loss (no more than normal RGB-to-palette conversion with nice dithering, anyway).

So...that, in a largish nutshell, is the past, present and future status of PNG. As for new competition, well, let's just say that there have been lots and lots and lots of fantastically improved, incredibly stupendous image formats that have come and gone over the years; ``WI'' is merely the latest, and SVG and JPEG2000/JPEG-LS are right around the corner. Anybody remember Johnson-Grace/AOL's ART format? How about Iterated Systems' fractal format (FIF)? Or some of the quadtree-based ones, or SPIHT, or FlashPix, or JPiG, or CMP, or ePIC, or HARC-C? Heck, even JPEG with arithmetic compression is considerably better than standard DCT-Huffman JPEG, but does anybody actually use it? No. Proprietary standards are simply not tolerated very well on the Web. Even free, open standards like PNG (with free, open-source, non-GPL'd reference libraries) have a huge barrier to climb. It took ``standard'' JPEG four years to catch on; it's taken PNG four years to catch on (yes, it's really been that long, and 2.5 years since the W3C Recommendation); and, barring largish miracles--e.g., Netscape and Microsoft cooperating--it will take any other new image format just as long.

There you have it. There's lots more info on the web site, and there are a couple of mailing lists for folks who really want to get gnarly with PNG. Oh, and please buy the book. ;-)

peter royal writes "MegaCar is a high-class Brabus 5.8 outfitted with a 153kbit/s wireless internet connection. It is 16 9.6kbit/s GSM modems in parallel, with a Linux box acting at the router." Just when you thought you'd seen everything.

Jeff Wheeler writes "Yet Another Perl Conference is a cheap, rogue perl conference at Carnegie Mellon University on June 24 - 25. Speakers will include Chris Nador, Kevin Lenzo, Jonathan Chafee, Mark-Jason Dominus, Randal Schwartz, and, of course, Larry Wall. YAPC should cost less than 100$US. "

MidnightRider writes "Monday's The Dallas Morning News has a front page article about GNOME and OSS. " Lots of stuff about Miguel. Brace yourself: We're gonna be smothered with mainstream Linux articles this week.

Glen Raphael submitted this odd question a while ago: "Suppose I have a test tool running under Linux in an environment where the power is expected to die often and for long periods of time without any warning (and buying a UPS isn't an option). How can I make it safe to just turn off the power to the PC running Linux without properly shutting down?" So what is one to do when they want to run a Linux box and they can't trust their outlet? Glen continues...
"It's okay for fsck to run at startup but I want to minimize the damage it has to repair and I want to entirely avoid the need to boot as root in order to repair major damage. What can I do to accomplish that goal? Performance is not an issue. I thought of doing a "sync" every minute or so, but that seems silly. Is it possible to turn off disk caching instead and if so how do I do that? What else can or should I do in software to ensure that you can turn off the Linux machine by hitting the power switch or cutting power to the building and not expect major repairs when the power comes back up?

(Side note: If this problem can't be solved, the favored alternative is to give up on Linux and rewrite the tool using DOS. Right now I'm using RedHat 5.1 or 5.2 on a generic Pentium notebook.) "

Kragen Sitaker has written a brutal reply to the story Sengan posted yesterday on the The Open Source Acid Test. It goes down and point by point shows the factual errors and fud in the story. It pleases me greatly to post this feature. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader Kragen Sitaker

I read Ted Lewis's article, _The Open Source Acid Test_, on your web pages.

I was appalled that an organ of a prestigious international society like the IEEE would publish such error-riddled, poorly-researched, deliberately deceptive nonsense. It's as if the _New England Journal of Medicine_ had published a case study of a zombie animated by voodoo!

The author did not cite sources for any of his dubious statistics, and they are therefore hard to disprove. Given the remarkable lack of factual accuracy in the article, I doubt that they have any basis in fact.

To begin with the most obvious errors:

1. Linus Torvalds's name is not Linus Torvold.
2. Applix, Tower Technology, and NewMonics do not sell open-source software.
3. There is no such company as "Walnut Creek Stackware". www.cdrom.com belongs to Walnut Creek CDROM. There is no such company as "Tower Tech JVM". www.twr.com belongs to Tower Technology, which sells a (non-open-source) JVM. There is no such web site as www.debian.com.
4. www.python.org is operated by the Python Software Association, not CNRI, although it is currently hosted on CNRI's network.
5. Several of the "commercial enterprises" listed in Table 1 are not commercial enterprises at all. www.hungry.com, www.python.org, and www.debian.org are all operated by nonprofit organizations. The Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which was incorrectly listed as operating www.python.org, is actually a not-for-profit research organization.
6. It is absurd to say that Unix was the foundation for Hewlett-Packard and IBM, as Lewis does in his introductory paragraph. Both companies had been established for more than thirty years when the first line of Unix was written.
7. On page 126, Lewis claims that the open-source community admits that its organizational structure is weak. The evidence he adduces is a quote from a document published on www.opensource.org. What he doesn't tell you is that the document is *a leaked internal Microsoft memo*. Unless Lewis missed the 115 references to Microsoft in this document and also failed to read the introductory paragraphs, the only reasonable conclusion is that he is being deliberately deceptive.
8. On page 125, Lewis claims that "Currently, Linux's installed base numbers 7.5 million". As usual, he cites no source. However, the most widely-cited source for such figures is Robert Young's paper, Sizing the Linux Market eight different data sources to obtain an estimate of between five and ten million Linux users. However, this paper has a date of March 1998. If Linux's growth had continued to double yearly in 1998, as it did from roughly 1993 to 1998, the number of Linux users would be between ten and twenty million.
9. On page 128, Lewis says, "Windows NT market share smothers all Unix dialects combined". According to International Data Corporation's Server Operating Environment report, Unix and Linux together had 34.6% of the server market in 1998, while Windows NT had 36%. See more information. The actual number of server Linux shipments IDC tallied in 1998 was only three-quarters of a million; that suggests that if you include people installing multiple servers from the same CD and installing from Internet downloads, you would find that Linux's server market share is much greater than Windows NT's.
10. Lewis remarks, "With few exceptions, open source software has never crossed the chasm into the mainstream without first becoming a commercial product sold by a commercial enterprise." Does he think that Linux is not a commercial product sold by commercial enterprises? If not, there are literally dozens of "exceptions" to this statement -- Perl, Apache, sendmail, BIND, Linux, Tcl/Tk, Berkeley DB, Samba, the X Window system, FORTH, GNU Emacs, and trn, for example. Many of these became popular before they were commercially sold at all.
11. Lewis misstates the business case for Linux and "its open source software cousins". According to Eric Raymond -- whom Lewis quotes extensively elsewhere in this article -- a much more compelling business case is founded on the better quality of the software, choice of suppliers, choice of support and maintenance, freedom from legal exposure and license tracking. More details are available at opensource.org/for-buyers.html.

