LinuxGames.com has an announcement at version 5.5.0 of LiquidWar, a “very interesting multi-player war game,” has been released.

– By Grant Gross –

If the U.S. government really wants to end the Microsoft monopoly, it has an easy way to do so without involving a bunch of antitrust lawyers, suggest consumer activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader and technology consumer activist Jamie Love.
The two are asking the government to change its software procurement policy to require that office suites work on multiple operating systems, or to require office software to disclose its file formats.
Such simple changes in U.S. government procurement policies would have a ripple effect across the worldwide software marketplace, creating an instant market for Linux, Apple and even BeOS, Love tells NewsForge. The U.S. government alone would have the purchasing power to force such changes in the entire software market, he adds.

“Our position is the government can do everything it needs to do, and everything it wants to do, just by making conditions on government purchases,” says Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology. “The government is spending millions of dollars to knock down the Microsoft monopoly in antitrust litigation and billions of dollars to support the Microsoft monopoly in procurement.”

Nader and Love met with federal Office of Management and Budget officials in early April to talk about procurement policies and about putting government contracts online. They sent a follow-up letter to OMB director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. today. In the letter, Love and Nader suggest several courses of action that would create more competition among software vendors for U.S. government contracts.

The OMB could set a limit on the percentage of machines run by one operating system, creating a “non-trivial” market for Linux and other operating systems, Love says. He and Nader also throw out the idea of using a carrot or stick to encourage Microsoft software’s compatibility with other operating systems. For example, if Microsoft Office runs on four operating systems, Office could be used on 70% of the government’s desktops, but if Office only ran on two OSes, it’d be capped at 50% of government desktops.

“You could essentially use market forces and economic incentives to get what you wanted,” Love says. “I’m just saying this is an alternative to spending your life before judges.”

Such procurement policies already have a history in U.S. government, says Love, who’s the cousin of Caldera CEO Ransom Love. The government used similar policies to keep IBM from dominating the government market back when IBM was the only major mainframe player.

The Nader/Love letter raises questions about federal software spending:

How much money does the government spend on Microsoft products and is the company’s government marketshare increasing or decreasing?

Would it be cheaper for the federal government to purchase the source code to an office suite and give away that office suite than to continue to pay for Microsoft licenses every year? “I think you could buy Corel for $100 million,” Love says. “How much do they spend every year in licensing Microsoft Office?”

Does a “monoculture” of software in the federal government, at least on desktops, make the government more vulnerable to viruses or other security problems?

Love says OMB’s Daniels and Angela Styles, administrator of the federal procurement policy, have been receptive to talking with him and Nader. Daniels, he says, is also interested in their proposal to put government contracts online.

“We know, from Angela, that there’s a lot of pressure by the software vendors to have the government act with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, like it’s walking into Best Buy when it comes to offering to buy software,” Love says. “The position of the software vendors is to have the government be a completely passive consumer, so the government just acts like any small business does in terms of the products and prices, which we think is not a good deal for the taxpayers.”

Styles didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment on the Nader/Love ideas.

Love hopes the April meeting and today’s letter will be part of a continuing dialog about federal procurement and how it now favors the Microsoft monopoly. He says the ideas in the letter could be just the start of a discussion. “We’ve identified different suggestions of things they could do, but obviously, there’s a little room for creativity here.”

Love and Nader have also bounced their ideas off members of the American Bar Association interested in antitrust. One lawyer wrote back and said he would be opposed to the U.S. government using its monopolistic power to fight Microsoft’s monopolistic power and that government software purchasing should be based on the best tool for the job at the best price.

Love encourages people supportive of the letter’s ideas to contact Styles or other OMB officials. Contact information for OMB officials is at this PDF document.

Kuro5hin.org has an item saying Taiwan plans to support Free Software through the creation of a totally Chinese free software environment for Taiwan users, free software application development, and training of 120,000 people for free software skills, among other things. ZDNet has more information.

– by Tina Gasperson –
Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows.com, today announced another preview
release of LindowsOS, the Linux distribution designed to be able to run Windows
applications. It’s called LindowsOS SPX, and his company is touting it as the first
“Broadband OS” designed to take advantage of broadband technology. All we
want to know is, what about the GPL?

