Just in from Groklaw, a court has ruled in favour of the GPL in the dispute between the Netfilter team and Sitecom GmbH.
This confirms an earlier preliminary injuction granted by the court.
Category Archives: Linux
Linux wireless stuff
A pair of Linksys WRT54GS’s turned up today. 🙂
They run Linux internally and you can get replacement firmware from a variety of sources (including SVEASoft) to allow you to do funky things like VLAN the ethernet switch and port all your favourite software to it (including Kismet)!
Personally I think Linksys deserve a lot of credit for doing this, and they certainly seem to be getting a lot of customers down here because they’re so easy to hack about and customise. Nice one folks.
SCO looses against Daimler-Chrysler
Groklaw is
reporting that SCO lost all but one of its complaints due to the judge accepting DaimlerChrysler’s motion to dismiss.
The only complaint still on the cards is whether or not they breached the agreement by taking longer than 30 days to reply. That’s all that’s left for them to argue about!
Of course that makes me wonder what use of this are the Redhat, AutoZone and IBM lawyers going to make in their own disputes with SCO.
Useful site of Windows -> Linux software options
Useful table of options for Linux equivalents for Windows software. Useful for those who aren’t aware of the possibilties for leaving the legacy operating system from Microsoft.
Found courtesy of a link on a story from Groklaw.
One in the eye for Microsoft..
Groklaw is reporting that Lindows has
successfully defended itself against Microsofts attempts to prevent them using their "Lindows" name and awarded costs to Lindows!
The AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement
Linux Australia has published
the first draft of their position paper on US – Australia “Free” Trade Agreement and Open Source
This talks about some of the possible chilling effects of the AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement, including many interesting things such as the fact it will prevent Australian consumers from buying DVDs from the US by making it illegal to use a region free DVD player, not what I’d call helping free trade.
There is also a warning on the introduction of software patents through this (although they may already be possible under current statutory instruments) including the fact that had Dan Bricklan been able to patent Visicalc in 1979 then any future spreadsheets until 1999 would have been illegal or required a license from Visicalc. Of course, as we’ve seen in lots of other areas, where there is a monopoly it’s not the market that gets to set the price for such things..
Here is a really illuminating, unambiguous warning on all of this from Bill Gates:
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
And one final, rather chilling, warning from the paper.
Note that the US has constitutional protections which limit these laws when they conflict with “freedom of speech”. Australia has no such limits.
How to Help
If this worries you (and believe me, it should), then please write a letter to your elected representatives, in your own words, telling them why you oppose this. Give reasons for why you think this will be a bad thing for Australia.
Sign the online petition. I’m not a big believer in such things, but if you do write to your representatives then sign this and say that you’ve done so.
Read the Linux Australia FTA page and use some of their suggestions to.
Spread the word! Link to stories like these on your sites, write blog entries about it, spread the word. Democracy can only really function when people know what some of the issues are. Research other effects that haven’t been considered yet. Will Apple iPod’s become illegal because you are not currently legally allowed to rip songs from CD’s you own for your personal use ? etc..
SCO can’t count
In the latest court appearance in the US it’s reported on GrokLaw that SCO have claimed they have identified "300 million lines of Linux code" affected.
OK, so SCO say 300 million lines in the kernel are affected, now how much is that as a percentage ? That’s easy to find out, the kernel sources are publically accessible, so we can count the number of lines and do the math.
Consider the 2.6.2 kernel, the latest at time of writing. It’s easy to work out, we find every file ending in .c or .h (which will be all source code, though a sizeable chunk is likely to be comments), cat it and pass all that through the wordcount program “wc” with the -l option to say only report the number of lines.
So here we go:
$ find linux-2.6.2 -name ‘*.[ch]’ | xargs cat | wc -l
5298593
Oh dear, that looks very strange. Only 5 million lines of text in all the program files (and again, not all of that will be code). Perhaps they were a bit ambitious and counted the lines in all the files ?
