Open Source News
May 10, 2004
Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web
Paul Ford covers a talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web. "But now that the Web is unquestioned as a basic medium, part of a parcel with television, publishing, and radio, there is risk of stagnation. To that end, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the first Web browser and server, and inventor of HTML, gave an open-ended plenary talk focused on two open questions: What should we do with top level domain names (TLDs)? And what should we do with the Semantic Web?"
CA Moves with New Open-Source Licensing
eWeek covers this week's open source announcements from Computer Associates. "Computer Associates International Inc. will use its annual CA World user conference in Las Vegas on Monday to make a slew of open-source announcements, including establishing a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, an out-of-the-box content management system built on the free Zope Application server; unveiling a new open- source license, and placing a version of Ingres, CA's flagship DBMS, under it."
Kill Bill
Yes, it's a Forbes article by Daniel Lyons, but he seems to have turned over a new leaf; this one is a lengthy look at IBM's involvement with Linux which doesn't mention lawsuits at all. "IBM seems to go to any length to push Linux into customer sites. Last year at the U.S. National Weather Service, IBM offered a free demo machine and a guarantee to keep its systems up-to-date, even writing software drivers for components IBM doesn't build, such as video cards. The result? The NWS spent $3 million to buy a thousand IBM desktop machines running Linux, replacing 900 HP Unix workstations."
Dell nears Sun in IBM-led server race
News.com looks at the latest Gartner numbers on server sales. "One area that blossomed in particular was sales of Linux servers, which grew 57.3 percent to $1.02 billion... IBM was the top Linux seller, with 28 percent share, followed by HP with 26.9 percent, Dell with 17.8 percent, Silicon Graphics Inc. with 3.1 percent, Fujitsu with 2.8 percent, NEC with 1.9 percent and Sun with 0.9 percent."
Linux Going Mainstream
Information Week looks at Linux adoption at United Parcel Service, Boeing, and other companies. "A key driver behind business use of Linux is support from high-profile vendors. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are all several years into strategies to use Linux to increase sales of Intel-based servers. Applications vendors such as Oracle and SAP push Linux as an option for companies transitioning portions of their data centers from proprietary to open-source software."
How Linux Saved My Files and My Job
This Linux Journal author used BG-Rescue Linux to save data from a "knackered" NTFS-based drive. "The current version of BG-Rescue Linux is 0.3.1, which is compiled with kernel version 2.4.24, and it supported a host of Ethernet devices--it even had USB and PCMCIA network device support. A host of command-line utilities are provided by BusyBox, and BG-Rescue Linux uses the uClibC C library. What really made my eyes light up was the inclusion of NTFS support."
Interview with Everaldo and Jimmac
OS News interviews KDE artist Everaldo Coelho and GNOME artist Jakub Steiner (Jimmac). "Currently Everaldo works for Lindows inc. and Jakub works for Novell inc. They were very kind to answer our questions related with the art in Linux, its future and much more."
An Interview with Allison Randal
Simon Cozens interviews Allison Randal on O'Reilly's Perl.com. "This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl Foundation. Let's hear more from Allison about what all of this means to her."
Top Ten Ethereal Tips and Tricks
O'ReillyNet presents the top ten list of Ethereal tips and tricks, from the book Ethereal Packet Sniffing (from Syngress). "Installing Ethereal from the source code is very beneficial in a number of ways. Not only will you have all of the source code, additional documentation, and miscellaneous files to peruse, you will also have the ability to control numerous aspects of the build process. Building software from source will give you a better feel for how the whole process works and what goes on behind the scenes. What you will take away is a wealth of knowledge about the software package, programming, and operating system management."
Secure programmer: Minimizing privileges
David A. Wheeler covers secure programming by minimizing privileges, on IBM developerWorks. "Real-world programs have bugs in them. It's not what we want, but it's certainly what we get. Complicated requirements, schedule pressure, and changing environments all conspire to make useful bugless programs unlikely. Even programs formally proved correct using sophisticated mathematical techniques can have bugs. Why? One reason is that proofs must make many assumptions, and usually some of those assumptions aren't completely true. Most programs aren't examined that rigorously anyway, for a variety of reasons. And even if there are no bugs today (unlikely), a maintenance change or a change in the environment may introduce a bug later on. So, to handle the real world, we have to somehow develop secure programs in spite of the bugs in our programs."
Build Web apps with Maypole
developerWorks is running a lengthy introduction to Maypole (a Perl framework for creating database-backed web applications) written by Maypole's creator. "The big problem with Ninkasi's recipe is that the nicer the end result, the more of it you consume, and, for some reason, the less likely you are to remember how good it was in the morning, and so you never know whether or not you want to buy that particular beer again. So you have to buy it anyway to try to work out whether or not you liked it. This is enjoyable, but not particularly economical. I found myself needing some kind of database to keep track of my tastings."
A model for open source software development
In this NewsForge article a pediatric oncologist finds analogies between biomedical research and the open source software development model. "It has been argued that the only way to make money off of software is to follow the closed proprietary system of software development. If this were true, then no company would be able to make money in biomedical research, which depends on full disclosure and published research. It can hardly be argued that there is no money to be made in biomedical research. Pharmaceutical companies do make money. But they do so in no small part due to the fact that they participate in research that is published in peer-reviewed journals."
Oracle claims world's largest Linux-based development organization
Oracle has sent out a press release claiming to have the largest Linux-based development organization in the world. "The company began the global initiative last year with the migration of 5,000 developers to Linux, and anticipates that by the end of 2004, its core development team worldwide will be leveraging the operating system. With Linux, Oracle developers have a broader choice of hardware platforms and can use cheap, fast hardware in a grid environment to help increase productivity and enhance testing capabilities."