– 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.

This Thursday, February 28th, the U.S.
Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation will
hold hearings on draft legislation, the Security Systems
Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). Sponsored by U.S.
Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC) and Ted Stevens (R-AK), SSSCA
would require government mandated copy prevention technology
in future digital devices that would give Hollywood control
over how consumers can use digital content.

Senate hearings
had originally been scheduled for October 25, 2001, but were
indefinitely postponed after much public opposition to the
proposed legislation. Thursday’s re-scheduled hearing will
allow testimony only from major copyright holders and
electronics companies no public interest or consumer rights
groups have been invited to provide input on the draft
legislation on how information may be used in a digital
environment.

Witness List:

Panel I Mr. Michael D. Eisner, Chairman and CEO, The Walt
Disney Company

Mr. Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer,
News Corporation

Mr. Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive Vice President, Intel
Corporation

Panel II Mr. Andreas Bechtolsheim, General Manager/Vice
President of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit, Cisco
Systems Inc.

Mr. James E. Meyer, Special Advisor to the Chairman and
formerly Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer,
Thomson Multimedia

Mr. Robert Perry, Vice President, Marketing, Mitsubishi
Digital Electronics America, Inc.

Info on hearings: Chair: Sen. Hollings to preside Feb. 28,
2002 9:30 a.m. “Protecting Content in the Digital Age”
Hearings are held in Room 253, Russell Senate Office
Building (unless otherwise noted), Delaware and Constitution
Avenues, North East, Washington, DC 20510

U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation
announcement of hearings:
http://commerce.senate.gov/press/107-159.html

About EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
liberties organization working to protect rights in the
digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
challenges industry and government to support free
expression, privacy, and openness in the information
society. EFF is a member-supported organization and
maintains one of the most-linked-to websites in the world at
http://www.eff.org/.

Caldera International, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD) today reported revenue of $17.9 million for the three months ended January 31, 2002, in line with the Company’s previous guidance.

“This is the third quarter the Company has operated within the guidelines of our operating model. We are pleased to have met our revenue projections in each of these past three quarters,” said Ransom Love, President and CEO of Caldera. “The past quarter included sales to many of our widely recognized accounts including Daimler Chrysler, CVS Pharmacies, Walgreens, Target, McDonald’s, Eckerd and Safeway, demonstrating corporate confidence in Caldera’s products and future.”

The Company reported a net loss to common stockholders for the three months ended January 31, 2002 of $11.0 million or $0.19 per common share, including non-cash and restructuring charges of $6.4 million. “As a result of our ongoing expense reduction measures, costs of continuing operations this quarter were $3.5 million less than the previous quarter,” said Love. Exclusive of the restructuring charge of $5.3 million, the net loss for the first quarter would have been $5.7 million, or $0.10 per basic and diluted share.

Results for the three-month period ended January 31, 2002, are not comparable to the results for the three-month period of the prior year because of the significant changes in the operations of the Company as a result of a major acquisition completed in the third quarter of 2001.

Caldera will hold its Annual Shareholder’s Meeting on March 4, 2002, at which the Company is anticipating shareholders will approve a proposal for a one-for-four reverse stock split of its common stock. Assuming this consolidation occurs, the 57.3 million weighted average shares currently outstanding would be reduced to approximately 14.3 million, which will affect the per share calculations.

Financial outlook
The following statements are based on current expectations. These statements are forward looking and actual results may differ materially.

• For the second quarter of fiscal 2002 ending April 30, 2002, we expect net revenue to be $16 to $18 million.
• For the second quarter of fiscal 2002, we expect the gross margin to remain fairly consistent at 68 percent and operating costs to decrease by 3 to 5 percent as a result of continuing expense improvements.
• For our fiscal year ending October 31, 2002, we expect net revenue of $68 to $72 million.

Conference Call
As previously announced, the Company will host a conference call at 5:00 p.m. EST today, February 27, 2001, to discuss first quarter results. To participate in the teleconference, please call (800) 289-0437, confirmation code 557672 approximately five minutes prior to the time stated above. A listen only Webcast of the call will be broadcast live with a replay available several hours following the call. The Webcast and replay may be accessed from http://ir.caldera.com/conference.html.

Caldera International, Inc.
Caldera International (Nasdaq: CALD) provides “Powerful Choices” for businesses through its UNIX, Linux and Volution product lines and services. Based in Orem, UT, Caldera has representation in 82 countries and 16,000+ resellers worldwide. Caldera Global Services provides reliable localized support and services to partners and customers. For more information on Caldera products and services, visit http://www.caldera.com.

