The latest news and views on all things Linux and open source by seasoned Unix and Linux user Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge PC operating system. SJVN covers networking, Linux, open source, and operating systems.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for more than two decades.
Today David Berlind has a great piece about Sun executives complaining that they "give and they give" but the open source community keeps demanding more. What exactly does the open source community want, Sun asks.
Peter Galli reports that the Free Standards Group is planning to break up the Linux Standard Base specification into "modules" that will allow for desktop and server standards. I'm glad to see the FSG addressing the desktop issue.
Over in England, Nick McGrath, who heads the local platform strategy group for Windows, is dismissing Linux by saying that it has "just" hundreds of developers and that no one is taking responsibility for it. Does Red Hat take responsibility for it, he asks?
Two stories in today's news, which seem quite different, are easy to connect with one sentence.Unix vendors are abandoning proprietary versions for Linux.
Activists at the World Social Forum in Brazil, headlined by John Perry Barlow, celebrated open sourcethis week. "Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger," said Barlow.
Pressed by the EU to create a server license allowing interoperability with other systems, Microsoft delivered a license that specifically prohibits it with open source, ZDNet reports today in the UK. Microsoft agreed with an interoperability license to comply with an EU antitrust decision, which it still seeks to overturn.
The law has been a key ingredient in corporate competition for generations.Big companies always have better lawyers than small ones.
When people think "open source," they usually think software. John Buckman, however, has been applying some of the open source philosophy to music using the Creative Commons licenses, and it seems to be paying off.
Matt Moen at Newsforge has been busy lately trying to get Windows viruses to work on Wine, an open source version of the Windows API designed to let Windows programs work on X-based operating systems.Before you ask "why," consider that a Windows virus might be a good compatibility test.