Anonymous Reader writes: “The final five winning essays in DesktopLinux.com’s first annual wIndependence Day contest are now available online. This last batch completes the program . . . this weeks essays relate stories of switching to Linux from Windows, a call to action plan, a nod to ‘housewives’, and Penguin Airlines gives us the view from the Flightdeck . . . Read them now at DesktopLinux.com.”

PDAJames writes” “A couple of days ago, Chris Paget published a whitepaper showing how you could exploit a ‘feature’ of the Win32 API to elevate user priveleges. Paget thinks this is a major fault with the API, but Microsoft doesn’t even acknowledge that it’s a vulnerability, according to this story (at ZDNet UK). Is Microsoft right for once, or is it just more ‘security through obscurity’?”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Codeweavers, the company that brought us Crossover Plugin and Office, is set to
release Crossover Office Server Edition at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo early
next week.Jeremy White, Codeweavers CEO, says that the server edition is
intended as a direct competitor to the Citrix/Windows Terminal Server solution
currently employed by many businesses.

“The idea is that you centrally manage your applications on a small set of
servers,” says White, “and have all your clients pick up their applications from
a central site.” The benefit for users appears to be the lowered cost of using
Crossover Office Server Edition compared to paying license fees for Microsoft
and Citrix products.

In much the same way that Crossover Office works for individual users, the
Server Edition will allow end users of Linux desktops to run Windows-based
applications — the difference is that the applications will live on the server
so multiple users can access them simultaneously.

“Initially, we’re going to target Solaris and Linux clients, but we hope to
rapidly add support for other Unixes, as well as for Mac OS X and Windows
clients,” White added.

Earlier this week, Codeweavers announced Crossover Office 1.2, with official support for Quicken and Microsoft Visio.

Frank writes: “Here’s a quick article (from IBM.com) about feeVSD, a virtual server environment that lets you create up to 250 Web development sandboxes on Linux for experimentation or production. Each virtual server has its own separate Web-hosting environment, so you can setup many developers with their own webpage development that they control completely, without causing harm to the other virtual servers or the host system. The best thing about freeVSD is that there are no licensing fees required.”

Wired: “In a Chicken Little-like incident that flew under virtually every computer security experts’ radar, the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center bravely predicted and monitored a ferocious cyberattack Tuesday morning on U.S. computer systems, launched by an army of European enemy hackers.

Never mind that no independent Internet traffic monitoring service or security expert had even noticed that any sort of cyberattack had occurred.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “How much or how little have computer “white box” systems changed in appearance over the last several years? whatisnew.com has an interesting picture of a few popular case trends since 1996 through today as part of “The Dynamic Edge Of Computer Chaos” article. It points out that ’96 – ’99 was about changes inside the chassis and now the chassis size is shrinking. Plus, we have more choices with how the system functions (such as Windows / Linux).”

Jeff McCormick writes: “SellWin, a newly open sourced CRM sales application, is now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sellwincrm. SellWin is entirely written in Java with a Swing user interface and EJB/JBoss server. Major functions include: Opportunity mgmt, Contact mgmt, Sales Forecasting, Quote generation, Activity Scheduling, Online Chat, Multi-Language, MySQL/Oracle/JDBC database support, and user/group adminstration.

SellWin is ideal for customers needing a unique sales force automation solution that can be easily tailored or branded to suit their needs. SellWin was entirely written on Linux but will run on any Java platform.

Commercial support is provided via http://www.open-app.com“

Anonymous Reader write: “LinuxDevices.com has just published its weekly Embedded Linux Newsletter, with all the latest news and info from the exciting world of Embedded Linux and Linux-based gadgets.”

Bob Findlay writes: “iCanProgram.com (http://www.icanprogram.com) offers online programmer training courses for no fees in return for a voluntary contribution to Cancer Research charity of the students choosing.

We have offered these courses to over 1000 students worldwide since the beginning of 2002.