Caldera, the Caldera logos, Caldera Volution, OpenLinux, SCO and the associated SCO logo, and SCO OpenServer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Caldera International, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Caldera Global Services is a service mark of Caldera International, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other brand or product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners.

Forward Looking Statements
The statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The Company wishes to advise readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the ability of the Company to successfully meet its revenue projections, which are based in part, on the continued acceptance in the marketplace of the historical products of the acquired operations; the ability of the Company to develop and successfully introduce products integrating its products and services with those historically offered by the recently acquired operations; the ability of the Company to continue to manage its cost reductions without adversely affecting customer service and employee productivity; the ability of recently introduced and new products to operate as designed, including compatibility with various platforms in the absence of other defects; the Company’s reliance on developers in the open source community; new and changing technologies and customer acceptance of those technologies; the Company’s ability to compete effectively with other companies; failure of our brand to achieve the broad recognition necessary to succeed; unenforceability of the GNU general public license and other Open Source licenses; our reliance on third party developers of components of our software offerings; claims of infringement of third-party intellectual property rights; and disruption in the Company’s distribution sales channel. These and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially, are discussed in more detail in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

NewsFactor Network writes: “The three central tenets of the Internet are peer-to-peer, distributed control and free speech. If you ask me, the broadband companies are in favor of none of these. For example, Time Warner RoadRunner recently terminated my service because I was running a Web server on my home system.”

Dave Jones: “Mostly just syncing with Linus, plus the next round of small bits.
I backed out the IDE changes for various reasons, handle with
care in case I missed something.”

Patch against 2.5.5 vanilla is available from:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davej/patches/2.5/

By popular request, the curious can now find most of what
was merged in each release at http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/patches/merged/

 -- Davej.

2.5.5-dj1
o   Merge 2.5.5 final.
    | Backout broken IDE changes.
o   Implement proper locking in ALSA lseek methods.     (Robert Love)
o   Document lseek locking.                             (Robert Love)
o   ALSA + YMFPCI compile fixes.                        (Stelian Pop)
o   Further console reentrancy work.                    (James Simmons)
o   NFS compile fix.                                    (Neil Brown)
o   Fix up some strsep changes from last time.          (René Scharfe)
o   tmpfs link-count on dir rename fixes.               (Christoph Rohland)
o   USB vicam driver build fixes.                       (Greg KH)
o   Split up terminal emulation.                        (James Simmons)
o   Fix scsi_merge crash-on-boot problem.               (Jens Axboe)

This is the GNOME Summary for 2002-02-17 – 2002-02-23.

==============================================================
Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------

1. GNOME 2 Desktop Beta available
2. Alex Larsson and Darin Adler teams up
3. Gnucash website back up
4. GnomeMeeting takes top spot
5. GStreamer applications galore
6. Abiword 0.99.2 available
7. Debugging CORBA applications?
8. Bug Day Reminder
9. Translated GNOME summaries
10. Hacker Activity
11. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
12. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. GNOME 2 Desktop Beta available
--------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, the event you have been waiting for has finally arrived. The GNOME
2.0 Desktop Beta is out! This is the time, this is the place, so start
downloading and experience the first glimps of the wonder called GNOME
2.0. Links below to the GNOME 2 beta download area. For those prefering
a easier path Jeff Waugh has updated his popular Garnome distribution to
support this latest and greatest. 

        
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases/gnome-2.0-desktop-beta/
        http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/

==============================================================
2. Alex Larsson and Darin Adler teams up
--------------------------------------------------------------

Alex Larsson becomes co-maintainer of Nautilus. This means we now have
two of the best hackers in the GNOME community focusing their attention
on Nautilus. They will togheter with the rest of the Nautilus
development community make sure that Nautilus for GNOME 2 will rock your
world. Announcement linked below. 
       
http://lists.eazel.com/pipermail/nautilus-list/2002-February/007403.html

==============================================================
3. Gnucash website back up
--------------------------------------------------------------

As many of you have noticed the Gnucash website was down for a while.
The reason was problematic hardware coupled with Linas Veptas and his
children beeing very sick. The site is back up now, and hopefully the
health of Linas and his kids are improving. Best wishes to him from us
all. 

        http://www.gnucash.org

==============================================================
4. GnomeMeeting takes top spot
--------------------------------------------------------------

The best video conferencing tool in the Unix world got a prize last
week. The Belgian Journalists on Information Technology award the IT
prize each year to the four best University projects in Belgium. This
year Damien Sandras and GnomeMeeting took the top spot. Congratulations!
Link below to full announcement and the GnomeMeeting website. 
        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomemeeting-list/2002-February/msg00169.html
        http://www.gnomemeeting.org

