Open Source > Linux > LQ
February 6, 2005 2 Comments
Andrew Tridgell has posted a great article over on Groklaw about a few persistent Samba Myths. An interesting read and I'll guess that almost every person who reads the article will learn at least one new thing – I know I did.
–jeremy
February 5, 2005 Leave a comment
The polls are closed and the results are in for the 2004 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. A couple interesting points. The distribution battle continues to get closer and closer every year. Just two years ago Red Hat won with over 26% of the vote. This year the winner only had 19% and 6 distributions had over 10%. The bottom line? There are a lot of quality choices out there that appeal to different people. Another interesting point is that while OOo as a suite cleaned up with almost 85% of the vote, the individual components were no where near as popular. Once again – congratulations to every project that was nominated.
–jeremy
February 5, 2005 Leave a comment
In an interesting move, Microsoft has pre-announced 13 security vulnerabilities. From the link:
* 9 Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical. Some of these updates will require a restart.
* 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft SharePoint Services and Office. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Moderate. These updates may or may not require a restart.
* 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft .NET Framework. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Important. This update will require a restart.
* 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Office. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Critical. These updates will require a restart.
* 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical. These updates will require a restart.
There are a lot of critical's in there, that's for sure. If you're responsible for a Windows machine you may want to get to work early on Tuesday ;) Would seem that Microsoft is preparing for the worst on this one – they even have a webcast setup.
–jeremy
February 3, 2005 Leave a comment
The polls have officially closed and the numbers are being reviewed now. Should have the results for you, along with some commentary, in a couple of days. Thanks to everyone who voted. For the fourth year in a row we had a record turnout. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the 2005 MCA's, please do let me know.
–jeremy
February 2, 2005 Leave a comment
The latest LinuxQuestions.org Podcast. Topics include the 2004 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, an LQ Radio and Skype update, a few LQ reminders, LQ sponsoring the OSBC, Linux kernel security, the Software Freedom Law Center and ESR stepping down from OSI.
–jeremy
February 2, 2005 Leave a comment
Here's a quick follow up to this post. From the article:
The end result will likely be the creation of an invite-only mailing list to which people can choose to report security problems. Whether or not this list is actually used was unimportant to Linus, just that it was an available choice. “Let people vote with their feet. If vendor-sec ends up being where all the 'important' things are discussed – so be it. We've not lost anything, and at worst a 'kernel-security' list would be a way to discuss stuff that was already released by vendor-sec.”
Good to see that this issue was quickly resolved (and correctly resolved IMHO). You can read the entire proposed draft here.
–jeremy
February 1, 2005 Leave a comment
The Software Freedom Law Center has been established to “provide legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software”. From the article:
“The Law Center is being established to provide legal services to protect the legitimate rights and interests of free and open-source software projects and developers, who often do not have the means to secure the legal services they need,” Moglen said in a statement.
Overseeing the Software Freedom Law Center will be Moglen; Diane Peters, OSDL's general counsel; Daniel Weitzner, the principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and author. A nice list of reps indeed. With such a small initial staff, a lot of case work may be unlikely, but this is yet another step (and there seem to be a lot of them lately) in Open Source growing up. In somewhat related news, OSDL recently hired Samba creator Andrew Tridgell and said the same $10 million legal defense fund that will be used to defend Torvalds from legal attack will extend to Tridgell as well. Nice!
–jeremy
February 1, 2005 Leave a comment
Looks like Red Hat is going to open a Lobbying Office Near DC. It's unfortunate that this type of thing is needed, but it's definitely another sign of the maturing Linux market. The article also mentions that RHEL4, due out at LinuxWorld, will ship with the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 certification. While mostly useless in reality, this should help with the aforementioned Government adoption. On a side note, either the picture of Paul is too GIMP'd, or he needs to use slightly less tooth-whitener. Scary.
–jeremy
January 31, 2005 Leave a comment
Found the following quote in this eWeek article interesting:
“Working at Microsoft today vs. five years ago is different,” Kroese said. “If anyone thinks the antitrust case hasn't slowed us down, you're wrong. If I want to meet with a products manager for Windows there needs to be three lawyers in the room. We have to be so careful, we err on the side of caution. We are on such a fine line of conduct.”
Maybe the antitrust case actually did get something accomplished.
–jeremy
January 31, 2005 Leave a comment
Only a few days left to vote in the 2004 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. We have a couple extremely close races going, so your vote could be the difference!
–jeremy
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