$ find linux-2.6.2 -type f | xargs cat | wc -l
6008957
Oops, doesn’t look any better, just one million extra lines! So SCO are out by a factor of 50!
But, if you work it out, there have been 26 release of the 2.2 series kernel, 25 releases of the 2.4 series and 3 releases of the 2.6 kernel which gives us 53 releases total. Now, if we assume that they’re all roughly the same size (which they’re not, they’ve been slowly increasing over time) then that means that there’s probably a total of 300 million lines of code from 2.0.0 through to 2.6.2.
However, I’ve not included the development series of 2.3 and 2.5, so it could be they’re just claiming everything from 2.3 onwards. Or maybe not, given that there were 76 releases in the 2.5 series. Or maybe half the code from 2.0.0 to 2.6.0. The problem here is that nobody knows asides from SCO what they’re talking about, and they won’t tell anyone, even under a court order!
Did Microsoft Give SCO a Loan in the Guise of License Fees ?
A fellow GrokLaw poster has found this letter filed with the SEC and this discussion on the Yahoo Finance board regarding the implications of what it says.
An
earlier letter filed at the SEC says that their bankers, MK, will charge SCO a 6% fee for any equity investment, and a 1% fee for any “senior debt” investment (apparently a loan, the investor is first in line if they go under).
Then in this letter they say they will charge SCO 6% for Sun’s investment and 1% for Microsoft’s investment.
To me that seems an admission that the MS payment was not straight revenue, but instead “senior debt”, in effect a loan!
Of course, if this is the case, and SCO go under when they loose to IBM, then MS will be the first in line for the pickings (if there’s anything left to pay IBM).
Linux things..
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Virus Emails
It’s come to my attention that some people have received viruses from an address claiming to be Gordon Heydon in the csamuel.org domain – this address does not exist (and never has) and the emails in question were forged by a virus on a Telstra subscribers PC. |
Anyway, now that’s out of the way…. I’ve been a bit quiet here recently so just a couple of quick updates on things I’ve been playing with:
An Open Source Instant Messaging system. All specified in XML so it’s easily extensible (and programable) plus has the ability to use connectors to interface to legacy IM systems such as MSN and ICQ. This means you only need to sign into your Jabber server and your Jabber server can sign into MSN, etc, on your behalf and act as a proxy, and your contacts think you’re using the legacy system natively.
My Jabber ID is: chris@jabber.org.au – NB: That is NOT an email address!
Scalable PBS (SPBS) and the MAUI Scheduler
SPBS is a queueing system used in clusters to share out and jobs between the compute nodes. I’ve been doing a fair bit of debugging at work with the guys who are maintaining this and they’ve been doing sterling work. Respect guys!
The MAUI scheduler interfaces with SPBS (and OpenPBS) and does clever tricks to work out the most efficient way to execute jobs in the PBS queue(s) based on policies and, most importantly, what the user tells SPBS is the maximum amount of time their job will run for.
NPACI Rocks is a Linux distribution specifically for cluster computing. It’s based on RedHat 7.3 for the IA32 release (and there’s an IA64 version based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 2.1) and includes virtually everything you could want for running a cluster (apart from SPBS mentioned above, they still use the old OpenPBS at the moment).
Very impressed with it so far, especially the automated installation tools and the PXE network boot support for automatic installs. The only issue I’ve had with it has been its use of the autofs automounter, I much prefer permanent mounts and autofs also doesn’t work with our preferred way of partitioning up user areas so that we guarantee they fit on a single DLT.
Mandrake Linux 9.2 has arrived!
…well for MandrakeClub members at least! Grabbed it via BitTorrent (I’m a club member) – my first (and probably only) use of a Peer2Peer application (and legitimate too!).
I’ve been playing around with the pre-releases already and I’m impressed, but I need a bit of time to burn the ISO’s onto CD’s and have a real play with the release versions..
…and that’s about it for now!
Mandrake 9.2 Release Candidate 2 is now out!
The release candidate 2 for Mandrake Linux 9.2 is now out – read about it here including where to download it from.