Pilot Online reports that the city of Virginia Beach paid Microsoft $129,000 after the municipality could not find licenses for 826 of the Microsoft products it uses. Add to that fine — or licensing correction fee — an estimated $81,000 in staff time during the month long records inspection.

LinuxPlanet’s Michael Hall evaluates Linux security packages with graphical front ends. “We took a look at a pair of GUI-based firewalling solutions for Linux: one a commercial offering from Stormix Technologies (Storm Firewall), and the other a free software project that integrates with the GNOME desktop (Firestarter). Both provide graphical front-ends to ipchains, taking some of the pain out of building tailor-made firewalls for home networks.”

Slashdot readers discuss an article in the Java Developers Journal that talks about tensions between the Java and Linux communities.

Upside Today has a column on the coming of OS X: “After years of living in the Linux shadows, the BSD community finally appears to be
preparing for a move to the head of the class.

Thanks to the imminent arrival of MacOS X, the next generation of
Apple’s Macintosh operating system that incorporates
substantial portions of the BSD code base, self-described ‘BSD bigots’
are contemplating a future in which more computers users run versions
of BSD than rival Linux.”

– By Grant Gross –

Envisioning a bumper sticker saying “FREE Darwin,” a long-time Macintosh fan and developer has launched a project to create a GNU General Public License version of the Apple-published BSD named after the father of evolution.

Michael L. Love, a post-doctoral associate in the molecular biology and genetics department of Cornell University in upstate New York, announced the project this week. It’s hosted on SourceForge.

“[The Apple Public Source License] is very restrictive compared to GPL, and the software will not be truly free until Darwin itself is GPL’d,” says Love, known as proclus online. “I am somewhat negotiable on this point, because the BSD folks have some good licenses, too.”

Although Darwin, the BSD foundation for Apple’s OS X, remains under the Apple license, Love hopes his project can work on porting the vast library of free software to Darwin. “The business of the [GNU] distribution is to port free software to Darwin so that the GUI and the tools, such as gtk-gnutella and the GIMP, will be GPL,” he says. “GNU-Darwin will be about having a Darwin distribution that is as free as possible. GNU-Darwin is Darwin itself, but overlaid with free software.”

So Love says his project will abide by the conditions of the Apple license, and he says he’ll be an advocate for the Apple license “until Apple sees fit to FREE Darwin.”

“Personally, I consider GPL as the ideal and I think that the notion of a GNU-Darwin
reflects that,” he adds. “Free software is stepping out to the front in so many ways now … I feel that Apple must free Darwin in order to keep up in the industry.”

Rob Braun, a Darwin developer and contributing author to the Unix System Administration Handbook, Third Edition, has talked to Love about the project, which seems OK,” but he sees some potential for licensing conflict. “I think we need to look into the licensing issues a bit more,” Braun says.

Braun also is concerned about the GNU-Darwin project sending code changes back to Darwin’s package maintainers, and he’s “a bit disappointed” that Love hasn’t done so yet.

But Love says GNU-Darwin does not yet modify the Darwin source base. “Rather, I have ported free software to Darwin OS,” he says. “I have notified most of the package maintainers of the ports, and I plan to submit my changes to the respective free software projects as soon as they are ready so that they can be merged with the core code base.”

If the project makes changes to Darwin — one might be to implement Beowulf-style clustering — it will make the changes available to the Darwin project, he says.

Love, a protein crystallographer, became interested in Macintoshes during college, and has never been a Windows or DOS user. He has helped people in his field get their labs working and saw Linux being used “about two years before Red Hat’s IPO.”

“I realized at that time that I needed to learn system administration under Linux in
order to help my clients and my future employers, as well,” he says. “I was lucky
that I had already learned Unix (Irix and Ultrix) as part of my crystallographic pursuits.” He first experimented with Linux and OpenBSD m68k, and after he owned his first PowerMac, he made LinuxPPC his operating system.

When Apple announced that an Open Source BSD would be used to create OS X, Love immediately registered on the Darwin site. “When Darwin 1.2 was released, there was some talk of community distributions, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” he says.

So far, the GNU-Darwin project is in its infancy, and Love was the lone developer listed on its SourceForge page Friday afternoon. “I will be happy to carry forward the distribution on my
own at this time, until I get too busy elsewhere, or until I am joined by others,” he says.

Love is already using Darwin as his primary OS, and he expects scientists who love Apple to flock to the Open Source Darwin X11 interface, instead of OS X, which they’ve found unimpressive, he says. “Other GPL interfaces are also available for Darwin, and they may even
do much better,” he says. “Clearly, GNU-Darwin could play a major role in the adoption of free software among Apple’s users, if it wins some support in the Darwin Community.”

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

From The Register: A Korean software developer has created the first “embedded Linux smart phone.” The IMT-2000, still in demo stage, is loaded with Tynux Embedded Linux and is both a cellular phone and PDA.

From LWN.net: “Debian’s non-US archive has been moved into a package pool. This is
the start of the transition to package pools For a quick peek at
the non-US pool, start here. Non-US was moved first because it is a
small archive that will let us find out what breaks without affecting
all of Debian. So far nothing significant has broken. Package
pools have long been the holy grail of Debian archive maintenance,
discussed over and over for years, with many benefits, but rather
difficult to implement. It’s great to finally have them.”

The Register reports on Red Hat’s decision to drop the Sparc version of Red Hat Linux 7 “due to insufficient
demand.”

The Register comments on Dell’s annoucement of its investment in Eazel: “>
Intel assembler (and bug-finder par excellence) Dell Computer was fingered in
speculation yesterday that it is poised to invest in open source desktop outfit Eazel and
anoint GNOME as its preferred Linux desktop …
But let’s take a quick reality check, first. Many of you will be thinking: ‘You mean Dell
Computer actually has a Linux desktop?’ and, quite rightly, concluding that this isn’t the
case at all.”

CNet follows up on stories about a new computer worm propagating itself by email that masquerades
as a Shockwave Flash movie. “Although experts agreed that the payload does not seriously damage a victim’s computer, they offered different
assessments of the risk of infection.

The virus, dubbed ‘Creative,’ comes in an email with the header ‘A great Shockwave
flash movie,’ … and has several aliases,
including Prolin, Shockwave, W32/Prolin@mm, TROJ_SHOCKWAVE and
TROJ_PROLIN. Prolin is short for ‘Pro-LINUX,’ so-called because the virus inserts harmless messages
on victim computers plugging the open-source operating system.”