07.19.08
Posted in Boycott Novell, News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
New versions of Gibraltar, Vixta, Slitaz, TFM, xPUD, CentOS (Live), Absolute, and Webconverger GNU/Linux have been released.
F/OSS
Microsoft
- The suspicious death of XP support
As Microsoft slowly kills off Windows XP itself — over the protest of many users — it’s still unclear exactly when Redmond will formally cut off all support for its old OS. But one reader’s experience in dealing with a series of update fiascos over the last few months suggests that XP support may actually have expired already, and under suspicious circumstances.
“I lost my XP system near the middle of May, and it took me until the end of June to get it back,” the reader wrote. “What happened was that, suddenly, all of my hardware disappeared from the Windows device manager as did my administrator privileges. I had a lot of licensed apps on my system, and the prospect of starting with a fresh install was too daunting, so I decided to recover instead. During this time, I spent over eight cumulative hours talking to Microsoft’s Indian ’support technicians.’ I was at least six hours into that ordeal before I finally spoke with one that had a small clue what he was talking about.”
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07.16.08
Posted in Boycott Novell at 5:53 am by Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
Openfiler 2.3, GNUSTEP 1.9 and BLAG 90000 have been released.
- KDE 4.1 RC1 Release Announcement
- IBM Sells 60 Teraflops Power6-Linux Super in Holland
Server maker IBM has spent more than a decade taking on the supercomputer market, and has become one of the big dogs, if not the big dog, when it comes to building different styles of high performance computer clusters. Last week, the company announced its first big Power6-based Power 575 supercomputer running Linux, nicknamed Huygens after the famous Dutch scientist, which was sold to SARA Computing and Networking, the national supercomputing network built and managed by the national government in The Netherlands.
- Persistent Configuration Options For X.Org Drivers
When it comes to proprietary drivers, AMD has almost completely eliminated their dependence on the xorg.conf and NVIDIA too is eliminating their need of this method for configuring the X server. With the fglrx Linux driver, ATI/AMD has developed the AMDPCSDB, or the AMD Persistent Configuration Store Data-Base.
- Run a Business Network on Linux: Remote Help Desks
- Google’s Android to kickstart mobile Linux
Google’s Android project could kickstart location-aware advertising by enabling the benefits of mobile Linux, experts predict.
- For Linux security, principle of least privilege prevails, says Red Hat security expert
- Linux can save us
In case you haven’t noticed, the economy is collapsing.
[…]
What does this have to do with Linux? Everything.
With both people and companies having to squeeze a nickel’s worth of good out of every penny, how long do you think people will be paying Microsoft for its imperfect operating systems and office suites?
- Event aims to bring Lindependence to one California town
What is going well? Starks reports there will be some national coverage, including a possible National Public Radio feature and partial coverage from Fox News. Also, there are rumblings of other towns that may wish to try the same kind of event. Both Starks and Cafiero have already been asked by others if they could replicate this event.
- [Tongue in Cheek] Windows Now Open Source
- Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID
My tests showed that the choice of filesystem makes a huge impact on performance, with XFS being substantially quicker for output on parity RAIDs, though in some configurations, such as 256KB-chunk RAID-10 block input, XFS can be slower than ext3.
Linux
Laptops
- Evidence mounts for August Eee PC carnage with $299 Dell E launch
For that price, assuming everything we’ve heard so far is correct, you’ll get an instant-on Linux distro running atop Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom processor, a 1,024 x 600 display, 3x USB, a wee SSD, integrated webcam, WiFi, and more in a 0.82-1.22-inch thick sled weighing about 2.2-pounds.
- Dell said to be planning launch of low-cost notebook in August
- CyberLink Sees Opportunities in Netbooks, Linux
Multimedia software maker CyberLink sees a lot of opportunities in the fast-growing netbook segment of the computer market, from online access to files stored on home PCs to multimedia software made for Linux OSs.
Some of the most popular netbooks, or mini-laptops, being launched come with options for far less storage space than mainstream laptops, such as Asustek’s Eee PC 1000, Eee PC 901and Acer’s Aspire one.
Many of them also run on a Linux OS, such as Linpus Linux Lite on the Aspire one and Linux OS by Xandros on the Eee PC. These netbooks can also come with Windows XP instead.
