It’s at kt.zork.net. Among the items: Discussion about the KDE Usability Project, adding a mini-golf game to the KDE Games package, a resolved problem with animated GIFs, a new KConfig backend based on XML, inclusion of an improved malloc into CVS, work to include SVG icon support (konqi, 128 icons, more SVG) into KDE, and KMail configuration migration.

Posted at LWN.net: Boris Nalbach, an experienced IT professional, assumes the position of Chief
Technology Officer (CTO) at SuSE Linux AG, the international Open Source
technology leader and solutions provider.

Mikael Pawlo adds more information to the NuSphere/MySQL GPL court fight: “NuSphere responds on Politech to MySQL’s claims. ‘MySQL AB is interpreting the GPL so broadly
that any commercial software that comes into contact with free software must
also become free. By that standard, a commercial email program would
violate the GPL if it downloaded mail from a GPL-compliant mail server.’
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Judge Patti B. Sarris is currently arranging a preliminary injunction hearing in Boston to find out.”

LinuxJournal.com covers the conference: “The keynote talks were unusual this year because both were delivered by Python outsiders. What they did have was experience in other relevant areas, allowing them to give us fresh ideas that we in the Python community may not have been able to come up with ourselves. The two speakers were Andrew König, who played a key role in the standardization of C++, and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web. Besides the keynotes, there were four tracks of seminars: Refereed Papers, Zope, Python Tools, and Web Services and Protocols.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
As the hearing to secure a temporary injunction against NuSphere’s
distribution of its MySQL-based products is underway, NuSphere has issued a
response to what it calls false claims by the Free Software Foundation and by
MySQL AB.

Britt Johnston, NuSphere’s CTO, tells NewsForge that his company has never
violated the terms of the GPL, even when its database software was statically
linked to the MySQL code. He says that MySQL itself claims that its core server
is separate from the table handler, in much the same way that NuSphere’s product
is separate from the MySQL code. “We’ve simply created an aggregate work,
connected via a public API, that removes the requirement for
the distribution of source code.” (NuSphere also issued a press release disputing the GPL violation.)

NuSphere is now distributing sources for the various components of its version
of MySQL. “We’ve intended all along to release the source code,” he says. He wants it to be known that NuSphere has donated more than 100,000 lines of code under the GPL, “some of it our intellectual property.”

Johnston is convinced that MySQL AB and the FSF are interpreting the GPL in far
too broad a manner. He says he has had discussions with FSF representatives, and
believes they are being forced to defend the GPL in a manner which they would
prefer not to, because they usually enforce GPL violations confidentially,
outside of the court. Since MySQL is opting not to “forgive” NuSphere’s previous
violation of the GPL (which NuSphere claims it did not commit), FSF has no
choice but to take a stand.

Lorne Cooper, the president of NuSphere, says, “The FSF had no basis on which to
issue” its statement Monday, in which Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the
foundation, said that NuSphere has committed a “garden variety” violation of the
GPL. Johnston agrees and says that the real problem is MySQL AB’s attempts to
get out from under the terms of a contract its officials made with NuSphere in June 2000.

“We are concerned that MySQL could remove MySQL code from under the GPL. When
they signed the contract, they agreed not to do that,” says Johnston. NuSphere has placed a faxed copy of
the agreement online (in .pdf format). In this version, at least, there is
no direct statement that MySQL was required to keep releasing MySQL products
under the GPL.

“We also
retain the right to use the name ‘MySQL,’ including the right to register and
use these marks,” Johnston says. The two companies had also been fighting over
who was the rightful owner of mysql.org. Though it is now registered by MySQL
AB, originally NuSphere had claimed the domain.

NuSphere has also made public an
affidavit filed by IT consultant Bruce
Webster on its behalf. In that document, Webster calls himself a “producer
and consumer of open source software in its myriad forms,” for more than 25 years. He
says that NuSphere merely linked its Gemini product with MySQL, and that doesn’t
make it a derived product. He says that NuSphere did indeed ship the source code
to MySQL and to the “world at large both before and after shipping its various
packages combining MySQL, Gemini, and several other” software packages. Webster
maintains that there was only a brief period of time when the source code was
not available, and he says that was because of problems at MySQL AB, not
NuSphere.

Although some experts in the Open Source/Free Software community, including
Bruce Perens, believe that the temporary injunction against NuSphere will be
granted, there are others who don’t. Linux developer Rick Bradley, in a post to
the Free Software Law discussion list, writes, “The fear I had when I read about this suit (being an open source
proponent for numerous social reasons, though not as strong a proponent
of the GPL in particular) is that by counter-suing NuSphere using the
GPL as a basis [MySQL AB is] forcing a legal test of the GPL. In
a
situation where it’s likely that a test of GPL termination might come
about the GPL looks even shakier than usual.”

From LinuxSecurtiy Contributors: “LinuxSecurity.com, the community’s center for security, has been made aware of multiple critical remote vulnerabilities exist in several versions of PHP. Several flaws in the way
PHP handles multipart/form-data POST requests have been found. Each of the flaws could allow an attacker to execute
arbitrary code on the victim’s system.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/server_secur ity_article-4515.html.”

bryam writes, “From CNet News: Sun Microsystems, trailing some competitors to the market with super-thin ‘blade’ servers, will begin to catch up when it releases its products in the second half of the year.
Sun will release two types of blades this year: those using Intel chips and the Linux operating system, and those using Sun’s UltraSparc chips and its Solaris operating system, said Colin Fowles, director of Sun’s blade business team.”

Evolt.org has a story about that very topic. “For just about as long as the commercial Internet has existed, SPAM email has been the bane of users worldwide. The harder and harder we try to fight the spammers and keep our email addresses out of their hands, the smarter they get and the harder they fight back. One example of peoples attempts to fight back is the large numbers of joe@NOSPAM.email.com.”

