Open Source > Linux > LQ
October 2, 2005 Leave a comment
My plane leaves in a couple hours, so it's time to start packing. Remember, if you'll be anywhere near London on October 5-6, make sure to stop into LWE UK in Olympia2. I'll be stationed in the LQ booth, which is located in the .ORG village. It's always great to meet LQ members and I'll be joined by at least 4 LQ mods. I'll be sure to update my blog from the expo.
–jeremy
LWE, LinuxWorld, Linux
September 19, 2005 Leave a comment
Ulrich has some problems with the LSB standard. He makes some outstanding points and is clearly an extremely smart guy. The problem as I see it is that the current LSB is broken and badly broken at that. When the answer to a bug report is “use a slow uni-processor machine, it is known to work there”, someone should be fired. A certification with a date of 15-Sep-2005 should not be done on a 300MHz Pentium as it's not indicative of what people are running. Is all lost though? Should the LSB just be completely dropped? Maybe this particular group/spec should be, since they are clearly not doing a good job, but it should be clear on why companies like Oracle want to ship a single binary that works everywhere. If we're serious about mainstream Linux adoption, this is something that I think has to happen. Requiring companies to build for each distro is dumb. It means multiple build environments, additional testing, additional resources. In the end, it means that either the company won't ship on Linux or the company will only support a specific distribution or two. That's bad for everyone. I don't have a solid answer (and from the looks of it, no one does) but this is a problem that needs to be solved.
–jeremy
LSB, Linux
September 17, 2005 Leave a comment
“Dell releases its first Linux consumer product with Mandriva”… or at least that's what the press release says. As I've mentioned on this blog many times in the past, a real OEM deal is critical to the success of Linux on the mainstream desktop. While this press release is a start, I don't think the title is 100% accurate. Look at the page for the 110L on the Dell site. It's not in the Home section, but the Business & Education section. A closer look at the press release seems to confirm this: Mandriva worked with Dell to certify this first consumer laptop, which is now being sold direct to students by Dell. Notice also that the Dell page does not list Linux as an option (even worse is the huge “Dell recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional.” on every page). So, if this deal is only available to students, and a normal “consumer” can't just go to the Dell site and order Linux what makes it a consumer product? I'm not sure. In the end, while a deal like this is a great start and kudos should go to Mandriva for attempting to break ground on this, the press release title seems a little optimistic and more needs to be done. I'm still looking forward to the day where someone can go to a major PC manufactures website and simply see Linux as an option on any arbitrary model. I may be waiting a while…
–jeremy
Dell, Mandriva, Linux
September 13, 2005 1 Comment
A follow up to this post. It appears that the hardware requirements are not as lofty as was originally reported. As explained here, Nigel was evidentially detailing the optimal hardware setup and somehow things got misconstrued. Amazing how fast things can tear through the blogosphere, isn't it? You have to feel bad for Nigel. I'm sure that by the time he realized what happened and had a chance to clear things up, the damage was done and the story was making its way into the annals of technorati. It seems that in the end, Vista will actually run on a tablet, which certainly aren't know for having beefy hardware.
–jeremy
Microsoft, Vista
September 10, 2005 1 Comment
I had to chuckle a bit when I saw the hardware requirements for Windows Vista. The only req that seems reasonable to me is the 1GB of RAM for 32bit machines (it's 2GB for 64bit). Let's take a quick look at the others. While 256M of RAM in a video card is not outrageous these days (some already have 1G, although they aren't cheap) it seems like an awfully high bar for a minimum. This is due to the change from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This alone will make a whole lot of computers fall short. They'd also like to see a PCI-Express video card, not the much more common AGP. Next is the RAM – they'd like to see DDR3. I don't even think this is shipping yet, and the roadmap looks like 2007 is the target date for mass adoption. Nice! The next one is SATA2. While SATA2 is nice (it supports Native Command Queueing), but certainly not the standard in machines today. So, we've already eliminated almost everyones machine so far, right? Now for the kicker. No current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista. That's right – NONE. To play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content you'll need a HDCP compatible monitor. The bottom line? If you'd like to upgrade to Vista, you'll probably need a whole new machine – including monitor. It almost seems like Microsoft is forcing you into buying a new computer. Is this their payback to the Dell's of the world for all the abuse they've been given? Seems coincidental, that's for sure. This has to be good news for Linux, which will not have any of these lofty prereq's, I'm quite sure. Hopefully Linux vendors will take advantage of this.
–jeremy
Microsoft, Vista, Linux
September 9, 2005 Leave a comment
Just a quick note to let everyone know that LQ will be exhibiting at LWE UK in London. So far it looks like in addition to myself, we'll have at least acid_kewpie, david_ross and XavierP. Last years trip to London was an excellent time and I'm looking forward to getting out there again. See you at Olympia.