These minor factual errors, so far, merely indicate that the author knows very little about the topic he writes about and is deliberately trying to mislead his readers; they do not directly undermine his conclusions. However, as I shall show, each of his supporting arguments consist of incorrect facts and lead to faulty conclusions.

One of the author's major contentions is that as Open Source software adds more features and becomes more comparable to proprietary software, it will lose many of its advantages. He cites as examples Linux's supposed lack of video card support, wireless LAN support, and "a good selection of productivity software."; he claims that Unix contains 10 million lines of code, while Linux contains only 1.5 million. On page 126, he says, "Maintenance and support grow more complex, and costs increase due to a scarcity of talented programmers. Success leads to features, and feature creep leads to bloated software."

With regard to video card support, it is true that the Linux kernel does not have video card support in it. That facility is provided by video drivers in other software; nearly all graphical software available for Linux uses X11 for access to those video drivers. Open-source X11 drivers for most video cards are available from www.xfree86.org; the list of supported cards there currently lists 555 different kinds of video cards, many of which include numerous individual models.

For those few cards for which XFree86 support is not available, proprietary X11 drivers are available from Xi Graphics and Metro-Link.

With XFree86, Linux's video card support is better than either Windows 98 or Windows NT, and considerably more extensive than any Unix that does not use XFree86.

To claim that Linux lacks video card support is merely laughable.

With regard to wireless LAN support, it is true that many of the recent wireless LAN products do not currently have support in Linux. However, Linux has had support for packet-radio wireless networking and several kinds of LANs for years, and has supported several wireless LAN products since at least late 1997, including most of the most popular ones:

Lucent Wavelan
DEC RoamAbout DS
Lucent Wavelan IEEE
Netwave Airsurfer
Xircom Netwave
Proxim RangeLan2
Proxim Symphony
DEC RoamAbout FH
Aironet ARLAN
Raytheon Raylink
BreezeCom BreezeNet

This information is readily available on the Web in the Linux Wireless LAN Howto.

With regard to productivity software, there are several office suites available for Linux, and there have been for several years. ApplixWare and StarOffice are the two most common.

With regard to the size of Linux: first, among the utilities tested in the failure-rate study (the latest report on which is entitled "Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of Unix Utilities and Services". the quote used on page 125 appears to be from the original paper, which I cannot find on the Web) are the standard set of Unix utilities, awk, grep, wc, and so forth. These utilities have a standard set of functionality common across all Unix systems, except that the GNU utilities tend to have a great deal of extra functionality included. If the GNU utilities really are only one-sixth the size of the corresponding utilities on a Unix system, yet provide much more functionality, and still have one-third to one-sixth of the failure rate, that is not an indictment of the defect rate of free software, but rather a vindication of it -- which is why this study is linked to from the Free Software Foundation's Web pages. The study is unfairly biased in favor of less-featureful proprietary software, and that software still came out way behind.

(From my own experience, I know that frequently, the best workaround for a bug in a Unix utility is to install the GNU version.)

Lewis's claim that this represents "a single-point estimate of defect rate" is incorrect. The paper includes detailed results of the tests on 82 different utilities, along with aggregate statistics by operating system. 63 of these utilities were available either from GNU or from Linux, and were tested in this study.

With regard to the lines-of-code figure: it is not easy to measure the number of lines of code that constitute "Linux", because it is not easy to define what constitutes "Linux" -- or, for that matter, "Unix" either.

If we mean just the kernel, this site has some figures for the sizes of several OS kernels in 1994. SunOS 5.2's kernel is listed as containing 680,000 lines of code, while SunOS 5.0's kernel is listed as containing 560,000 lines of code. If the rate of increase per version remained constant (doubtful, because 5.0 and 5.1 weren't really finished products) then the latest SunOS (the one that's the kernel of just-released Solaris 7) would contain 1,280,000 lines of code.

By comparison, the source code of the 2.2.1 Linux kernel totals 1,676,155 lines of code, including comments and blank lines, counting only .c, .h, and .S (assembly) files.

The Linux project's source code has already reached a level where we would "expect Linux defect densities to get worse". They haven't.

On page 125, Lewis cites Apache as an example of support diminishing when "the hype wears off", saying "it is currently supported by fewer than 20 core members" -- implying that the "cast of thousands" is a thing of the past. The truth is that the core Apache team has never been larger than 20 people, and they *still* receive contributions from many people outside the group. He also says that "Apache is losing the performance battle against Microsoft's IIS." But Apache has never been intended to be the fastest HTTP server around -- it's already more than fast enough to saturate a T1 when running on a puny machine, so its developers have been concentrating on things like adding more features and making it more reliable.

On page 128, Lewis says, "The concept of free software is a frequently practiced strategy of the weak". While free-as-in-price giveaways are common -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer strategy is a perfect example -- they are not related to open-source software, and their patterns of success and failure have little relevance for us here.

Kragen Sitaker has written a brutal reply to the story Sengan posted yesterday on the The Open Source Acid Test. It goes down and point by point shows the factual errors and fud in the story. It pleases me greatly to post this feature. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader Kragen Sitaker

I read Ted Lewis's article, _The Open Source Acid Test_, on your web pages.

I was appalled that an organ of a prestigious international society like the IEEE would publish such error-riddled, poorly-researched, deliberately deceptive nonsense. It's as if the _New England Journal of Medicine_ had published a case study of a zombie animated by voodoo!

The author did not cite sources for any of his dubious statistics, and they are therefore hard to disprove. Given the remarkable lack of factual accuracy in the article, I doubt that they have any basis in fact.

To begin with the most obvious errors:

