I am proud to announce that LinuxQuestions.org is a sponsor of the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo in Boston. LQ has been exhibiting at LWE for a while now, and it's great to be able to give something back. The Expo runs February 15-17. We should find out if we'll be exhibiting again “real soon now”.
–jeremy
Archive for November, 2004
In response to this, we really do change things. For an example, you need look no further than a few posts down in this Blog. Due to a bug in the iPod and the addition of EFI to the kernel, my iPod no longer worked. Not only was I able to see what the problem was, I was able to roll an RPM and offer it to whoever wanted to download it (in addition to letting the vendor know, so they could address it). In this case the fix was trivial and hopefully I've gained enough trust in the community that people weren't too scared to try the code (and judging by the feedback I got, many people did). Now, admittedly this isn't always the case and random people arbitrarily making kernel changes is obviously a bad thing. Don't forget though, the strength of Open Source isn't solely the ability to change the code (although that is a huge benefit in itself). It's the right to fork, the ability to avoid vendor lockin…the freedom.
–jeremy
Haven't blogged in a couple days, but here are a few things that happened:
As a followup to this, here are a couple of comments from Linus on the subject. In summary, his opinion seems to be: So while I may have some niggling concerns with the GPL, they are in the details, and in the end, I actually think that the GPL simply is the best license for the kernel..
The SCO site was defaced twice over the last couple of days. While they are twits (at best), this kind of thing doesn't really hurt them at all and gives them something to point at the Linux community (whether it was someone from that community or not) about. The second crack was fairly subtle and actually easy to miss if you didn't look closely…and it stayed online for a long time. Almost makes you wonder if they did it themselves.
ESR responds to the silly claim that “Sun's Java is developed more in the mode of the bazaar than Linux is”. He explains: Anyone who doesn't like Linus' decisions about Linux can fork the code base, start his own effort, and compete for developer and user attention on a legally equal footing. That is the essence of the bazaar,” Raymond wrote. Raymond then went on to explain that, from where he sits, JCP is anything but open source.
–jeremy
Here's the latest LinuxQuestions.org Podcast. Topics include LQ updates, our potential Podcast hardware (will it be Apple?), NoSoftwarePatents.com, my Audacity problems, LQ sponsoring the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit and my Fedora iPod kernel for FC3. BTW, the mic is a bit misplaced which caused the occasional pop – I'll make sure to get the fixed for the next podcast.
–jeremy
Microsoft recently supplied a screencap of its new BETA MSN search to the Associated Press. Not all that interesting you're thinking to yourself. Take a closer look though – they are using FireFox. Nice!
–jeremy
As Dave Winer points out, Blogtorrent looks pretty cool and could make things quite a bit easier. It'd be great to be able to do the LQ Podcast (next podcast should hopefully be online later today) via Blog Torrent. The problem? It only runs on Windows. Have to love this line from the Blogtorrent site though:
We only have a Windows version of the Blogtorrent client (help fix that!) so for now we just detect when people aren't using Windows browsers, and don't show them the easy download links. For Mac users, we give them instructions on how to download and install the OS X Bittorrent client. And for non-Mac, non-Windows users, we assume that since they're running some weird OS, they can probably figure Bittorrent out themselves.
Although I have been using Linux on my main desktop (well, on almost all my machines really), it's lines like the above that make me remember just how much work we have ahead of us. Should prove to be a fun journey though. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be blogged 
–jeremy
Just imagine – 60,000 BSOD's. …and it appears that it's not even Microsoft's fault. EDS was set to upgrade a small number of test machines that were running WindowsXP. Instead of deploying the patch to those machines, the patch went to about 80% of all of the machines, which happened to be running Windows 2000. As you may have guessed, the results were less than stellar. With about 60,000 machines being out for over 4 days, you're talking a minimum of 240,000 work hours that were likely, um…less than productive What's amazing to me is that EDS continually seems to botch things (although this mishap was especially egregious) but continues to get new contracts. Although not directly MSFT's fault, you have to wonder how the people that made this decision are feeling right about now.
–jeremy
Well, I was about to do my next podcast, when Audacity starting locking up (out of nowhere). It seemed to be ALSA related, and I decided to reboot into a new Fedora kernel (which I had been putting it off). Lo and behold, upon reboot my display doesn't work. As you may have guessed, the machine has an NVIDIA card. I check the logs, and I see a bunch of:
nvidia: Unknown symbol __VMALLOC_RESERVE
A bit of Googling later and I find out this problem was introduced in 2.6.9, upon which the latest FC2 kernel is based. Since none of the RPMs around seem to have the fix in them, I decided to roll an RPM based off the livna one and post it on the LQ mirror. If you have any problems with it, let me know. …now to see if Audacity works.
–jeremy
Linus Torvalds, Michael Widenius and Rasmus Lerdorf have started www.NoSoftwarePatents.com. While Europe and the EU are the particular focus now, it's an issue everyone should be concerned with. The patent system is one that could have helped protect small companies in theory, but in reality it's turned into a system that is abused by large companies and stifles innovation. You can visit this page to brush up on the basis of the issue.
–jeremy
While no release date has been set, the next version of the GPL is now being worked on. From the article:
The changes planned for the next release, Version 3, a draft of which is due next year, focus on several broad topics that reflect the dynamic change in the software industry since the early 1990s—intellectual property licensing and patent issues, the question of how to deal with software used over a network, and concerns around trusted computing.
I wonder if a new version of the GFDL is also being worked on. I've contacted the FSF and CC in the past to see if a level of compatibility between the CC by-sa and the GFDL was possible, and both sides said it was something they would like to work toward. Hopefully they are making some progress on that, as it would really benefit the LQ Wiki (which would benefit the Linux community at large, ideally).
–jeremy
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