More Companies Jump on the Linux Train

"X Company now supports Linux" announcements are coming in thick and fast these days. Examples: yesterday J Ellerbroek sent this link for Aureal's Linux drivers and Drakar wrote, "I e-mailed Sigma Designs asking them about Linux support for the RealMagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder, and they say they're working on supporting Linux for a future product." And Nicholas Tang turned us on to this announcement about an upcoming open sourced RPG with a Linux client. Very nice! But we're getting so many of these announcements that we can't possibly run them all. If you've spotted any others recently, please post them below. (Click for more.)

I had a thought while I was typing the words above: should Slashdot do periodic "roundups" of new Linux ports and support announcements? With so many hardware and software vendors now moving into the "Linux marketplace" (which is how many of them see Linux -- as a marketplace), these announcements are no longer "news" in the sense of being unique or unusual events, but they're still good to know about.

Should we make a weekly post out of all these announcements? Or, because they don't come in at an even rate, should we save them up until we have 10 or so and post them all then whether that takes two days or three weeks?

So, besides posting any new Linux product/support announcements you've seen lately, how about a little advice on how Slashdot might best handle these announcements in the future? I promise to read every comment with a moderation level of zero or higher.

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Comments

"In a future product"

[scjody]

There has been discussion of this on the LiViD mailing list for quite some time. What gets me is that Sigma Designs could easily release the specs and allow Linux to be supported in their current product, but instead they're making Linux users buy a whole new card.

And we're supposed to be pleased with this?

Re:"In a future product"

[damyan]

Where I was working last year they had several marketing ideas floating around -- one was 'lets see if we can get this on Slashdot'. (Along with 'lets email everyone on the internet' and 'lets fax every fax machine in the UK' -- they weren't very bright)

The point is that the unscrupulous could quite easily get themselves onto /. and basically (in their eyes) reap in the same benefits that spam provides them with.

I think that perhaps /. should ignore announcements like 'we'll be supporting linux in a future product' and only post ones like 'version 1 of xxx for linux is out'.

Linux? What about Free Software?

[Kaufmann]

At the risk of coming off as some unholy Stallman-wannabe, I have to say this.

Linux isn't what's important. Free Software is.

Linux is software, and software comes and goes. Whether some company or other jumps on the Linux bandwagon is irrelevant in the big picture. What is truly important is to spread Free Software in general - not only the software itself, but the accompanying meme that says, essentially, that "sharing is profitable". The catch is to ingrain this idea into our culture in the same way that sharing is already ingrained in the scientific and mathematical communities.

Once we've done that, we'll have achieved something much greated than pressuring a lot of companies to support a Free operating system. We'll have dominated the world. Because world domination is not achieved by actually taking over the world, but by having the world think that you're in control of it.

(Again, sorry for the rant. I'm in extended no-sleep mode.)

Leave this to Linux Weekly News

[The Pim]

In answer to roblimo's question, I find that Linux Weekly News (www.lwn.net) already does an excellent job of such roundups. This isn't something slashdot needs to duplicate.

Re:Leave this to Linux Weekly News

[Raindeer]

I think that in the end it doesn't really matter who does this.. It could be Freshmeat, Linux Daily, Linux Weekly, *Linux Drivers* or Slashdot... What does matter is that there should be, a source for all the new releases...
In my opinion it would be best to have it on another site as Slashdot, since Slashdot is more about discussing news and not about Linux drivers :-) But it would be nice to have a link to the site, just like with Freshmeat. So see this as a way to start your own Linux site, or for other sites to expand their business...

Proposal: Linux announce page

[Paolo]

I would image in the best way to go about this would to have a Linux announce page, which would have a submission form for companies or observant end-users to give their announcements to slashdot. This would be off of the main page, and once a /. moderator looked at the email acct or whatever where the submissions went to, he/she could post them on the page.

How is this accessible on the main page? A slashbox of course! Make it a default one so everyone can see what's been announced in a box on the main page.

Aureal's Linux drivers violate GPL?

[Stiletto]

I took a look at the released linux drivers posted at Aureal's site and they seem to be violating the stock-GPL lisence they distribute it with!

The driver is released in the form of a single C "wrapper" file that links with the main portion of the driver, which is binary-only. Does this seem to any of you to be a sneaky way to say they are delivering source, but in fact are not?

IANAL, but from what I have always believed the GPL meant, you can't link GPL code with binary-only modules.

Can anyone knowledgable comment on this?
________________________________

Gear CDR too

[whoop]

I noticed over at Gear's web page that they say a Linux version is coming "soon." I have been looking for VideoCD software for quite a while, either recording or playing 'em. Hopefully this will be one step closer.

Linux is important!

[rogerbo]

Sorry, I beg to differ and I bet a lot of other people do to.

I don't require that everypiece of software is GPL'ed, or even that every piece of software is freely available in any form.

Binary only software distribution has it's place and so does (gasp horror) binary only software that you have to pay money for.

What is important about linux gaining mainstream driver support (even in binary only form) is that people now have a real choice in the future on intel rather than being forced to use Microsoft operating systems by default.

With the mostly collapse of non-intel architecture unix platforms in the workstation market (Sun, SGI, HP etc) we needed a robust unix based low cost alternative.

Linux is it, and I don't care if some software is binary only or I have to pay money for it.

