Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

SCO – Ultimate Hypocrites ?

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Oh dear oh dear oh dear, SCO do seem to be able to make a complete pigs ear out of things, don’t they.

First of all they say Linux has copied code, then they give two examples, the first being a malloc() routine appearing in V3 Unix and written in 1973 (the algorithm appeared in a book in 1968) and released under a BSD license by Caldera (now SCO – yes the same ones pursuing the law suit) and the second being part of the Berkeley Packet Filter suite written by Lawrence Berkeley Labs and released under the BSD license. Read more here.

Then they say the license that many open source projects are released under, the GPL, is worthless and bad, and yet the same day announce that they’ll be using the Samba 3.0.0 release in their systems. Now guess which license Samba is released under ? Read more here.

To cap it all off, their webserver, according to Netcraft, is running Apache on Linux!

Have a look at what it, and the other systems it shares space with, run, by looking at the Netcraft Summary for the IP block it lives on says.

Lots and lots of Linux, some Windows and no SCO or Unixware…

Mathematical Model shows Open Source can fix bugs faster than Closed Source

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The Ars Technica website has picked up on an article in the journal Nature about a pre-print of a paper written by two theoretical physicists from the UK on the arXiv.org e-Print archive that includes a mathematical model about why Open Source projects can inherently fix problems quicker than a Closed Source project for the same parameters.



The nub of their argument is that it is the frequent release of projects and the slew of bug reports that come back from these rapid releases that result in this effect.



Their conclusions seem to be:



  • "our model shows that software projects can converge to a bug-free state even with imperfect programmers"
  • "closed source projects are always slower to converge to a bug-free state than open source projects at constant parameters"
  • "the quality of open source project programmers does not need to be as high as those of close source projects in order to achieve the same rate of convergence to bug-free programs."
  • " the abilities of the maintainer has a much less dramatic influence" than "having better programmers"
  • "ignoring bug reports on already modified code is the best option for closed source projects; this even outperforms open source at short time scales, because the programmers only work on fully buggy parts, hence the bug fixing rate is higher"


Whilst the paper has a number of assumptions (they acknowledge them and proposes further work to confirm or refute their validity) it is an interesting model that could inform developers on either side of the fence on how to speed up bug fixing. This can only be good for everyone.

SCO, the 10-Q form, IBM, Linux and Microsoft

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As most people involved with Linux and who aren’t hiding under a rock will know, SCO have begun legal action against IBM over alleged trade secret breaches in the US. They’ve also been bad mouthing the Linux community and claiming that code from Linux has been taken from their UNIX codebase. To this end LinuxTag and various German Linux companies have obtained an injunction against SCO in Germany to prevent them from repeating allegations which they refuse to publically prove.
Anyway, one of the latest developments in this have been quite interesting, in that Microsoft went and bought a UNIX license from SCO. The conspiracy theorists went ballistic over this, saying that MS were essentially funding SCO to damage Linux.
In the light of all this, SCO’s recent filing of it’s form 10-Q (a US Securities and Exchange Commission document, legally binding) makes for very interesting reading. The brief notes are:

  • SCO believes that the legal action may damage their business in the long run.
  • Apart from MS there has been only one other (unnamed) SCOSource licensee.
  • These two licensees contributed over $8 million to SCO’s revenue.
  • The unnamed SCOSource licensee has also been offered up to 210,000 shares of SCO at $1.83 a share. SCO is currently trading around $10!
  • SCO describes the SCOSource UNIX license as “perpetual”.

For more info read on….

Continue reading →

Microsoft kills of Linux Anti Virus Software

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Well Microsoft have done it again.



They’ve bought out a Romanian Anti-Virus software company, most of whos business is making software for Linux gateways to protect vulnerable Windows systems from virus attack.
Guess what’s the first casualty of the takeover ? Yup, the anti-virus range.



So much for the anti-trust judgement..


Sources:


New photo gallery up!

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OK folks, the
new photo gallery is now up and running, with all the photos from the old one copied over. The captions from the old photos still need to be copied though.

Open Source Windows ?

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Here’s an interesting story, what happens when the philosophy that brought you Linux, *BSD, Apache, etc, starts to set its sights on reworking that software which comes from Redmond ?



ReactOS, that’s what!


These strange people have decided that it would be a wizard wheeze to create a Windows NT 4 compatible operating system, including device driver compatability.



Now, to be fair, they’ve got a long way to go, but the initial reports on their website look promising, it can already self-host (i.e. you can compile ReactOS under ReactOS using GCC) but the screenshots don’t show it looking like an NT gui (a lot to do before then I suspect).



Interestingly if you use Windows you can download a copy of Bochs, the freeware x86 emulator with a ready setup version of ReactOS from the downloads section of the ReactOS website.



Linux users will need to download Bochs separately and use the
ReactOS images that are available.