==============================================================
5. GStreamer applications galore
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GStreamer team is hard at work stabilizing the core of GStreamer in
order to make the GNOME 2.0 Fifth toe release. As a result of this many
applications based on GStreamer is starting to pop up. Here is a small
preview of some of them, most of these apps will have their first
releases in the next few weeks. First we have beatbox a program that
could serve all the functions of two turntables, a drum machine, and
possibly a small mixing studio. Credit to Andy Wingo and Leif Johnson. 

        http://ambient.2y.net/beatbox/
        http://ambient.2y.net/tmp/beatbox-24-2-2002.png
        http://ambient.2y.net/tmp/beatbox-large-24-2-2002.png

There is also gst-record an application which lets you record v4l
streams into AVI movies. Credit to Ronald Bultje. 

        http://ronald.bitfreak.net/images/gst-record-1.png
        http://ronald.bitfreak.net/images/gst-record-6.png
        http://ronald.bitfreak.net/images/gst-record-7.png

Then there is the iTunes look alike Rhytmbox, which lets you rip, play
and burn cdroms of your favourite songs. Credit to Bastien Nocera. 

        http://idisk.mac.com/bnocera/Public/rb-gnome2-table.jpg
        http://idisk.mac.com/bnocera/Public/rb-gnome2-better.jpg

Redael is a software package that combines a video player (MPEG1/MPEG2),
annotation tools, and a scoring system into an easy to use GUI. Credit
to Joshua N. Pritikin. 

        http://redael.berlios.de/news.html

then of course there is zchat a video conferecing application. Credit to
Zeeshan Ali. 

        http://zchat.sourceforge.net
        http://zchat.sourceforge.net/scrshot.png

We also have a GStreamer Bonobo component now, thanks to the effort of
Jorn Baayen (known for his great work on Galeon). 

        http://people.nl.linux.org/~jorn/mediaplayer_component/

And last but not least there is the Gstplay mediaplayer which supports
playback of all the formats that GStreamer supports like Ogg Vorbis, Ogg
Tarkin, Mp3, c64 SID, Mod, Wav, Au, AVI, Mpeg 1 and 2, VOB, FLI. No
screenshots as the gui is really really small currently, and Xv doesn't
support making screenshots of the video area. But you find it in the
gst-player module in CVS. Credit here goes to Arik Devens and Benjamin
Otte. 

        http://www.gstreamer.net

==============================================================
6. Abiword 0.99.2 available
--------------------------------------------------------------

Our hardworking friends on the Abiword project has put out a new
release. Fewer bugs and more polished features is the keywords. This
release fixed as crasher bug for me, so maybe this is the release you
too have been waiting for. Go get it. Our hardworking danish friend
Jesper Skov has also put out a new Abiword Weekly News article for your
pleasure. 

        http://www.abisource.com
        http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2002/awn82.phtml

==============================================================
7. Debugging CORBA applications?
--------------------------------------------------------------

Have a CORBA application you want to debug? Well Linux Journal has an
article with some hints and tips for you. Now all bugs are really
shallow. 

        http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5453

==============================================================
8. Bug Day Reminder
--------------------------------------------------------------

To honor all those bugs that have been killed last week, we will also
this week hold a memorial service in #bug this thursday between 2PM-2AM
GMT aka (9AM-9PM EST). All those who don't mourn the loss of these bugs
and want to see more killed should join the bug hunter team at this
occassion. 


==============================================================
9. Translated GNOME summaries
--------------------------------------------------------------

As always we have translations of the GNOME summaries available. So
linked below are French translation, Spanish translation and Hungarian
translation. If there are other translations available please let us
know. 

        http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
        http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/

==============================================================
10. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 89 gnumeric
 81 galeon
 80 gtk+
 69 gnome-applets
 59 gnome-panel
 57 evolution
 47 SashXB
 42 gtkmm-root
 40 gimp
 35 gnome-control-center
 35 gedit
 34 gnome-i18n
 34 gdome2
 34 gnomeicu
 34 nautilus
 30 gnucash
 29 gcompris
 28 gnome-xml
 26 gnomemeeting
 26 gtranslator
[127 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 106 kmaraas
 52 murrayc
 42 kabalak
 39 veillard
 38 jody
 34 tjmather
 33 lark
 33 kevinv
 32 owen
 29 mmclouglin
 29 mortenw
 28 erat
 28 jcorwin
 26 chyla
 26 michael
 26 seth
 25 menesis
 24 ajshankar
 23 hadess
 20 neo
[141 active hackers omitted]


==============================================================
11. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

This information is from http://bugzilla.gnome.org, which hosts bug and
feature reports for most of the Gnome modules. If you would like to join
the bug hunt, subscribe to the gnome-bugsquad mailing list.