1. Linus Torvalds's name is not Linus Torvold.
2. Applix, Tower Technology, and NewMonics do not sell open-source software.
3. There is no such company as "Walnut Creek Stackware". www.cdrom.com belongs to Walnut Creek CDROM. There is no such company as "Tower Tech JVM". www.twr.com belongs to Tower Technology, which sells a (non-open-source) JVM. There is no such web site as www.debian.com.
4. www.python.org is operated by the Python Software Association, not CNRI, although it is currently hosted on CNRI's network.
5. Several of the "commercial enterprises" listed in Table 1 are not commercial enterprises at all. www.hungry.com, www.python.org, and www.debian.org are all operated by nonprofit organizations. The Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which was incorrectly listed as operating www.python.org, is actually a not-for-profit research organization.
6. It is absurd to say that Unix was the foundation for Hewlett-Packard and IBM, as Lewis does in his introductory paragraph. Both companies had been established for more than thirty years when the first line of Unix was written.
7. On page 126, Lewis claims that the open-source community admits that its organizational structure is weak. The evidence he adduces is a quote from a document published on www.opensource.org. What he doesn't tell you is that the document is *a leaked internal Microsoft memo*. Unless Lewis missed the 115 references to Microsoft in this document and also failed to read the introductory paragraphs, the only reasonable conclusion is that he is being deliberately deceptive.
8. On page 125, Lewis claims that "Currently, Linux's installed base numbers 7.5 million". As usual, he cites no source. However, the most widely-cited source for such figures is Robert Young's paper, Sizing the Linux Market eight different data sources to obtain an estimate of between five and ten million Linux users. However, this paper has a date of March 1998. If Linux's growth had continued to double yearly in 1998, as it did from roughly 1993 to 1998, the number of Linux users would be between ten and twenty million.
9. On page 128, Lewis says, "Windows NT market share smothers all Unix dialects combined". According to International Data Corporation's Server Operating Environment report, Unix and Linux together had 34.6% of the server market in 1998, while Windows NT had 36%. See more information. The actual number of server Linux shipments IDC tallied in 1998 was only three-quarters of a million; that suggests that if you include people installing multiple servers from the same CD and installing from Internet downloads, you would find that Linux's server market share is much greater than Windows NT's.
10. Lewis remarks, "With few exceptions, open source software has never crossed the chasm into the mainstream without first becoming a commercial product sold by a commercial enterprise." Does he think that Linux is not a commercial product sold by commercial enterprises? If not, there are literally dozens of "exceptions" to this statement -- Perl, Apache, sendmail, BIND, Linux, Tcl/Tk, Berkeley DB, Samba, the X Window system, FORTH, GNU Emacs, and trn, for example. Many of these became popular before they were commercially sold at all.
11. Lewis misstates the business case for Linux and "its open source software cousins". According to Eric Raymond -- whom Lewis quotes extensively elsewhere in this article -- a much more compelling business case is founded on the better quality of the software, choice of suppliers, choice of support and maintenance, freedom from legal exposure and license tracking. More details are available at opensource.org/for-buyers.html.

These minor factual errors, so far, merely indicate that the author knows very little about the topic he writes about and is deliberately trying to mislead his readers; they do not directly undermine his conclusions. However, as I shall show, each of his supporting arguments consist of incorrect facts and lead to faulty conclusions.

One of the author's major contentions is that as Open Source software adds more features and becomes more comparable to proprietary software, it will lose many of its advantages. He cites as examples Linux's supposed lack of video card support, wireless LAN support, and "a good selection of productivity software."; he claims that Unix contains 10 million lines of code, while Linux contains only 1.5 million. On page 126, he says, "Maintenance and support grow more complex, and costs increase due to a scarcity of talented programmers. Success leads to features, and feature creep leads to bloated software."

With regard to video card support, it is true that the Linux kernel does not have video card support in it. That facility is provided by video drivers in other software; nearly all graphical software available for Linux uses X11 for access to those video drivers. Open-source X11 drivers for most video cards are available from www.xfree86.org; the list of supported cards there currently lists 555 different kinds of video cards, many of which include numerous individual models.

For those few cards for which XFree86 support is not available, proprietary X11 drivers are available from Xi Graphics and Metro-Link.

With XFree86, Linux's video card support is better than either Windows 98 or Windows NT, and considerably more extensive than any Unix that does not use XFree86.

To claim that Linux lacks video card support is merely laughable.

With regard to wireless LAN support, it is true that many of the recent wireless LAN products do not currently have support in Linux. However, Linux has had support for packet-radio wireless networking and several kinds of LANs for years, and has supported several wireless LAN products since at least late 1997, including most of the most popular ones:

Lucent Wavelan
DEC RoamAbout DS
Lucent Wavelan IEEE
Netwave Airsurfer
Xircom Netwave
Proxim RangeLan2
Proxim Symphony
DEC RoamAbout FH
Aironet ARLAN
Raytheon Raylink
BreezeCom BreezeNet

This information is readily available on the Web in the Linux Wireless LAN Howto.

With regard to productivity software, there are several office suites available for Linux, and there have been for several years. ApplixWare and StarOffice are the two most common.

With regard to the size of Linux: first, among the utilities tested in the failure-rate study (the latest report on which is entitled "Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of Unix Utilities and Services". the quote used on page 125 appears to be from the original paper, which I cannot find on the Web) are the standard set of Unix utilities, awk, grep, wc, and so forth. These utilities have a standard set of functionality common across all Unix systems, except that the GNU utilities tend to have a great deal of extra functionality included. If the GNU utilities really are only one-sixth the size of the corresponding utilities on a Unix system, yet provide much more functionality, and still have one-third to one-sixth of the failure rate, that is not an indictment of the defect rate of free software, but rather a vindication of it -- which is why this study is linked to from the Free Software Foundation's Web pages. The study is unfairly biased in favor of less-featureful proprietary software, and that software still came out way behind.

(From my own experience, I know that frequently, the best workaround for a bug in a Unix utility is to install the GNU version.)

Lewis's claim that this represents "a single-point estimate of defect rate" is incorrect. The paper includes detailed results of the tests on 82 different utilities, along with aggregate statistics by operating system. 63 of these utilities were available either from GNU or from Linux, and were tested in this study.

With regard to the lines-of-code figure: it is not easy to measure the number of lines of code that constitute "Linux", because it is not easy to define what constitutes "Linux" -- or, for that matter, "Unix" either.

If we mean just the kernel, this site has some figures for the sizes of several OS kernels in 1994. SunOS 5.2's kernel is listed as containing 680,000 lines of code, while SunOS 5.0's kernel is listed as containing 560,000 lines of code. If the rate of increase per version remained constant (doubtful, because 5.0 and 5.1 weren't really finished products) then the latest SunOS (the one that's the kernel of just-released Solaris 7) would contain 1,280,000 lines of code.

By comparison, the source code of the 2.2.1 Linux kernel totals 1,676,155 lines of code, including comments and blank lines, counting only .c, .h, and .S (assembly) files.

The Linux project's source code has already reached a level where we would "expect Linux defect densities to get worse". They haven't.

On page 125, Lewis cites Apache as an example of support diminishing when "the hype wears off", saying "it is currently supported by fewer than 20 core members" -- implying that the "cast of thousands" is a thing of the past. The truth is that the core Apache team has never been larger than 20 people, and they *still* receive contributions from many people outside the group. He also says that "Apache is losing the performance battle against Microsoft's IIS." But Apache has never been intended to be the fastest HTTP server around -- it's already more than fast enough to saturate a T1 when running on a puny machine, so its developers have been concentrating on things like adding more features and making it more reliable.

On page 128, Lewis says, "The concept of free software is a frequently practiced strategy of the weak". While free-as-in-price giveaways are common -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer strategy is a perfect example -- they are not related to open-source software, and their patterns of success and failure have little relevance for us here.

