zez.org: about code has a short and sweet article covering the joys of perl in the shell written by BÃ¥rd Farstad.

–pkej

EuroLinux publishes European software patent horror gallery

Munich, 2000-11-20 – The Association for the Promotion of a Free
Informational Infrastructure (FFII), member of the EuroLinux
Alliance
of software publishers and non profit associations, has published a
database of software patents granted by the EPO, together with
some impressive examples, statistics and articles. This database
shows
that software patents granted by the European Patent Office are even
more trivial than software patents granted in the United States.
This
“European Software Patent Horror Gallery” will be introduced on
November 21 11-12:30 in Munich, Germany, with special guest Richard
Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom.
Currently, pure software patents granted by the European Patent
Office
are considered as illegal or abusive by national courts in Europe.
However, this situation may change by the end of the week if the
exception on computer programs is removed from the European Patent
Convention. It would then be no longer legal to conduct automated
medical diagnoses in Europe. The same applies to numerous economic
or
social activities such as conducting of examinations in schools,
bringing traders together at the stock exchange, generating
purchasing
lists from cooking recipes, setting prices dynamically, learning
languages by comparing one’s pronunciation with that of a teacher.

All
these activities would infringe on European patents, as soon as they
are implemented through software. Other EPO patents encumber network
standards such as MIME and CGI and squatter the operating system
level
by occupying thousands of basic methods of memory arithmetics,
making
programming in these fields a hazardous endeavour.

FFII’s patent data specialist, Arnim Rupp, recommends that anybody
discussing about software patents should first take a look at that
database: “By browsing through the EPO’s patents you will quickly
find out that this has nothing to do with protecting software, let
alone protecting innovative solutions. What this is really about is
occupying complete problems. Fortunately for us, these hilariously
trivial and gruesomely broad EPO patent claims are so far not
necessarily enforceable before European courts. The American mega
corporations, to whom most of these illegally granted patents
belong,
are still waiting for a change in the European Patent Convention. If
the Diplomatic Conference sets the wrong signal in Munich next week,
Germany will hopefully abide by the words of the Ministry of Justice
and refuse to ratify the new European Patent Convention. The
situation
is serious enough to justify this. The European patent system will
work one way or another. The issue at stake now is how to keep 30000
mines from detonating and how to give back basic legal security to
European IT enterprises and citizens.”

For Daniel Rödding, CEO of a software enterprise in Paderborn, the
situation is very serious: “By browsing the FFII’s patent data base
you can quickly grasp what software patents mean for most European
IT
companies today. On such a minefield small software companies hardly
have any chance anymore. For my company I have already drawn the
consequences: Starting from mid of next year we will conduct large
parts of our software development in a country which does not yet
have
such a highly developed patent law system and in which a change of
the
legal situation cannot be expected for the near future. In certain
fields the development of software is becoming too dangerous in
Germany. Given the long-term legal risks, continuing with this
activity in Germany would be irresponsible from a small
entrepreneur’s
point of view.” Same applies to the rest of Europe.

So far already 200 software companies and 55000 signatories of the
Eurolinux Petition have expressed themselves in a similar way.
Economists worldwide have confirmed that the introduction of patents
in the software economy tends to harm innovation.

Meanwhile at the “Diplomatic Conference” patent representatives of
20
European countries will be negotiating about a “Base Proposal for
the
Revision of the European Patent Convention” drafted by EPO president
Dr. Ingo Kober. Therein the EPO proposes among others to stipulate
universal patentability (Art 52) and to confer special legislative
rights on the administrative council of the EPO (Art 33). The rules
or
procedure have been determined by the EPO in such a way that
national
patent delegations can overrule individual items only by a 2/3
majority. Otherwise the will of the EPO will become legally binding
in
all European countries whose parliaments do not opt out of the
European Patent Convention (EPC).

