Here’s an announcement at Slashdot about the latest update to KDE. Read the discussion or download the stuff.

More stuff about Linux in education, the latest “good thing” to talk about. This is a LinuxPlanet profile on Paul Nelson and Eric Harrison of the k12LTSP project.

Anonymous Reader writes: “KaZaa, the Dutch company created by Niklas Zennstrom who developed the FastTrack network, has announced it will shut it doors because it can no longer afford the cost of defending itself in its legal tribulations brought about by the major movie studios and record companies.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/kazaafolds . tml“

“Extended capabilities for Deployment Solution specifically address
growing demand for Linux-based solutions running on HP ProLiant BL
e-Class Server Blades .” More at LinuxPR.

Silvio Umberto Zanzi writes: “According to many experts, Linux is going through a rough time in its development. Right at the time when Microsoft is converging its line of operating systems, Linux is being broken up by the large manufacturers into Kernels with extensions that are not always compatible. Are we being faced with a dissection into branches?
This is obviously a strong criticism. We have therefore decided to ask the opinion of a person who is actively involved in the development of Kernels: Andrea Arcangeli.
His opinion can ben found here at PortaZero“

According to this Washington Post article, Microsoft has been barraging the Department of Defense, asking them to stop using Open Source software because it is a security risk. How they can call Linux a security risk with a straight face is beyond us.

– By Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
Zend calls itself “The PHP Company.” It’s making enough money to cover costs and the future looks bright, according to CTO Zeev Suraski, but other PHP developers have mixed feelings about the way Zend interacts with those who work on the Open
Source version of PHP. For example, Chris Cornutt, webmaster of PHPDeveloper.org says, “Zend is responsible for a lot of the functionality of PHP, but lots of people think they’ve stepped over the line with prices and self-promotion.”

No one denies Zend’s coding prowess or that Zeev is right up there in the top ranks of PHP developers. Even though he’s now a corporate CTO, he still codes. “I don’t just sit in a room and read magazines,” he says, and points out that Zend’s commercialization of PHP — or at least of its own PHP tools — isn’t getting as much heat from Free Software believers as it did when the company was founded back in 1999. “The last half year or so,” Zeev says, “flak from ardent Free Software people has died down.”

A fast foray into the PHP IRC channel on the Open Projects Network brings out a series of comments about Zend like, “They charge too much money for their products,” but no one mentions licensing problems. The reality of PHP is, of course, that Zend’s proprietary products are not needed to develop in it.

Indeed, OSDN’s own Jay Luker, who maintains the (PHP) code behind Software.Linux.com and DaveCentral.com, does not use Zend Studio or other proprietary PHP development tools.

But some developers prefer to use packaged software development tools as much as possible, including the ones Zend sells for PHP. Zend’s site contains a list of case studies that includes one about OSDN’s freshmeat, which also runs on PHP. Interestingly, these case studies seem devoted to PHP use in general rather than to Zend customers in particular. You can look at this as good for PHP or you can look at it as Chris Cornutt does, as an attempt to make Zend synonymous with PHP in some users’ eyes. “I mean, these days, if someone is looking for ‘corporate PHP’ they end up with Zend,” Chris says.

Zeev isn’t shy about Zend’s desire to make money, but balances it with his and his coworkers’ desire to spread PHP use even in ways that don’t directly benefit Zend. He says, “We basically have two directions in which the company goes. One is the Open Source direction, the PHP, where we improve the platform. The second direction, the one that actually makes the money, is selling
PHP-based software, which is usually not Open Source, to companies that have adopted the Open Source but need to go in directions PHP doesn’t provide.”

Zend is profiting in part by helping proprietary developers use PHP. “One [Zend] application encodes PHP so you can distribute PHP apps without disclosing the source code,” Zeev says. In fact, he points out, “This was the product that launched Zend. We got emails from people who wanted to build apps with PHP and make money.” He says the company went along with (and profited from) this idea partly because “we believe personally that PHP should be strong everywhere, not just in the Open Source world. We want it to become a very strong Web platform.”

This tactic seems to be succeeding. According to Zend’s PR people, “PHP has surpassed Microsoft’s once-dominant Active Server Pages (ASP) technology and continues to boom.” Another bit of Zend PR tells us PHP now powers more than 9 million Web sites and has more than 750,000 users worldwide.

Zeev is happy about this, because at least some corporate-level PHP developers are using Zend tools. He admits that “the first version of Zend studio wasn’t very good, so we released a new version [2.0] a few months ago. It understands all the PHP code and functions, and gives you code completion at a very high level.”

Now Version 2.5 is is due for release “in a few weeks.” Zeev says. “It makes PHP much more enjoyable to work with.” He knows programming tools are a very intimate thing, being a programmer himself, and says he understands other programmers’ reluctance to move from the ones they know and love to something new unless it offers them a significantly better experience or — especially in a commercial “production” environment — significantly greater speed.

In some ways, all this is somewhat like carpentry. Yes, you can build a house with nothing but hand tools, and probably do a more elegant job than with power tools, but there is no way you can put out enough work per day with hand tools to earn a living (at least in the developed world) without commercial-grade power tools, even though they can be costly to buy and maintain.

Zend is openly going after top-end businesses, not small-time webmasters, with its PHP equivalents of a carpenter’s truckful of power saws, drills and planes. Zeev speaks joyfully of a $300,000 deal Zend made recently, which is obviously enough to build the PHP equivalent of an entire series of apartment complexes, not just one house.

When Zend started, Zeev says, “The big question was whether people — developers that is — were going to buy tools for money, but if the tool saves them time and make their life easier, they don’t mind spending money on it.”

Okay, it all sounds nice. This pattern seems to be working for Zend, which Zeev says has recently made “some of the biggest deals in PHP history.” But can other Open Source developers apply it? Is it fair to the Open Source community that helped develop the original code base the proprietary tools make easier/faster/cheaper to use? Is this a sustainable business model or will Free Software tools for PHP come along that do at least as good a job as the proprietary ones, a la GCC and the commercial compilers it (for all practical purposes) replaced?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. Do you?

From O’Reillynet Linux:
“Noel Davis looks at a new version of OpenSSH that corrects several security problems; buffer overflows in Wu-imapd, Solaris’ lbxproxy, tcpdump,
mpg321, lukemftp, and OpenServer sar; and problems in bzip2, FreeBSD’s k5su, SuSE’s shadow/pam-modules utilities, Red Hat’s XML Extras Mozilla
packages, and the Quake II server.”

“What does the future of video gaming look like? That depends on who you ask.” Sfgate.com gets answers from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, all of which seem to be going in different directions. Will one win? Two? All? Will the game console market fragment even more than it’s fragmented now? Good questions. Can you answer them? Inquiring (executive) minds (at Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) want to know, we’re sure.

News.com writes, ” Sherwin-Williams Paint Stores has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to use 9,700 IBM Linux PCs to run operations in its paint retail stores, the companies will announce Thursday…
Sherwin-Williams will use the PCs in more than 2,500 stores for running each store’s centralized cash register software, reading e-mail and browsing the company’s intranet, and for securely recording customers’ choices in custom paint tints.”