Robertson’s emphasis on marketing strategies hasn’t been sitting well with some
Linux people, and the latest push to call Lindows the first operating system to
fully utilize broadband tech is sure to further irritate them. Others, however,
are delighted with Lindows. “I am a very happy Linux User,” wrote an anonymous
poster at NewsForge. “I have found the best distros in my humble opinion to be
Red Hat 7.3 and Mandrake 8.2. However, lately I stumbled over Lindows. All I
can say is WOW!!!!!! The installation was easier than at the time Corel
Linux, It has all the power as the usual distros expect for it being able to
run most windows apps. So far I
have just installed M$ Office 2000, M$ Internet Explorer, Quickbooks 2001,
Act 2000. I am trying for Dreamweaver and Photoshop next. If these install and
work as well
as the others I will be a happy man. I am looking forward to Lindows future
offerings and excited to become a M$ free office.”

One complaint the Linux community has had with Lindows is its seeming ignorance
of the terms of the GNU General Public License, which forbid things like End User License Agreements
(EULA), and require software distributors to release their modifications to
GPLed code. Remember, this is a Linux distribution, and Linux (or GNU/Linux
if you’re with the FSF) is still Free Software. Back in April, the Free Software
Foundation was tailing Lindows, asking “where’s the source?” after a Lindows
Insider tipped the FSF off to the fact that the source code was nowhere to be found on the
install CD or on the Lindows Web site (although several readers pointed to links on the
Lindows site that led to the source code for several KDE products that were
included with the distribution).

“We are in the midst of negotiations” with LindowsOS, says Brad Kuhn, v.p. of
the FSF. “Our general counsel, Eben Moglen promised [Robertson] a rewrite of the
EULA,” the original
of which is sure to raise the hackles of anyone who’s a fan of the GPL. But
Moglen has been on vacation for the past several weeks and didn’t deliver a new
EULA in time for the SPX release. “My hope is that they haven’t released
unilaterally,” Kuhn says.

“They were moving toward compliance based on our recommendations. [Robertson is]
willing to move,” he says. We located a compliant-looking source file tree at http://net2.com/lindows/source/pool/debian/, but the individual files need to be examined before coming
to any conclusions.

“We’re still upset that it had to happen this way,” Kuhn says, “but we don’t
hold grudges. If there’s a problem with the EULA still, we’ll get it fixed.
Normally these violations don’t happen so publicly. We try to work behind the
scenes.”

“UCITA sets default rules for software licensing. It’s supported by vendors, but opposed by a diverse coalition of end users, library and consumer groups and 32 state attorneys general, who believe the law gives vendors too much power on contracts.If this opposition “remains vociferous and widespread, we will have problems with UCITA,” said John McCabe, legislative director of NCCUSL. But if the proposed changes can mollify some opponents, “then this may have some opportunities. But we have to wait and see.” More at IDG.net.

Jeremy Andrews writes: “KernelTrap has spoken with Peter Chubb who currently works for the Gelato Project. His efforts are currently focused on supporting large disks and partitions, utilizing 64-bits. Regarding the project’s focus of improving Linux support for the Itanium 64-bit processor, Peter says, “Back in the days when the VAX was king, there was a general assumption amongst some programmers that `all the world’s a vax’. In the Linux world, there’s a similar assumption: `all the world’s a pentium’.”

Peter lives in New South Wales, Australia, with his wife, Lucy, also a kernel hacker, and two daughters. He earned a PhD under the late John Lions, author of the Lions Book. His UNIX kernel hacking experience is with an impressively large number of kernels.

KernelTrap has the full interview.”

“Four companies that sell packaged distributions of the open-source Linux operating system are joining forces to sell a uniform distribution targeted at large enterprises.

The OS standard, which the vendors have dubbed UnitedLinux, will make it easier for hardware and software makers to certify that their products run on Linux platforms, said Holger Dyroff, North American sales director for SuSE Inc. of Oakland, Calif.” More at ComputerUser.com.

“Yesterday’s announcement of a Linux-based cooperation agreement between IBM and Germany’s ministry of the interior changes the rules of the game dramatically. Microsoft still has deals with the German government, and will undoubtedly still sell software to it and to Germany’s states, but the territory covered by the agreement and the terms used by minister of the interior Otto Schily signal that Linux has already won the server war in principle, and that the German government intends it to do so in practice.
” More at The Register.

Kellie writes: “Writing private versions of GNU C library functions is a great way to debug systems problems or make quick fixes. This article at developerWorks shows you how to use the LD_PRELOAD shell variable, to selectively override system C library functions with your own private versions. This technique works for both Linux and Solaris environments.”

From LinuxPlanet: “In reality, the procedure of adding of new hard drive in Linux is not that hard and sometimes you can spend
less time then you would spend to do the same thing in Windows. To illustrate this, I’ll start from the very
begining to explain this procedure in detail. ”