Jim Thompson wrote in with a feature regarding funding Open Source projects. His proposal is to create some sort of agency that will route money where it goes, but more importantly, allow funds to be pooled, but still go where the donator wants them to go. Hit the link and read... The following was written by Slashdot reader Jim Thompson

I'm writing you with an idea. Perhaps this has been thought of before; if so, I'd like to be pointed to the originator to learn more. However, I've been following the open-source movement under its various guises for many years now, and I've not heard of anything similar (if it exists, it needs to be better advertised). Maybe it's a bad idea, in which case you'll no doubt inform me so, and quickly. But I think it's a good idea.

What I'm wondering is whether there is an established mechanism for donating money to open-source projects. I don't mean simply that I want to throw money at any random project, because I know I could always mail my cash to Richard Stallman for the GNU project. What I mean is, if I know of some specific project I want to support, something that doesn't fall under RMS's aegis, is there some established agency or foundation to which I can donate money? Someplace that will both ensure that my money is either used for its intended purpose, or returned to me?

If such an agency doesn't exist, I think it's high time somebody started one.

Many open-source projects get along fine simply with the time and equipment of their authors, which usually means spare time and a home PC. Other projects need special equipment or sponsorship. If you go to Freshmeat and read the home pages of the active projects, many openly request donations of money and/or equipment. Just the other day, I visited the home page of BurnIT, a CD-Recorder project and read that its author's CD-R had broken. The author would continue writing code, but couldn't test it directly. Anyone wanting to donate a CD-R would, the author noted, be welcome to do so.

More recently I read an interview with Dag Brattli, the man behind the Linux/IR project to bring support for IrDA to linux. In the interview Mr. Brattli mentioned that he would like his project to be a member of the IrDA standards organization, so he could have access to its documentation, name, and other benefits. But he couldn't afford the fifteen hundred dollar membership fee.

Upon reading this I remember thinking that $1500 is a paltry sum compared to the vast resources of those who follow, use, and benefit from open-source projects. This is the economic parallel to the principle that, "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". With enough wallets, all costs are trivial.

Now, I am not a wealthy man; I have a wife, two daughters, and a mortgage, so I can't afford to buy the guy a $1500 IrDA membership by myself. But I could easily afford to donate, say, $100 toward the membership. And I would gladly do so provided that fourteen other people could be found to do the same. But here's the rub: if those fourteen others can not be found, or the project folds before they are, I expect to have my C-note returned to me. I want my money used for the intended purpose or returned.

So what? That's my problem, right? If I want to ensure that my money is well-used, then I should e-mail the guy, get to know him, build some confidence and then, *maybe*, I send the money.

But maybe it's not just my problem. What about those fourteen others who might also want to donate $100: are they also expected to go through their own evaluation of the project author and whether he's trustworthy? Maybe fourteen other people aren't willing to go through that process. Maybe the Linux/IR project never gets its $1500 because fifteen people can't be found who are willing to send their money to somebody they've never heard of.

Maybe it's more general than than. Maybe there are other projects that lose donors for the same reason. Maybe it's more than just my problem.

What I want to propose is that the open-source movement needs its own fundraising arm. Something like a United Way for geeks: an escrow agency that will collect money from people like me and distribute it to projects in need of support.

This agency will provide donors like me and J. Random Benefactor with some peace of mind that our money is being used for its intended purpose. There are several ways the agency could do this. For example, to raise the $1500 for the Linux/IR project, the agency will take my $100 and hold it in escrow. It will stay there until either the remaining $1400 is raised, or some predefined period of time has passed. At that time my money will be returned (or, at my option, used for some other deserving project).

Of course, even if Linux/IR gets its IrDA membership, that's no guarantee that the project will succeed. I'm not expecting an escrow agency to attempt to provide such a guarantee. The agency would have to provide such "caveat emptors" to each its donors.

Will the existence of an escrow agency increase donations to open-source projects? There's probably no way to know for sure because no one's keeping statistics on such things, but I believe an agency *would* increase donations. I believe that people are far more likely to send money to an established, trusted agency than to send money to some random person in the Internet.

The key words there are "establish, trusted". How does a new agency become instantly established and trusted, especially in such a new and dynamic area as open-source software? One way would be to build such an agency on a reputation that's already been established.

Opensource.org has such a reputation. So does Red Hat Software. So does O'Reilly and Associates. A few people on the 'net have their own individual reputations; Eric S. Raymond comes first to mind. I believe that some such organizations or people will have to sponsor or collaborate on a fund-raising/escrow agency for it to succeed.

I could ramble on about the additional benefits an escrow agency could provide to open-source projects, but I want to leave the focus on what I believe to be the main benefit of such an agency: to promote donations to open-source projects by increasing the degree of trust donors feel for the effectiveness of their donations. That benefit alone justifies the establishment of an escrow agency.

So there you have it. If it Loses, shoot it down.

Finally, to put my money where my mouth is, I will write a check for $100 the instant I learn of someone willing to escrow my money and collect the other $1400 for Linux/IR. It doesn't even have to be a formally established agency -- if ESR, or Red Hat, O'Reilly, or OpenSource.org wants to "alpha test" the idea by taking collections for Linux/IR, *and* is willing to actively promote the fund-raising, I will send my $100 check to them.

A couple of other notes: first, I want to stress that none of the above discussion of Dag Brattli and the Linux/IR project is meant in any way to impugn Mr. Battli's reputation. I'm sure he's a nice and trustworthy young man; I simply chose him as an example.

Second, although I have a small amount of money to donate, I have no time to donate. Even the short time I've taken to write this note is time I should have spent working on my Real Job. I will leave it to the leaders of the open-source movement to implement this idea, if it is worthy. But I will support it with my dollars.

Thanks for your time.
Jim Thompson

References:

Interview with Dag Brattli
BurnIT news

Jim Thompson wrote in with a feature regarding funding Open Source projects. His proposal is to create some sort of agency that will route money where it goes, but more importantly, allow funds to be pooled, but still go where the donator wants them to go. Hit the link and read... The following was written by Slashdot reader Jim Thompson

I'm writing you with an idea. Perhaps this has been thought of before; if so, I'd like to be pointed to the originator to learn more. However, I've been following the open-source movement under its various guises for many years now, and I've not heard of anything similar (if it exists, it needs to be better advertised). Maybe it's a bad idea, in which case you'll no doubt inform me so, and quickly. But I think it's a good idea.

What I'm wondering is whether there is an established mechanism for donating money to open-source projects. I don't mean simply that I want to throw money at any random project, because I know I could always mail my cash to Richard Stallman for the GNU project. What I mean is, if I know of some specific project I want to support, something that doesn't fall under RMS's aegis, is there some established agency or foundation to which I can donate money? Someplace that will both ensure that my money is either used for its intended purpose, or returned to me?