F/OSS
Microsoft, Google
Apple
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06.12.08
Posted in Boycott Novell, Novell, Opensuse at 2:04 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Headline modified (was: “OpenSUSE Board Member and Colleagues/Devs Launch Smear Campaign Against Boycott Novell (Updated)”) due to uncertainty or lack of sufficiently concrete evidence
How low Novell has sunk…
Would Novell or its community resort to gaming the system in Digg, FS Daily, and Ubuntu Forums? Would new accounts be opened merely to fuel this effort and “yes men” engage in a sockpuppet act? It sure seems so. (Hi, Francis)
Congratulations, Novell and/or OpenSUSE. You have reached an all-time low. Lower than Miguel de Icaza’a threats.
Rebutting all the libel you guys have spread would not be worth the effort. So, we’ll finish off with the famous S.u.S.E. words: “Have a lot of fun!” █
“Some years back, Microsoft practiced a lot of dirty tricks using online mavens to go into forums and create Web sites extolling the virtues of Windows over OS/2. They were dubbed the Microsoft Munchkins, and it was obvious who they were and what they were up to.”
–Source
Update: In the IRC channel it has just been pointed out that “some openSUSE articles have shown up on FSDaily’s queue and are being upvoted by many [of] the same people.”
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05.22.08
Posted in Boycott Novell at 10:58 am by Roy Schestowitz
“What Microsoft really wanted was that ISO stamp of approval to use as a marketing tool. And just like your mother told you, when they get what they want and have their way with you, they’re probably not gonna call you in the morning.”
–Tim Bray
By this stage, even the MSBBC has broadly commented about widespread skepticism over the announcement from Microsoft.
Just to repeat what it is we’re referring to, shortly after the farce that was an ISO process, Microsoft got what it wanted (see quote at the top) and moved on to playing defense. Yes, it made an announcement. It made a promise, but didn’t present an actual product. It has been agreed by some folks that this whole thing seems like vapourware, whose main purpose is to freeze the market and EE&E [1, 2].
Thanks to help from some readers, we’ve accumulated responses from more important figures and key ‘balconies’. Let’s go through them in turn.
Novell was happy. It has to be happy.
Microsoft’s buddies at Novell welcomed the announcement.
“Microsoft’s support for ODF in Office is a great step that enables customers to work with the document format that best meets their needs, and it enables interoperability in the marketplace,” said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell.
“Novell is proud to be an industry leader in cross-platform document interoperability through our work in the Document Interoperability Initiative, the Interop Vendor Alliance and with our direct collaboration with Microsoft in our Interoperability Lab. We look forward to continuing this work for the benefit of customers across the IT spectrum.”
Michael Meeks (Novell):
The Microsoft announcement that they will natively support ODF is at some level encouraging. And better - MS will join the ODF TC and contribute: which could be really interesting (be careful what you wish for). Of course this may end up being really good for ODF: it all depends if the blatant psuedo-technical competitive marketing continues in the (already dysfunctional) TC context.
Simon Phipps (Sun’s open source chief):
Of course, I might also reflect on the fact they are finally doing exactly what Stephe Walli said they ought to do to kill ODF. But for now, it’s huge, warm congratulations on giving your customers the freedom to leave and the confidence to stay - and a small British mutter of “about bloody time”.
Stephane Rodriguez (OOXML crappiness guru):
First of all, Microsoft is a huge Office licensing monopoly. It’s so big it even surpasses Windows in sales. Any decline in Office licensing would be dramatic for Microsoft’s future. With that alone, you know that any announcement from Microsoft that they are willing to interoperate with other people’s software, namely applications, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Here is how, with the release of Office 2007, Microsoft intends to keep their monopoly in Office licensing :
Phase 1 - as long as there is not enough Office 2007 documents out there, make sure that customers understand that only Office 2007 can reliably migrate binary files to the new file formats. Hence the backwards compatibility claim which are part of the OOXML ISO marketing diversion (ironically inflated by critics).
[…]
Phase 2 - there is enough Office 2007 documents out there. Game over.
With that said, a few more words.
[…]
Mark Shuttleworth (of Canonical/Ubuntu) about the ISO process:
TG: Recently you publicly criticised the ISO for the way the way it handled the voting on Microsoft’s OOXML; how seriously do you think ISO’s credibility has been damaged by that episode?