The “European Software Patent Horror Gallery” will be introduced on
November 21 11-12:30 by near the EPO in Forum der Technik, Helios
conference room. FFII members will respond to questions from
journalists regarding this database and the EuroLinux petition to
protect software innovation in Europe. Special guest Richard
Stallman,
founder of League for Programming Freedom, will introduce the
situation related to software patents in the United States.

References
European Software Patents: Database and Examples –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/examples/

Eurolinux Petition for a software patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/index.en.html

Dr. Swen Kiesewetter-Köbinger: Über die Patentprüfung von
Programmen für Datenverarbeitungsanlagen — Probleme und
Ungereimtheiten der Softwarepatentierung aus der Sicht eines Prüfers
am Deutschen Patent- und Markenamt –
http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/prina/patpruef.pdf

Comparative report about the examination practice for software
patents at the US, European and Japanese patent offices –
http://www.jpo-miti.go.jp/saikine/repo242.htm

German Ministry of Justice demands that the computer program
exception not be removed at the coming conference and threatens to
opt
out of the EPC otherwise –
http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,100120,00.html

Protecting Informational Innovation against the Abuse of the
Patent System –
http://swpat.ffii.org/

A simplistic but true introduction to the problem (German only) – http://www.save-our-software.de/

GNU Project – http://www.gnu.org

Software Patents – League for Programming Freedom –
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/

Diplomatic Conference to revise the European Patent Convention –
http://www.european-patent-office.org/epo/dipl_conf/documents.htm

The EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org

EuroLinux Sponsors – http://petition.eurolinux.org/sponsors

Statements for Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/statements

The EuroLinux Public Consultation –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation

Softwarepatente – SPIEGEL ONLINE – 27. Oktober 2000
http://www.spiegel.de/druckversion/0,1588,100120,00.html

The EuroLinux File on Software Patents –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/reference

About EuroLinux – www.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations
united to promote and protect a vigorous European Software Culture
based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source
Software. Companies members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or
sell
software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating
systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows.

The EuroLinux Alliance launched on 2000-06-15 an electronic petition
to protect software innovation in Europe. The EuroLinux petition has
received so far massive support from more than 50.000 European
citizens, 2000 corporate managers and 200 companies.

The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organized in 1999, together with the
French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux
and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of
the
www.freepatents.org web site to promote and protect innovation and
competition in the European IT industry.

About FFII – www.ffii.org
FFII is a non-profit association which promotes the development of
open interfaces, open source software and freely available public
information. FFII coordinates a workgroup on software patents
which is sponsored by successful German software publishers. FFII
is member of the EuroLinux Alliance.

Derek Burney says Corel is ‘prepared to look at any possibility’ in this National Post story on the dark future for Corel Linux. Mr. Burney said it is clear the Linux operating system business is not all it should be. –garym

Userlocal.com reviews Checkinstall: “CheckInstall has taken on the challenge of easily installing/tracking/removing applications compiled and installed from source. Not only does CheckInstall take on this challenge, it triumphs with glory. How does it do this? After doing “./configure” and then “make” you simply su to root and type “checkinstall” instead of “make install”. after typing checkinstall you will be prompted with…” –keskoy

Linux Today posts the KDE release schedule.

Linus Torvalds has posted another update to the kernel.

Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2000 18:19:33 -0800 (PST)
                From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@transmeta.com
                To: Kernel Mailing List linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
                Subject: Linux 2.4.0-test11
                 
                Ok, test11 is out there. The most noticeable fixes since pre7 are the
                Athlon lockup fix, the PCI routing handling, and getting the Joliet stuff
                right for iso9660.
                 
                                Linus
                 
                ----
                 
                 - final:
                    - Patrick Mochel: export the ACPI facs table in /proc too
                    - Brian Gerst: Video4Linux cleanup (named initializers)
                    - me: only use irq13 for FP errors for external FPU's. This
                      fixes the Atlon FP exception lockups.
                    - me: add a new intel signature to the PIRQ table matching logic.
                      Make the matching match both reported and actual device ID (with a
                      preference for the reported). Fixes PCMCIA on NEC Versa laptops.
                    - iso9660: fix Joliet filename argument order bug introduced in pre7
                    - Highmem: p_page -> b_page typo.
                    - me: don't allow pending FPU exceptions without an FPU context..
                 