If such an agency doesn't exist, I think it's high time somebody started one.

Many open-source projects get along fine simply with the time and equipment of their authors, which usually means spare time and a home PC. Other projects need special equipment or sponsorship. If you go to Freshmeat and read the home pages of the active projects, many openly request donations of money and/or equipment. Just the other day, I visited the home page of BurnIT, a CD-Recorder project and read that its author's CD-R had broken. The author would continue writing code, but couldn't test it directly. Anyone wanting to donate a CD-R would, the author noted, be welcome to do so.

More recently I read an interview with Dag Brattli, the man behind the Linux/IR project to bring support for IrDA to linux. In the interview Mr. Brattli mentioned that he would like his project to be a member of the IrDA standards organization, so he could have access to its documentation, name, and other benefits. But he couldn't afford the fifteen hundred dollar membership fee.

Upon reading this I remember thinking that $1500 is a paltry sum compared to the vast resources of those who follow, use, and benefit from open-source projects. This is the economic parallel to the principle that, "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". With enough wallets, all costs are trivial.

Now, I am not a wealthy man; I have a wife, two daughters, and a mortgage, so I can't afford to buy the guy a $1500 IrDA membership by myself. But I could easily afford to donate, say, $100 toward the membership. And I would gladly do so provided that fourteen other people could be found to do the same. But here's the rub: if those fourteen others can not be found, or the project folds before they are, I expect to have my C-note returned to me. I want my money used for the intended purpose or returned.

So what? That's my problem, right? If I want to ensure that my money is well-used, then I should e-mail the guy, get to know him, build some confidence and then, *maybe*, I send the money.

But maybe it's not just my problem. What about those fourteen others who might also want to donate $100: are they also expected to go through their own evaluation of the project author and whether he's trustworthy? Maybe fourteen other people aren't willing to go through that process. Maybe the Linux/IR project never gets its $1500 because fifteen people can't be found who are willing to send their money to somebody they've never heard of.

Maybe it's more general than than. Maybe there are other projects that lose donors for the same reason. Maybe it's more than just my problem.

What I want to propose is that the open-source movement needs its own fundraising arm. Something like a United Way for geeks: an escrow agency that will collect money from people like me and distribute it to projects in need of support.

This agency will provide donors like me and J. Random Benefactor with some peace of mind that our money is being used for its intended purpose. There are several ways the agency could do this. For example, to raise the $1500 for the Linux/IR project, the agency will take my $100 and hold it in escrow. It will stay there until either the remaining $1400 is raised, or some predefined period of time has passed. At that time my money will be returned (or, at my option, used for some other deserving project).

Of course, even if Linux/IR gets its IrDA membership, that's no guarantee that the project will succeed. I'm not expecting an escrow agency to attempt to provide such a guarantee. The agency would have to provide such "caveat emptors" to each its donors.

Will the existence of an escrow agency increase donations to open-source projects? There's probably no way to know for sure because no one's keeping statistics on such things, but I believe an agency *would* increase donations. I believe that people are far more likely to send money to an established, trusted agency than to send money to some random person in the Internet.

The key words there are "establish, trusted". How does a new agency become instantly established and trusted, especially in such a new and dynamic area as open-source software? One way would be to build such an agency on a reputation that's already been established.

Opensource.org has such a reputation. So does Red Hat Software. So does O'Reilly and Associates. A few people on the 'net have their own individual reputations; Eric S. Raymond comes first to mind. I believe that some such organizations or people will have to sponsor or collaborate on a fund-raising/escrow agency for it to succeed.

I could ramble on about the additional benefits an escrow agency could provide to open-source projects, but I want to leave the focus on what I believe to be the main benefit of such an agency: to promote donations to open-source projects by increasing the degree of trust donors feel for the effectiveness of their donations. That benefit alone justifies the establishment of an escrow agency.

So there you have it. If it Loses, shoot it down.

Finally, to put my money where my mouth is, I will write a check for $100 the instant I learn of someone willing to escrow my money and collect the other $1400 for Linux/IR. It doesn't even have to be a formally established agency -- if ESR, or Red Hat, O'Reilly, or OpenSource.org wants to "alpha test" the idea by taking collections for Linux/IR, *and* is willing to actively promote the fund-raising, I will send my $100 check to them.

A couple of other notes: first, I want to stress that none of the above discussion of Dag Brattli and the Linux/IR project is meant in any way to impugn Mr. Battli's reputation. I'm sure he's a nice and trustworthy young man; I simply chose him as an example.

Second, although I have a small amount of money to donate, I have no time to donate. Even the short time I've taken to write this note is time I should have spent working on my Real Job. I will leave it to the leaders of the open-source movement to implement this idea, if it is worthy. But I will support it with my dollars.

Thanks for your time.
Jim Thompson

References:

Interview with Dag Brattli
BurnIT news

ChiChiCuervo asks: "I've been wrestling with Sendmail for the past few months because it's configuration system is a nightmare. So I was wondering what the differences between/benefits of each (sendmail and qmail) mailer were, and what everyone thinks of each."

Scott Hutton writes "Yahoo has a Reuters article about how a man crashed his car when fifty newly-purchased pagers all went off at once. It's all marketing's fault, too... " See? that is why you shouldn't carry 50 beepers.

Greg Roelofs writes "Graphics developers (yo, GIMP folks!) will be mildly amused to know that the PNG Development Group has released version 1.1 of the Portable Network Graphics specification. It includes a significantly rewritten section on gamma correction, a couple of new chunks for color correction, and some little stuff relating to suggested palettes, alpha-channel processing, etc. A complete pseudo-context-diff is available. Note also that ISO/IEC standardization is underway, and the PNG home page has even been spiffed up a tiny bit. Whoa. "

Bill McGonigle writes "Dave Caulkins wants to fire ICBMs, slated for destruction, into the atmosphere over major cities and create spectacular fireworks shows for the year 2000 new-year's celebration. Brilliant. " God this is disturbing. But I'd still like to see it.

Terrence W. Zellers writes "TcX's MySQL has won cnet's best affordable database award. " Now if I could just get it to stop leaking we'd be much more stable over here. But I dig mysql anyway.

Nick Barnes writes "Details of the next generation of desktop Macs, codenamed Yosemite, have been leaked to Mac OS Rumors." Lots of specs and numbers to read if you're curious.