Merant and RIMS porting to Linux

[Ark]

Since you said "If you've spotted any others recently, please post them below," I'll take you up on the offer. :)

The company I work for, RIMS, and a vendor of ours, Merant, will have a joint press release out tomorrow. The process release will be about Merant's porting of their Micro Focus Object COBOL stuff to Linux and our efforts to port our QicClaim/2 product to the COBOL port on Linux. <marketing speak>QC/2, as with all our software, is aimed at the healthcare verticle market. QC/2 is used to administrate health benefit programs, mostly used be third party administrators.</marketing speak>

No, its not open sourced, but its the start of greater use of Linux and open source projects within my company. Something I've been fighting a year for. We hope to have some open source stuff out there in the near future. We're deceiding the what, where, and when of all that. But I'm pretty excited as I'll be a big part of all of it.

Linux Anouncements

[chabotc]

I think i'd like a combination of some of the above ideas.

First create a anounce section, in which every 'anouncement' is an article. This gives people the option to discuss every anouncement, eg those aurol 3d drivers seem to be a nice discussed item, so why stomp the discussions.

Then create a slashbox, to show the most N-recent anouncements. This alows people who are interested to see all the recent trafic on the 'anounce list', but ppl who dont care dont have to be confronted.

Then every once a 'period' eg week, biweekly or whatever, do a roundup, as we do quickies every-once-in-a-while (Tm) currently, on the main page.

This way people who want to read, and reply to everything, can.

People who have questions on this release/anouncements, have a place to discuss.

People who just care a little bit, can just read the slashbox, to get a @ a glance impression.

People who care even less, will see an article commin by every week/ every other week, and get a quick glance @ what happend, and is of intrest...

This way we should serve all people, and all desire levels.



-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"

Freshmeat

[redhog]

I think this type of announcements are not longer different from any announcement on Freshmeat, and should hence be moved over there, perheaps bundled in a pack of tens of them at once.
While both /. and Freshmeat are now Andover.net sites, I have seen little or no cooperation between them, at least in the content field (I don't know about code cooperation).
This may be regarded as troll, non-/.-ish or whatever, but please read it and think twize, before you moderate or comment.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.

Re:Aureal's Linux drivers violate GPL? Probably no

[Le douanier]

For what you seem to describe we have a situation with the following schema:

Binary driver --> C file (wrapper) -->Linux kernel

Given that Linus specifically allowed binary drivers these are not violating the GPL FOR LINUX ONLY (Linus said it was Ok, but this only apply to Linux).

They have a good reason to do this wrapper:
Linus don't care that much if new kernels break the compatibility with binary-only driver (and IMHO he is right), so doing a wrapper to the driver allow them to just change this wrapper to keep the compatibility, they can also put the wrapper under the GPL (or, better for them, the LGPL) and hope that people using their hardware will help them keep the compatibility between kernels.

It's a first step in the right direction (full Free Software driver) and this give them a first taste of Free Softare and we can only encourage them in it (by helping them keeping the compatibility and, when you submit the patch, tell them how great this would be for you and them if the driver was fully GPL'd).

Of course your post didn't mention wether the wrapper was Free (speech) but there would be little advantage to give this wrapper otherwise.

IBM OSS Still mostly engineer driven

[Greyfox]

Although IBM is announcing a very aggressive open source policy which basically says that all drivers and docs for any given device should be open unless the department can show a specific necessity to keep the source closed, the OSS movement in the company is still largely driven by the lower employees rather than management. This is actually starting to change, but IBM is such a big company that you still don't have a lot of OSS awareness in many of the groups that comprise the company.

What you have to do is get a message to their marketing group that they do actually have Linux users and that demographic will get bigger for their hardware if they provide drivers. The best ways to do that is to E-Mail their tech support requesting that they send your message on to marketing or to open a suggestion defect requesting drivers and support for Linux. The justification is that the Linux market segment is growing and that Linux is the only non-MS OS on the market which is exhibiting such growth. Thus supporting Linux makes much more sense than supporting, say, OS/2, which IBM has been actively trying to kill for the last 5 years.

The more requests of this nature that go into the company, the more you'll see OSS awareness in the company grow. It'll probably be a couple of years yet before the entire company is completely clueful on the subject but I think that day will come.

We don't need announcements...

[Eccles]

...we need a web page. With summaries of each company's existing support (and non-support), the structure of this support (closed driver vs. published specs vs. open source driver), and announced plans. That web site could then have a weekly news report of new announcements.

Tommorow: VMWare 2.0 beta

[HeUnique]

Well, I just got the word from VMWare:

Tommorow there will be a public beta of VMWare 2.0, and they included support for SCSI, Sound-in, Major improvment of running Windows 95/98 as a guest, Shrinking disk, Larger then 2GB Virtual disk support, and other goodies.

Check tommorow: http://www.vmware.com

Not the first open source online RPG, btw

[P_Simm]

Just thought I'd mention, Worldforge is a project that's been going for more than a year now and is making terrific progress. It's a fully open source, volunteer driven online RPG system. This includes a server-client protocol allowing for multiple clients and multiple servers, and full customizability for individual servers. They're also developing a full fantasy RPG world, plus a couple of other game worlds using the same technology.

They've got over a dozen people working on the project, including both coders and artists. There's definitely room for more help though. (I'm not directly involved in the project, although I will be as soon as I can find more time.)

Click the link in my sig for more info.

RMS comments from the ALSA list

[Captain Zion]

http://helllabs.org/~claudio/alsa/ rms-aureal.txt