We are pleased to announce that the Introduction to Linux Programming course has been revamped over the summer months to take into account all of the suggestions from previous students. The first session of this revised course will begin during the week of 02 Aug 19. While demand for this course has been extraordinarily high we still have room for more students. For more information and an online registration form simply go to http://www.icanprogram.com/linuxProgramming.html.

iCanProgram thanks you for all your generous support for these courses.”

–By Grant Gross –

The PR departments of all kinds of companies that have some connection with Linux are gearing up for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco August 12 to 15. NewsForge has received about a dozen PR pitches and requests for briefings since early last week.
One such pitch was from Samsung Contact, a mail/messaging server that works with Linux and Unix and has Hewlett-Packard’s OpenMail as an ancestor. In a press release, the Samsung Contact people are suggesting that enterprises can save more than $32 million over three years by migrating from Microsoft Exchange.

No, that’s not a typo, that’s $32 with six zeros behind it. This is definitely a case of “your mileage may vary,” because that $32 million savings is calculated for businesses with 100,000 email users. Your business may not be quite that big — Samsung Contact chief architect Richi Jennings says several customers moving from the old HP’s OpenMail really have that many email users — but the numbers still work out to be a significant savings for smaller businesses, according to the company.

The Samsung people say a business with 1,000 email users could still save $432,000 over three years, and those with 10,000 email users would save $4.7 million by using Samsung Contact instead of Microsoft Exchange. Those numbers don’t include the cost of switching to Unix or Linux if your company is not already using one of those operating systems.

“It’s an enormous discrepancy,” Jennings says of the TCO numbers.

It’s almost a sure bet that Microsoft would dispute those numbers, but Samsung Contact has lined up an industry analyst or two who get similar TCO results.

David Ferris, president of email analyst firm Ferris Research, says Samsung’s numbers hold up. According to his numbers, Exchange typically costs about $16 per user per month, with Samsung Contact costing about $9 per user per month.

Although there are plenty of other email server products that work with Linux, Jennings claims that Samsung Contact has a unique place in the market because it provides functionality similar to the popular features in Microsoft Outlook. Samsung Contact supports Outlook, plus Open Source mail software such as Mozilla or Ximian’s Evolution. The Contact group is finishing its own email/collaboration client that will work with Windows, Linux, or as Web mail.

Jennings says the cost savings comes because Samsung Contact needs fewer tech people to support it, since Contact is more reliable and scalable than Exchange, and fewer servers are needed to run large email farms, Jennings claims.

“There are other vendors out there who claim they do Outlook, but the devil is always in the details,” Jennings says. “The detail is always in that list of Outlook functionality that, ‘well, actually we don’t support that.'”

Ferris agrees. “Samsung is right, it’s unique in the ability to provide a very
full-function Outlook experience against a back-end Unix box,” he says.

Samsung Contact, released in March, is based on OpenMail, a software product no longer on the front burner at HP. Samsung has licensed the technology from HP, and several employees from HP, including Jennings, have moved over to Samsung to continue working on the product.

Remember that OpenMail is not an Open Source project — HP was using that name for several years before the phrase “Open Source” was coined.

Jennings says the initial focus of the Samsung Contact team was HP’s original OpenMail customer base. The company is now trying to win new users and present itself as an alternative, especially with the controversy over Microsoft’s new 6.0 licensing scheme, which went into effect at the start of this month.

“It’s causing enterprises all sorts of headaches as they work out how they’re going to pay for Microsoft products in the future, and how much they’re going to have to pay for them,” Jennings says. “Even with the last-minute special, special deals that Microsoft was doing to get people to adhere to the deadline, the information I have is that roughly 50% of their larger enterprise customers have not signed up for 6.0.”

Jennings and crew are also pitching Samsung Contact and the upcoming email client as an alternative to the “bloated” Outlook. “In the words of one client who shall remain nameless, ‘Outlook is funky,'” Jennings says.

Asked how the future looks for Samsung Contact, Ferris says it’s a bit hard to predict. “I think it has the best opportunities in the following areas: OpenMail customers who don’t want the big hassle of migrating elsewhere, and service providers wanting to support customers with Outlook.”