Jim Thompson writes "Today's edition of Project Heresy at CNET News covers a very interesting new (?) project called Squeak by, of all people, The Disney Co. This project, targetted at embedded devices, has a Smalltalk heritage and is based, to some extent, on code from Apple. Apple required that Disney not commercialize their product, so Disney has released it as Open Source. Squeak is not itself an OS, but the Heretics speculate that Squeak will soon be married to a scaled-down linux kernel an ported to all sorts of handheld devices. Squeak sounds reasonably cool in that it's based on Smalltalk-80 and has what sounds like a built-in "skins" feature for its UI. Do any Slashdotters have more info on Squeak, on where to go for more information? "

danimal writes "Well, last week we at Blue Sky Studios released a web site for our new short computer animated film, Bunny. We all worked incredibly hard on this and we are glad it is done. There are a few stills and after the premier in NY (next week) we are going to put up more images and stuff. There are some screenings of it in L.A. for the next 3 days (starting today 11/17). " The shots from the film look awesome. This sure ain't tron anymore.

The Alchemist wrote in to say that Lotus Notes 4.6a now runs on Wine-981109. Also, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote in to say "Great news! WINE Office 97! Both Winword and Excel work. Not perfect, but at least you can type :-) Older version supported Word 2.0 and 6.0, but at last the WINE team is "up to speed". And even before Corel is coming in..." I see bright shiny things in our future, like maybe I can get addicted to Diablo again...

danimal writes "Over at StarWars.com they have posted pictures of the ST:Episode 1 teaser sheets. The only thing that comes to mind is "why did they put 'Episode 1' on the sheet and not 'The Phantom Menace'?"" The image is pretty sweet. Does anyone know what movies the trailer will be attached to later this month? The Pixar/ILM/Lucas connection says Bugs Life, but I wanna know- hell they could attach it to some terrible romantic comedy starring the chick from Ally McBeal falling in love with block of velveeta cheese and I'd pay to see the trailer anyway. Maybe I have issues?

Chris Rogers writes "There is another pro-linux article on CNN talking about how Linux is up and comming to the desktop market. Check it out Here " Swingman wrote in to say that CNNs Headline News did a spot on the air of Linux as well.

cwilkes wrote " Went to the last meeting of the Jefferson Club. This is a monthly meeting of people interested in free enterprise markets. Heavy on Ayn Rand and von Mises. This next talk looks interesting to /. readers. I quote: "Better software is emerging today through cooperation based on full disclosure in the infosphere" with a link to opensource.org. " This thought-provoking backgrounder is available online.

Over 30 of you wrote in to tell us that Jon Postel, died of complications after heart surgery at the age of 55. For those who don't know who Postel, he's the DNS admin (as head of the IANA), controlling the root name server setup and being a guiding force in the current government domain name wrangling. He was the voice of reason against many of the government's less-than-intelligent proposals for restructuring DNS. He was also editor of most of the 2500 RFCs. His PhD thesis adviser and his friend Vint Cerf sum up the feelings of the Internet community in this DejaNews post. The New York Times' obituary is here. You can also find an interview with Jon Postel from July. His homepage is simple and to the point.

I'd like to thank Idcmp, Claude Johnson, and Jeff Garzik whose material was used to compile this report.

Greg Roelofs writes "Gadget freaks may be interested in Philips' new Pronto, a $399 universal IR remote with 1 MB of flash and a 320x240 touch-sensitive LCD display instead of normal buttons. (This is basically the next-generation version of the Marantz [Philips] RCX-2000, which is pretty cool in its own right.) And even cooler features are on the way, but of course I'd have to kill you, etc., etc. " What would be even cooler is if the Palm IIIs could use their irda ports as a universal remote. Boy do I live in a dream world...

Parise writes "Forbes Digital published an article entitled " Rewriting the Geek Tragedy" concerning the shortage of "real" nerds. The premise is that the programmer community is not reproducing itself at a fast enough rate." Maybe this is related to the recent studies hinting that techies are bad lovers? *grin*.

c3w writes "I'd like to run a machine with IP-aliasing that /appears/ truly to be a collection of networked machines. inetd doesn't support ip-aliasing and binds to a port on /every ip/ (*:port) of that machine. tcpserver, part of D.J. Bernstein's ucspi-tcp package, link can bind to a port on a /specific IP/ and ignore connections to other IPs aliased on that machine. The problem is tcpserver's configuration isn't as clean as inetd; it's not a super-server like inetd, and thus runs each port/ip/service combination as a process, with it's command line options visable via `ps`. It also consumes (about 88k unshared) more memory per process. is there an inetd-like replacement that supports IP-aliasing and an inetd.conf style config? should I try to write one by combining the best bits of tcpserver and inetd? am i strange for wanting this? --c3w "

subhas sent us a link to a fairly standard anti-linux article. It covers all the usual arguments against the OS, but paints it as just the latest pawn in the database vendor wars. He doesn't question the technical stuff, just the lack of support. InfoWorld gave Linux best tech support, does that mean anything? What about Red Hat and Caldera? Maybe it isn't as much about support as marketing. Well that, and Linux can be a bit rough on newbies, but even that is changing rapidly.

Jeff Gehlbach writes "Technauts has unveiled a tiny (8"x8"x1") P100-based personal-pan-pizza-box departmental-strength server running home brew mail and web servers over Linux. This thing is amazingly tiny."

Greg Roelofs writes "I've just finished up my hideously detailed report on last Tuesday's "Future of Linux" panel. (You'd think I didn't have a life...) With luck it will help cast some of the other (sometimes misleading) news reports about the evening into perspective. It's at: link (which will resolve to another site, but please use this link). It's even "Don't Fear"-enhanced. :-) "

Jason Y. Sproul writes "Eric Kidd has started a mailing list for people interested in hacking robots based on Linux. Send mail to majordomo@randomhacks.com with the body "subscribe linux-robotics". "

ray jones writes "Bruce Schneier's company, Counterpane Systems, has released a description and source code for a new block encryption algorithm, Twofish. Twofish is their submission to the NIST's Advanced Encryption Standard process. Twofish is unpatented/uncopyrighted, much like its predecessor, Blowfish. Crypto is an area that's long used a model similar to open source to ensure that ciphers are safe. Ciphers developed in secret (such as Skipjack) are considered unreliable by default."

Rex Walters wrote in to tell us about MagicPoint, a presentation package (ala PowerPoint) that will compile and run under Linux. Open Source, LaTexesque input, easy keyboard controls, ability to 'swallow' Xclients into it. I doubt most of you have a need for such an application, but by the same token, I bet a good number of you consider this type of application a last unbreakable connection to some 'other' OS, so this may be worth a look.

Brian Kimball writes " link The rumor is that the mac look-and-feel is being ported to Linux. Supposedly this will be announced at the upcoming Apple developers conference. Steve Job says it's bogus; I'll wait and see. " Without the Macintosh's standard everything the Mac GUI would blow on Linux. But the article does claim that Apple does have some sort of Linux related announcement coming...

jeff covey wrote in to tell us that he asked NPR to start a Linux Discussion on their discussion pages. You can join in here. I'm quite amazed at the positive stuff I've heard about NPR after their little Linux story a few days ago.