From PRNewswire: CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading
Windows-to-Linux software developer, today unveiled CrossOver Plugin(TM)
Version 1.1, the newest version of the company’s leading Windows(R)-To-
Linux(R) adapter for Windows browser plugins and email viewers. Among its
many improvements, CrossOver Plugin 1.1 provides new support for multi-user
environments, enabling quick and easy rollout to literally thousands of
desktops without reconfiguration.

– By Jack Bryar –
Less than two weeks after Scott McNealy put on a cross-eyed penguin suit to convince analysts that Sun was really committing to Open Source, the company has become entangled in another series of PR blunders that make observers wonder if the company will ever get its relationship right with the Open Source crowd.

When Sun Microsystems went before the analyst community a couple of weeks ago to publicize its Linux initiative, the company’s irrepressible CEO brought the house down. As McNealy showed up dressed as a cross-eyed version of Tux, the Linux mascot, he muttered, “Lou Gerstner
didn’t have to do this.”

Gerstner certainly didn’t. However, the former IBM CEO didn’t have as
much to prove to a skeptical Open Source community. Unfortunately for
McNealy and Sun, the company has spent the last two weeks annoying the Linux
and Open Source communities with a series of initiatives that seemed
designed to undermine its Linux friendly messaging.

One of the most irritating moves by the Sun team has been
disinformation campaign aimed at frightening major corporations away from the
platform. In a recent “Reality Check” article Sun’s chief competitive officer Shahin Khan claimed that Linux couldn’t scale and that it “can’t respond to the workload demands of Web serving.” In a crude attempt to buttress Sun’s claim that Linux is appropriate only on “low end” servers, Khan claimed that Linux on “big iron” was inherently a bad idea. He claimed that Linux on a IBM mainframe wasn’t really Linux, but a proprietary hybrid.

In the same article, Kahn exaggerated the complexity and cost of
support required for Linux. He suggested that getting Linux apps to run on a
mainframe would require support from multiple Linux platform vendors, and that
support costs just for Turbolinux would exceed $100,000 a year.

This type of crude disinformation will not win the company
many friends in the Open Source community.

Neither will picking fights with leading Open Source organizations.

Sun’s dispute with the Apache Foundation escalated this week.
Members of the Apache Foundation’s Jakarta Project, which creates and maintains
Open Source solutions on the Java platform went
public attacking Sun for its lack of cooperation over licensing and
for throwing into doubt what could and could not be released as Open
Source applications. What made the public attack all the more extraordinary
was the number of current and former Sun
engineers who are part of the Jakarta Project. These included
James Duncan Davidson, Pierpaolo Fumagalli, Petr Jiricka, Arnout J. Kuiper,
Ramesh Mandava, Rajiv Mordani, and Harish Prabhandham, among many others. When
your own employees are taking on your legal department in public, you’re in trouble.

To top it off, the company leaked news that it
planned to charge for StarOffice, the previously free, good-if-not-great desktop office
suite. Sun has been offering StarOffice as a free download since acquiring
the German company Star Division in 1999.

After letting the story hang for a day or two, company representatives
weakly denied published reports by Germany’s Heise Online. Heise quoted Martin Haerling, saying he was a Sun
marketing director. According to Haerling, StarOffice 6.0 would be free only for
Solaris users. The company would charge license fees for the Linux and Windows versions of the software when it was formally released this spring. In denying the story, Sun spokesman Russ Castronovo flatly
refused to deny that the company would be charging for at least some
versions of the software in the near future.

While StarOffice has yet to generate a serious challenge to
Microsoft’s Office suite, the company reported that more than 8 million copies of the
software had been downloaded, including nearly a million copies of the 6.0 beta
software. In the process, StarOffice has emerged as one of the most
common desktop applications to be found on Linux desktops.

Sun’s defenders point out that an Open Source version, called OpenOffice would be unaffected by the decision. The company suggested a proprietary StarOffice 6.0 “retail” product might include third-party code that might not otherwise be available. Others at Sun have claimed that commercial clients wouldn’t use StarOffice unless they were convinced that Sun would continue to support the platform, and charge accordingly.

However, many members of the Open Source community were outraged.
They claimed that volunteers spent significant time debugging and testing
StarOffice because Sun had declared the office suite to be “free to be
changed. Free to be improved. Free to adapt to meet the needs of any
situation.” When the announcement was posted on Slashdot this weekend, many of the
more than 600
respondents cried, “treachery!” One poster said, “It is becoming immensely clear that Sun is intending to hijack the open-source movement.”

That’s unlikely, but Sun’s behavior has been a puzzle. IDC analyst Dan
Kusnetzky said to C|Net recently, “Sun has done a lot for the
open-source community, but they somehow always say something in a way that would
offend …” The company has continued to support the community with tools
such as ABIcheck and programs such as Netbeans. Sun has financed the work of
Ximian and the Indian development company Wipro to complete work on a
polished, handicapped accessible version of the Gnome desktop. Gnome will soon
become the standard interface for Sun’s Solaris boxes. However,
StarOffice has been been Sun’s highest profile Open Source project. The
Register suggested that if the company went through with plans to
charge for the Linux version of Star Office, “Sun risks putting the nose of
Linux developers out of joint” yet again.

Sun reportedly is considering a price point of between $50 and $100 for
StarOffice amid warnings that the product was unlikely to generate any
meaningful revenue, and could destroy demand for the platform.

In the meantime, even as Sun continues to struggle with how to live
with Open Source, IBM claimed recently it has made back the entire
$1 billion it said it invested in the Linux operating system in 2001.