                 - pre7:
                    - Kai Germaschewski: more ISDN cleanups and small fixes.
                    - Al Viro: fix ntfs_new_inode() that he broke. Cleanups.
                    - various: handle !CONFIG_HOTPLUG properly
                    - David Miller: sparc and networking
                    - me: more iso9660 fixes.
                    - Neil Brown: fix rd and RAID on highmem machines
                    - Vojtech Pavlik: input driver fixes
                    - David Woodhouse: module unload races - up_and_exit()
                                                                                   
                 - pre6:
                    - Intel: start to add Pentium IV specific stuff (128-byte cacheline
                      etc)
                    - David Miller: search-and-destroy places that forget to mark us
                      running after removing us from a wait-queue.
                    - me: NFS client write-back ref-counting SMP instability.
                    - me: fix up non-exclusive waiters
                    - Trond Myklebust: Be more careful about SMP in NFS and RPC code
                    - Trond Myklebust: inode attribute update race fix
                    - Charles White: don't do unaligned accesses in cpqarray driver.
                    - Jeff Garzik: continued driver cleanup and fixes
                    - Peter Anvin: integrate more of the Intel patches.
                    - Robert Love: add i815 signature to the intel AGP support
                    - Rik Faith: DRM update to make it easier to sync up 2.2.x
                    - David Woodhouse: make old 16-bit pcmcia controllers work
                      again (ie i82365 and TCIC)
                 
                 - pre5:
                    - Rasmus Andersen: add proper "" for sound drivers
                    - David Miller: sparc64 and networking updates
                    - David Trcka: MOXA numbering starts from 0, not 1.
                    - Jeff Garzik: sysctl.h standalone
                    - Dag Brattli: IrDA finishing touches
                    - Randy Dunlap: USB fixes
                    - Gerd Knorr: big bttv update
                    - Peter Anvin: x86 capabilities cleanup
                    - Stephen Rothwell: apm initcall fix - smp poweroff should work
                    - Andrew Morton: setscheduler() spinlock ordering fix
                    - Stephen Rothwell: directory notification documentation
                    - Petr Vandrovec: ncpfs capabilities check cleanup
                    - David Woodhouse: fix jffs to use generic isxxxx() library
                    - Chris Swiedler: oom_kill selection fix
                    - Jens Axboe: re-merge after sleeping in ll_rw_block.
                    - Randy Dunlap: USB updates (pegasus and ftdi_sio)
                    - Kai Germaschewski: ISDN ppp header compression fixed
                 
                 - pre4:
                    - Andrea Arcangeli: SMP scheduler memory barrier fixup
                    - Richard Henderson: fix alpha semaphores and spinlock bugs.
                    - Richard Henderson: clean up the file from hell: "xor.c"
                                                                                 