Jim Knoble has written us an editorial on the recent situation involving the OpenGroup and their new cost structure related to X11 6.4. I'd say if Netscape was the biggest Open Source success of the year, this situation may very well be the biggest failure. Fortunately XF86 will remain free, and will very likely define the future of X. Anyway check the link below and read Jim's take on the situation. The following is an editorial by Slashdot reader Jim Knoble Why the Hue and Cry? Thoughts on the Recent X11R6.4 `License' (or: What Can Public Radio in the United States Teach Us About Free Software?)

I've been spending far too much of my time recently following the ``Licensing charges for X11R6.4'' thread on comp.windows.x (at the time of this writing, over 227 articles in the thread, plus several spinoff threads).

In case the distinguished Slashdot readership isn't aware (uhh ... right), the Open Group, current stewards of the X11 copright, have announced a new licensing scheme for the recently released X11R6.4. Any one who makes money from selling X11 is required to pay a per-copy license fee. There is also a non-commercial use license which does not require the license fee.

According to the Open Group, ``We are unable to continue to support this technology without the participation of those companies who build business from re-selling this technology.''

That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Those who make money from selling X11 ought to pass on some of the dough to the folks that make it available ... right?

Two questions pose themselves from the above:

1. Isn't ``selling'' X11 a rather broad term? What does it mean to ``build business from re-selling this technology''? Some of the Usenet discussion has centered around clarifying this point (especially because the license and other info on the Open Group's site are somewhat unclear). Does it mean that companies or organizations such as Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Walnut Creek, CheapBytes, etc., who were to distribute X11R6.4 as part of a Linux distribution which is sold on CD-ROM would have to pay the license fee? (According to a somewhat vocal member of the Open Group, they would). What about the XFree86 Project? (They're covered by the `non-commercial' license). What about folks who press CDs of archives which contain `non-commercial' X11R6.4 source code and sell them? (They'd have to pay). Et cetera.

This is not what i'm here to talk about. But it leads to the second question.

2. Is it necessarily obvious that the folks who make money from selling X11 ought to be the ones to support its development? This is what i'm here to talk about. I don't think it is.

Back for a moment to Usenet. Why is there so much uproar about this new `arrangement' for supporting development of X11? I think there are three reasons:

1. Change.
2. Surprise.
3. Uncertainty.

The announcement of a `commercial-use' license for X11R6.4 caught more than a few folks off guard. We've been so used to X being free software for so long that we didn't much consider the possibility that it might change. Many folks find change uncomfortable. Why fix what we didn't perceive as being broken? This change is one that potentially affects quite a few folks in the Linux community.

The new licensing scheme also casts some doubt on the future of X. Although the license fees are currently somewhat reasonable for a large volume of sales ($0.15US per unit for 50,000 units for non-Open-Group members), who is to say that the Open Group won't raise `prices' later? Or that X will remain `free' (think beer) for non-commercial use?

Here's the point: The Open Group's announcement of licensing fees for commercial redistribution of X11 is amounting to a public relations fiasco in the open source community ... especially on the heels of Netscape's official open-source-ification of Communicator 5.

Why is that? What did the Open Group do wrong? I think their biggest mistakes were the following:

1. They did not consult with the open source community.
2. They did not consider alternative methods of supporting the X Project Team.

1. They did not consult with the open source community. I am not a conspiracy theorist; i leave that to those who are better at it than i am. For whatever reason, the folks who make open source software obviously did not have much input into the decision to license commercial redistribution of X ... that goes against the very core of what open source software is. Had the Open Group consulted with the open source community, at the very least, the words ``reluctantly'' or ``We regret that'' would have appeared somewhere near the words ``There is a fee associated with...''. At best ... well, that brings me to the second mistake.

2. They did not consider alternative methods of supporting the X Project Team. Had the Open Group considered for a moment the importance of the relationship between the X Window System and the open source software community, they would have scrambled to look for alternatives to implementing per-unit redistribution license fees. Similar license fees are the reason almost no open source software is written using Motif or CDE. Putting license fees together with software that has historically been available without commercial redistribution fees is just asking for bad press.

What could the Open Group have done differently to avoid the slew of bad press they're getting now? I believe that they could have used a more collaborative approach rather than the authoritative one they chose. I also believe that the open source software community can learn from their mistakes. Let me explain.

First, a bit of background for the Slashdot readership outside the United States (if you know the significance of the words `National Public Radio', you can skip this paragraph). In the United States, besides the `regular' privatized commercial radio stations that broadcast thirty minutes of music and thirty minutes of advertisements per hour (or so it sometimes seems :), we have what are called `public' radio stations, whose broadcasts consist almost entirely of programming without advertisements. These radio stations used to be heavily funded by both the federal government and some state governments (this ought to sound familiar to residents of many countries in Europe and elsewhere, where such public broadcasting is the norm). In recent years, funding for public radio has gotten slimmer and slimmer, as state and federal governments have been required to `balance budgets' and `cut spending'. Many public radio stations now raise a large percentage of the money they need in order to operate by holding seasonal `on-air fundraisers', where regular programming is surrounded by the local radio staff asking listeners to donate money to the radio station.

Anyone who has heard their local public radio station announce that 70 percent or more of their yearly operating budget comes from listener donations knows how effective the seasonal fundraisers can be. The importance of this fundraising model is that it involves the listeners. Not only do the listeners get a chance to `feel good' about supporting public radio, but sending in their donation often gives them a chance to give feedback to the station, and the fundraiser suddenly becomes a two-way channel of communication. The listeners get a chance to collaborate in the work of the radio station.

I believe a similar fundraising model might have worked in the Open Group's favor. Instead of imposing an authoritarian license fee, they could have opened up the development of X as a collaborative effort: ``We're doing the main development ... can you help support us?'' Suddenly the whole view of the situation changes. And, X would not have distribution restrictions caused by silly license fees.

Then again, perhaps such a fundraising model would not have worked for the Open Group. Perhaps some other alternative (such as dissolving the X Project Team and donating X11R6.4 to the open source software community at large) would have worked instead, or would have worked even better. The point is that they acted without consulting the fastest-growing group of folks that would be affected, and without considering alternatives to the outdated `build once, license many' paradigm.

We are in the middle of a time when alternatives to the traditional methods of distributing and supporting software are not merely available, not just fashionable, but increasingly necessary. We need to find ways to maintain freely distributable software that benefit both ourselves and the community, otherwise we lose the support of the community, who are also our customers. Let's all learn from the Open Group's mistakes.

Jim Knoble has written us an editorial on the recent situation involving the OpenGroup and their new cost structure related to X11 6.4. I'd say if Netscape was the biggest Open Source success of the year, this situation may very well be the biggest failure. Fortunately XF86 will remain free, and will very likely define the future of X. Anyway check the link below and read Jim's take on the situation. The following is an editorial by Slashdot reader Jim Knoble Why the Hue and Cry? Thoughts on the Recent X11R6.4 `License' (or: What Can Public Radio in the United States Teach Us About Free Software?)

