ZDNet UK reports on Caldera’s new proprietary Linux code, commenting on “a growing trend among Linux distributors to
develop proprietary code to differentiate themselves.”

A year after several high-profile sites were hit with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, most sites are still unprepared to deal with intrusions. ZDNet reports that defenses are almost so uniformly weak that it probably wouldn’t take much work to repeat the damage of last year’s attacks.

– By Grant Gross –

With a new $15 million investment to play with, the Gnome services company formerly known as Helix Code has more resources to convert non-believers to the Open Source/Free Software desktop and to give those potential converts even more reason to make the switch.

The commercial face to Gnome, which recently changed its name to Ximian, announced this week that Charles River Ventures and Battery Ventures invested the money, and CTO Miguel de Icaza seems to have dozens of ideas to improve the Open Source desktop experience.

“We can tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before,” says de Icaza. “This opens the door to many developments … and we can help bring Gnome to more people.”

One of the top priorities, de Icaza says, is to develop relationships with companies such as hardware vendors, so that Open Source software can come pre-installed. “We’re trying to win users over from Windows, and we’re trying to get people to make the choice for Free Software,” he says. “We need to have the tools for people to actually make the choice, instead of saying, ‘We don’t have the resources to train millions of users.’ “

Among the features this investment will help Ximian speed along:

• Ximian set-up tools, a group of easy-to-use system administration tools that would replace the “really, really bad” tools that each Linux distribution now has, de Icaza says. Simple things, such as setting the date, are still too difficult for the end user in most distributions, he adds. The Ximian tools would work across Linux distributions and other operating systems that run Gnome, including Solaris and *BSD.
• Location management for laptops: A set of tools that would allow a laptop user to save his laptop settings for different locations where he uses the laptop. The user could change all the system settings including the Internet connection commands and the printer configuration — even the time zone — with a click of the mouse.
• Time travel: Have you ever messed with your computer, hoping to make it work better, only to mess something else up? Time travel would allow you to “snapshot” your computer at any point, so you could reset your computer’s settings to the way they were two days ago, or a week ago. “It lets you travel back in the configuration of the system,” de Icaza says.

de Icaza says end users no longer seem to be scared off by the old perception that Linux lacks a human-usable desktop, but are still worried by mysterious warnings in the command line interface, by setup problems, and by lack of plug-and-play support. These are among the issues he plans to tackle with the new investment.

“I think Gnome has reached the point in which, yes, we do have the applications, and yes, we do have the usability, yes, we can right now replace the desktop system if you are an expert systems administrator,” he says. “But we need to work together with other companies, we need to work together with other distributions to make sure that the distributions people pick are end-user enabled.”

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Network World Fusion reports on the appointment of Netscape’s next president, Jim Bankoff. The article says that “Bankoff will be responsible for directing business operations and managing the continued growth of Netscape.com and for the Netbusiness initiative, an online business resource Web site targeted at smaller business owners.” Oh, and don’t forget the Web browsers.

ZDNet wants to know if your next computer will be a Mac. Specifically, will it be the new G4 PowerBook released at San Francisco’s Macworld conference? With a titanium case, long battery life, and screamingly fast processor, will Apple’s new hardware become the sexiest consumer machine ever to run UNIX? For $4,000 and the patience needed to deal with Apple’s online store, you can find out for yourself.

TRUSTe, one of the Internet industry’s larger privacy organizations, has done an about-face, stating that it will now support laws regulating Internet privacy. Full story at Computer News Daily. In privacy activist circles, TRUSTe has a reputation for looking the other way when its members violate voluntary policies; any legislation it might endorse will be interesting, to say the least.

LWN.net posts the weekly summary of news and announcements for the Zope community: Announcements for New York’s Linux World Expo and EuroZopeCon in Amsterdam; Zop 2.3 beta 2 status report; All about “Zope Zen.”

A post at LWN.net announces the release of Jython 2.0, a Java implementation of the Python programming language. “It allows users to compile Python source code to
Java byte codes, and run the resulting bytecodes on any Java
Virtual Machine.”

Last week, Salon’s Simon Garfinkel wrote about Java. Specifically, he wrote some things about Java that were not very nice. In response, the Java advocacy crowd wrote in to say some things that were not very nice. He has now written a response to address those who took exception to his opinion.

LWN.net has the mid-month summary of news and announcements for the Python community: Keep your eyes peeled for the first alpha release of Python 2.1; Improve line-by-line file acccess speeds; Introducing pydoc, a tool for browsing Python documentation.