                 - pre3:
                    - James Simmons: vgacon "printk()" deadlock with global irq lock.
                    - don't poke blanked console on console output
                    - Ching-Ling: get channels right on ALI audio driver
                    - Dag Brattli and Jean Tourrilhes: big IrDA update
                    - Paul Mackerras: PPC updates
                    - Randy Dunlap: USB ID table support, LEDs with usbkbd, belkin
                      serial converter.
                    - Jeff Garzik: pcnet32 and lance net driver fix/cleanup
                    - Mikael Pettersson: clean up x86 ELF_PLATFORM
                    - Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz: sound and drm driver init fixes and
                      cleanups
                    - Al Viro: Jeff missed some kmap()'s. sysctl cleanup
                    - Kai Germaschewski: ISDN updates
                    - Alan Cox: SCSI driver NULL ptr checks
                    - David Miller: networking updates, exclusive waitqueues nest properly,
                      SMP i_shared_lock/page_table_lock lock order fix.
                 - pre2:
                    - Stephen Rothwell: directory notify could return with the lock held
                    - Richard Henderson: CLOCKS_PER_SEC on alpha.
                    - Jeff Garzik: ramfs and highmem: kmap() the page to clear it
                    - Asit Mallick: enable the APIC in the official order
                    - Neil Brown: avoid rd deadlock on io_request_lock by using a
                      private rd-request function. This also avoids unnecessary
                      request merging at this level.
                    - Ben LaHaise: vmalloc threadign and overflow fix
                    - Randy Dunlap: USB updates (plusb driver). PCI cacheline size.
                    - Neil Brown: fix a raid1 on top of lvm bug that crept in in pre1
                    - Alan Cox: various (Athlon mmx copy, NULL ptr checks for
                      scsi_register etc).
                    - Al Viro: fix /proc permission check security hole.
                    - Can-Ru Yeou: SiS301 fbcon driver
                    - Andrew Morton: NMI oopser and kernel page fault punch through
                      both console_lock and timerlist_lock to make sure it prints out..
                    - Jeff Garzik: clean up "kmap()" return type (it returns a kernel
                      virtual address, ie a "void *").
                    - Jeff Garzik: network driver docs, various one-liners.
                    - David Miller: add generic "special" flag to page flags, to be
                      used by architectures as they see fit. Like keeping track of
                      cache coherency issues.
                    - David Miller: sparc64 updates, make sparc32 boot again
                    - Davdi Millner: spel "synchronous" correctly
                    - David Miller: networking - fix some bridge issues, and correct
                      IPv6 sysctl entries.
                    - Dan Aloni: make fork.c use proper macro rather than doing
                      get_exec_domain() by hand.
                                                    
                 - pre1:
                    - me: make PCMCIA work even in the absense of PCI irq's
                    - me: add irq mapping capabilities for Cyrix southbridges
                    - me: make IBMMCA compile right as a module
                    - me: uhhuh. Major atomic-PTE SMP race boo-boo. Fixed.
                    - Andrea Arkangeli: don't allow people to set security-conscious
                      bits in mxcsr through ptrace SETFPXREGS.
                    - Jürgen Fischer: aha152x update
                    - Andrew Morton, Trond Myklebust: file locking fixes
                    - me: TLB invalidate race with highmem
                    - Paul Fulghum: synclink/n_hdlc driver updates
                    - David Miller: export sysctl_jiffies, and have the proper no-sysctl
                      version handy
                    - Neil Brown: RAID driver deadlock and nsfd read access to
                      execute-only files fix
                    - Keith Owens: clean up module information passing, remove
                      "get_module_symbol()".
                    - Jeff Garzik: network (and other) driver fixes and cleanups
                    - Andrea Arkangeli: scheduler cleanup.
                    - Ching-Ling Li: fix ALi sound driver memory leak
                    - Anton Altaparmakov: upcase fix for NTFS
                    - Thomas Woller: CS4281 audio update

Paul Ferris at Linux Today writes: “Well, it’s been an interesting couple of years (almost). A lot has happened in the time since I started having
my stories linked here, started having my stories posted here, started running the site, rewrote the site, and
finally started re-writing the site.”

Linux.com’s weekly feature: “…if Linux wants to increase the user base, improvements in the
developmental process are needed in the operating system and software. Linux
software needs to solve problems by providing solutions not only to the developer, but
also to the business and hobby users.”

Jarek Sygitowicz submitted this article from LinuxNews.pl: “Lets look backward: nearly a month ago one officer taxed 6 GNU/Linux boxes and two Star Offices at the price of 6 Microsoft Windows and 2 Microsoft Offices. The affair was widely commented and stirred a wave of protests. We heard from various sorces that the Government, trying to patch a big hole, is preparing for the impossible: a tax on using Free Software.”

The Rambus collective now wants everyone to pay royalties on any
device that interfaces with an SDRAM, DDR or direct Rambus
DRAM (RDRAM) chip, reports The Register. Avo Kanadjian, vice president of worldwide
marketing at Rambus, expounded on the latest plans for world
domination at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas last week.