–jeremy
LinuxWorld
September 5, 2005 Leave a comment
I have to admit I was quite surprised to hear that MySQL signed a deal (any deal) with SCO. Surely it wasn't true. …and if it was true, it was probably along the lines of SCO buying a support contract and then touting it as a partnership to get PR (which would seem like an odd thing to do, until you consider some of SCO's PR moves). Then a saw the press release on the MySQL site. They must not be proud of that release, because it's not even listed on the press release index page, even though it's dated “3 September 2005”. Now, I understand that MySQL AB is a business that wants (ne, needs) to make money. But I can't imagine that the negative will generated by this deal will not far outweigh any short term monetary gain. While SCO does indeed have some entrenched install niches, it's a dying product. A quick look at SCO's number easily confirm this. As a company that depends on Open Source to survive, partnering with a company that declared the GPL unconstitutional seems like an odd move. Here's a comment from an MySQL AB employee (who made it clear that this was his and not MySQL AB's opinion: “First our users are our users no matter what platform they are on. This isn't about SCO, this is about the users of that platform who deserve to be able to get support. There are still a lot of SCO servers sitting out there and the users deserve to be treated like any other users. They didn't pick SCO's battle and many of them have legacy applications that can not be easily ported or easily rewritten. The choice of a vendor is not always an option.”
While I'm glad to see that they try to have their customers needs in mind, I don't think partnering with SCO is in anybodies best interest (an argument could indeed be made for MySQL simply resuming shipping for the SCO platform I guess). We'll have to see how this one plays out, but I can't imagine it will be good for MySQL AB. If anyone sees any official comments, let me know.
–jeremy
MySQL, SCO, Open Source, GPL
August 26, 2005 1 Comment
Just interviewed Doc Searls for LQ Radio. Fairly informal, which is one thing I like about LQ radio and overall I think it's an interesting interview. We coved a variety of topics including recent OSCON and LinuxWorld trips, Cluetrain, Google, splogs, RSS, Linux Trademarks and more. More than a couple times the discussion lead into a direction that I had written down in my outline. Total running time is 1:27. Take a listen and let me know what you think.
–jeremy
OSCON, LinuxWorld, splog, RSS, Linux, weblog
August 23, 2005 Leave a comment
In just over a year, LQ ISO has facilitated over 1,000,000 Linux ISO downloads. We've added a couple interesting features, such as using GEO IP data to offer you the closest fast mirror (while retaining the freedom to pick any mirror you'd like), along the way. With over 175 distribution versions available from over 430 mirrors, hopefully the site has your favorite distro available for download. If not, please use the suggest link and we'll add it ASAP. Our end goal is to have every distro in distrowatch and then some.
–jeremy
Linux, Open Source, Download
August 11, 2005 Leave a comment
You have to love it when one large company calls for two other competing companies to do something. In this case Martin Fink calls for Sun and IBM to depreciate the CDDL and CPL, respectively. First, having just attended the OSI BOF at OSCON, I am acutely aware of the problem with license proliferation. Beyond being aware of it, I agree that it really is a problem and have even offered LQ's help to the OSI in helping with the problem. That being said, this is just a pot shot and was clearly posturing. Considering one of the main mantra's of the OSS community is that choice is good, it seems odd to try and force everyone to use the GPL. The GPL is a good license for some cases, but it's not for everyone. It's not multiple licenses that are bad, it's the proliferation of needless licenses that is bad. Remember that for instance the CDDL is mostly Mozilla's MPL, with a few changes that Sun felt were necessary. In fact, the CDDL announcement clearly states:
We have carefully reviewed the existing OSI approved licenses and found none of them to meet our needs, and thus have reluctantly drafted a new open source license based on the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1 (“MPL”). We do appreciate the issue of license proliferation, however, and have worked hard to make the Common Development and Distribution License (“CDDL”) as reusable as possible. Additionally, we have attempted to address the problems we perceived in existing open source licenses that led us to conclude that reusing those existing licenses was impractical.
Also, I don't know if it was Martin or the journalist who said “In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted”. This insinuates that the GPL is not copyrighted, which is obviously incorrect. The bottom line is, use the right tool for the job and then license that tool under the right Open Source license. Yes, it's a shame that all code is not compatible. The driving reason behind why people open source code is different though. Don't forget that neither of the two products that are quickly becoming the backbone of the web, Firefox and Apache, are GPL'd. Perhaps the biggest irony here is that IBM and Sun have both done significantly more for the Open Source community than HP has (not to detract from the legitimate contributions HP has made, but let's get some perspective here). He did get the crowd to clap though, and to some I guess that's all that matter.
–jeremy
Open Source, OSI, IBM, Sun, HP, GPL, CDDL, CPL
Jeremy's Blog 
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