MS [Mark Shuttleworth] Very seriously [for] anybody who is passionate about open standards. The ISO process has traditionally worked very well; it’s quite an academic, considered process, but it really wasn’t designed to handle a case with very, very vigorous corporate lobbying and an enormous amount of money being spent to try to get a particular outcome. And with hindsight, there were a number of very serious flaws in the process.
stegu at <NO> OOXML:
Of course, only time will tell if they will deliver on this promise, but the tone has changed dramatically, and this might actually be a good time to celebrate. We wish to welcome Microsoft to the party, even though they are very late and managed to make a fool of themselves in the process of trying to fight this outcome in every way possible.
There was also this bad article from Reuters, which yet again shows that journalists can confuse and mix open standards with open source (code). See our highlights in red below.
EU says to study Microsoft’s open-source step
[…]
Without adding any special software to Office, users will be able to open documents sent to them in the open source Open Document Format (ODF), the company said. Users will also be able to edit and save documents in that format.
The Commission has fined Microsoft 1.68 billion euros ($2.7 billion) since 2004, in large part for the company’s failure to provide proper interoperability between its dominant Windows operating system and other software.
The Times of India made a similar mistake quite recently. Microsoft capitalises on these stupidities which wrongly characterise it in trade journals as an embracer of “open source”. This is neither good nor accurate. █
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05.13.08
Posted in Boycott Novell at 1:05 am by Roy Schestowitz
[Correction 14/05/2008: Alex insisted that “All I can see is a single developer speculated that writing an IMAP handler in C# would be easier. That’s very much not what that blog post was saying; it was saying GNOME was contaminated via Evolution with a new Mono dependency for IMAP, which is totally wrong.”]
“One Free Software Foundation-backed group–aptly called the End Software Patents Project–is using the [Bilski] case as a platform to argue that no form of software should ever qualify for a patent. Red Hat also argued that the “exclusionary objectives” of software patents conflict with the nature of the open-source system and open up coders to myriad legal hazards.”
–Court case could redefine business method, software patents
Referring to an article that we mentioned here a few days ago, Slashdot has just picked up the modified headline “Microsoft ‘Shared Source’ Attempts to Hijack FOSS.” Is this news to anyone? Can Novell pretend that it’s unaware of the issue? If Microsoft gets its way, then ‘open source’ and software patents will no longer be seen as collisional. Why would you mind? Because GNOME continues to be contaminated with a clone of the shared-sourced .NET and this time it’s Evolution, the E-mail client. [Minor update: clarifications in this subsequent discussion]
As we warned before, Silverlight, OOXML, DRM and all sorts of other nasties might sooner or later accompany this harmful adoption of Microsoft technologies inside the core of GNU/Linux distributions. Glyn Moody shrewdly refers to such things as “poisoning” in his latest column.
Imagine, though, a day when open source programs run well on Windows. Given that the installed base of Windows is currently much larger than that for GNU/Linux, this means that many open source developers are likely to start paying more attention to Microsoft’s platform, even to the detriment of GNU/Linux versions. As a result, some coders will be more amenable to including “optimised” technologies like Silverlight in their Windows versions. And so it will begin: the gradual pollution of free software with proprietary elements and software patents.
If Microsoft’s old approach can be likened to Hamlet’s attempt to “take arms against a sea of troubles” - a futile effort - it’s new, more subtle, tactic might be characterised as poisoning that sea. As we know from real life, that’s all-too easy, and particularly hard to prevent, especially as it can occur very slowly and imperceptibly to begin with.
To prevent the poison building up to noxious levels, open source projects need to be extremely wary when responding to Microsoft’s chummy enquiries, or they may ultimately find themselves repeating Hamlet’s more famous quotation from the opening of the same speech.
What would GNOME’s spokesman say in his defense this time? That you can compile GNOME with the exclusion of Tomboy? Fine. That you could choose a different E-mail client? Fine. How much of GNOME would one have to castrate in order to keep it Microsoft-free and free of software patents that Microsoft granted Novell exclusive rights to? And as it gets harder and harder to do so, who would actually bother? As with most posts that cover this issue, backlash filled with rudeness is expected and since the information above seems factual, it’ll be safe to close this item and disable comments.
By the way, Sam Varghese published another scathing piece about Jeff Waugh, but it gets tedious and redundant. It seems very unproductive because it fails to address the real questions that are practical, as opposed to personal. Mono is coming out of the closet and there is hardly any point in denying it. GNOME is becoming a .NET-rich environment that clones even patent-encumbered and standards-hostile functionality. And that’s a real shame. █
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Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.