I've been spending far too much of my time recently following the ``Licensing charges for X11R6.4'' thread on comp.windows.x (at the time of this writing, over 227 articles in the thread, plus several spinoff threads).

In case the distinguished Slashdot readership isn't aware (uhh ... right), the Open Group, current stewards of the X11 copright, have announced a new licensing scheme for the recently released X11R6.4. Any one who makes money from selling X11 is required to pay a per-copy license fee. There is also a non-commercial use license which does not require the license fee.

According to the Open Group, ``We are unable to continue to support this technology without the participation of those companies who build business from re-selling this technology.''

That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Those who make money from selling X11 ought to pass on some of the dough to the folks that make it available ... right?

Two questions pose themselves from the above:

1. Isn't ``selling'' X11 a rather broad term? What does it mean to ``build business from re-selling this technology''? Some of the Usenet discussion has centered around clarifying this point (especially because the license and other info on the Open Group's site are somewhat unclear). Does it mean that companies or organizations such as Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Walnut Creek, CheapBytes, etc., who were to distribute X11R6.4 as part of a Linux distribution which is sold on CD-ROM would have to pay the license fee? (According to a somewhat vocal member of the Open Group, they would). What about the XFree86 Project? (They're covered by the `non-commercial' license). What about folks who press CDs of archives which contain `non-commercial' X11R6.4 source code and sell them? (They'd have to pay). Et cetera.

This is not what i'm here to talk about. But it leads to the second question.

2. Is it necessarily obvious that the folks who make money from selling X11 ought to be the ones to support its development? This is what i'm here to talk about. I don't think it is.

Back for a moment to Usenet. Why is there so much uproar about this new `arrangement' for supporting development of X11? I think there are three reasons:

1. Change.
2. Surprise.
3. Uncertainty.

The announcement of a `commercial-use' license for X11R6.4 caught more than a few folks off guard. We've been so used to X being free software for so long that we didn't much consider the possibility that it might change. Many folks find change uncomfortable. Why fix what we didn't perceive as being broken? This change is one that potentially affects quite a few folks in the Linux community.

The new licensing scheme also casts some doubt on the future of X. Although the license fees are currently somewhat reasonable for a large volume of sales ($0.15US per unit for 50,000 units for non-Open-Group members), who is to say that the Open Group won't raise `prices' later? Or that X will remain `free' (think beer) for non-commercial use?

Here's the point: The Open Group's announcement of licensing fees for commercial redistribution of X11 is amounting to a public relations fiasco in the open source community ... especially on the heels of Netscape's official open-source-ification of Communicator 5.

Why is that? What did the Open Group do wrong? I think their biggest mistakes were the following:

1. They did not consult with the open source community.
2. They did not consider alternative methods of supporting the X Project Team.

1. They did not consult with the open source community. I am not a conspiracy theorist; i leave that to those who are better at it than i am. For whatever reason, the folks who make open source software obviously did not have much input into the decision to license commercial redistribution of X ... that goes against the very core of what open source software is. Had the Open Group consulted with the open source community, at the very least, the words ``reluctantly'' or ``We regret that'' would have appeared somewhere near the words ``There is a fee associated with...''. At best ... well, that brings me to the second mistake.

2. They did not consider alternative methods of supporting the X Project Team. Had the Open Group considered for a moment the importance of the relationship between the X Window System and the open source software community, they would have scrambled to look for alternatives to implementing per-unit redistribution license fees. Similar license fees are the reason almost no open source software is written using Motif or CDE. Putting license fees together with software that has historically been available without commercial redistribution fees is just asking for bad press.

What could the Open Group have done differently to avoid the slew of bad press they're getting now? I believe that they could have used a more collaborative approach rather than the authoritative one they chose. I also believe that the open source software community can learn from their mistakes. Let me explain.

First, a bit of background for the Slashdot readership outside the United States (if you know the significance of the words `National Public Radio', you can skip this paragraph). In the United States, besides the `regular' privatized commercial radio stations that broadcast thirty minutes of music and thirty minutes of advertisements per hour (or so it sometimes seems :), we have what are called `public' radio stations, whose broadcasts consist almost entirely of programming without advertisements. These radio stations used to be heavily funded by both the federal government and some state governments (this ought to sound familiar to residents of many countries in Europe and elsewhere, where such public broadcasting is the norm). In recent years, funding for public radio has gotten slimmer and slimmer, as state and federal governments have been required to `balance budgets' and `cut spending'. Many public radio stations now raise a large percentage of the money they need in order to operate by holding seasonal `on-air fundraisers', where regular programming is surrounded by the local radio staff asking listeners to donate money to the radio station.

Anyone who has heard their local public radio station announce that 70 percent or more of their yearly operating budget comes from listener donations knows how effective the seasonal fundraisers can be. The importance of this fundraising model is that it involves the listeners. Not only do the listeners get a chance to `feel good' about supporting public radio, but sending in their donation often gives them a chance to give feedback to the station, and the fundraiser suddenly becomes a two-way channel of communication. The listeners get a chance to collaborate in the work of the radio station.

I believe a similar fundraising model might have worked in the Open Group's favor. Instead of imposing an authoritarian license fee, they could have opened up the development of X as a collaborative effort: ``We're doing the main development ... can you help support us?'' Suddenly the whole view of the situation changes. And, X would not have distribution restrictions caused by silly license fees.

Then again, perhaps such a fundraising model would not have worked for the Open Group. Perhaps some other alternative (such as dissolving the X Project Team and donating X11R6.4 to the open source software community at large) would have worked instead, or would have worked even better. The point is that they acted without consulting the fastest-growing group of folks that would be affected, and without considering alternatives to the outdated `build once, license many' paradigm.

We are in the middle of a time when alternatives to the traditional methods of distributing and supporting software are not merely available, not just fashionable, but increasingly necessary. We need to find ways to maintain freely distributable software that benefit both ourselves and the community, otherwise we lose the support of the community, who are also our customers. Let's all learn from the Open Group's mistakes.

David Ross writes "A really nice port of the Bochs PC emulator has just been released for Windows NT and Windows 95. You can now run Linux (and Windows 95) within Windows 95 or Windows NT! Eat your heart out Linus! The URL is here Full source code is included. Bochs builds from the same source tree on UNIX, BeOS and Windows. "

Wow did I ever call it. Netscape announced this morning that they are going to GPL communicator 5. Check out this link and this one for more information on one of the biggest events in recent software history. Now let's hope the Free Software folks can prove that this is the future of software! Thanks to Phaedrus and James Baker for sending in the first of many links on the subject.