Currently open: 6554 (In the last week: New: +713 Resolved: -822)

Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests): 

  nautilus: 1248 (In the last week: New: +63  Resolved: -64)
  gnome-core: 456 (In the last week: New: +101  Resolved: -139)
  gtk+: 346 (In the last week: New: +41  Resolved: -50)
  gnome-applets: 242 (In the last week: New: +27  Resolved: -20)
  gnome-vfs: 237 (In the last week: New: +2  Resolved: -2)
  gnome-pilot: 198 (In the last week: New: +11  Resolved: -16)
  sawfish: 162 (In the last week: New: +9  Resolved: -21)
  galeon: 158 (In the last week: New: +142  Resolved: -223)
  gnome-pim: 137 (In the last week: New: +3  Resolved: -21)
  gphoto: 127 (In the last week: New: +3  Resolved: -0)
  gmc: 125 (In the last week: New: +5  Resolved: -0)
  medusa: 125 (In the last week: New: +0  Resolved: -0)
  GIMP: 112 (In the last week: New: +16  Resolved: -17)
  balsa: 109 (In the last week: New: +17  Resolved: -10)
  control-center: 97 (In the last week: New: +30  Resolved: -20)
  
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs: 
  
  yaneti@declera.com: 114 bugs closed.
  louie@ximian.com: 107 bugs closed.
  mpeseng@tin.it: 77 bugs closed.
  k_wayne@linuxpower.org: 64 bugs closed.
  menesis@delfi.lt: 62 bugs closed.
  jfleck@inkstain.net: 51 bugs closed.
  otaylor@redhat.com: 36 bugs closed.
  dan_erat@pobox.com: 32 bugs closed.
  charles@rebelbase.com: 32 bugs closed.
  srittau@jroger.in-berlin.de: 21 bugs closed.
  mark@skynet.ie: 20 bugs closed.
  jsh@pixelslut.com: 19 bugs closed.
  hadess@hadess.net: 13 bugs closed.
  kristian@planet.nl: 13 bugs closed.
  maclas@gmx.de: 12 bugs closed.
  
==============================================================
12. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

gbonds  - A savings bond inventory program
gEuCo  - It allows you to convert currencies from the EURO community to
Euro and vice-versa.
GRot13  - A GUI interface to rot13
gThumb  - Image viewer and browser.
GnomeICU  - Internet Communication Utility
gLabels  - Lightweight program for creating labels and business cards.
Cronos II  - Powerful mail client
oggdoctor  - Ogg tag editor
Abiword  - Full featured and cross-plattform Wordprocessor.
GMime  - Library for handling MIME messages.
Gnucash  - The GNU personal finance manager.
GNOME Subtitle Editor  - Edititing/manipulating and converting DivX
subtitles.
Gnome-chord  - Guitar chord index
Dr. Genius  - Dr Genius is a geometry tool more to come.
gnocl  - gnocl extension for the programming language Tcl.
pyFind  - Find File utility for GNOME.
GPMM  - Program for connecting your Portable Mp3 Player
XdeFactor  - This program is for printing and create invoices
GChemPaint  - A 2D chemical structures editor
Atomix  - A mind game about atoms and molecules.
Gabber  - Gabber is a Jabber client
Elysium Download  - A download manager using gnome-vfs.
gcompressor  - gui interface of compression decompression tolls
File Roller  - File Roller is an archive manager.

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/applist/listrecent.php3

Great week with the new desktop beta out. Think this issue of the
summary also proves that GNOME 2.0 will be the multimedia desktop of
choice. Next week we cover the new Sun, Ximian and Wipro deal. 

Christian 
gnome-summary@gnome.org 

Kimbro Staken writes: “The Apache Xindice team is pleased to announce the release of Apache Xindice
1.0 release candidate 2. Full source code is available under the terms of
the Apache Software License and downloads are available from
http://xml.apache.org/xindice/

Apache Xindice is a native XML database. As such it has basically one purpose,
easy management of XML data. It is not intended as a
competitor for relational databases and is primarily targeted at new
application development where XML plays a significant role.

The server is currently suitable for medium volume XML storage applications. It
supports XPath for queries and XML:DB XUpdate for XML updates. An implementation
of the XML:DB XML database API is provided for Java developers and access from
other languages is enabled through the download of an XML-RPC plugin.

Apache Xindice was formally known as dbXML. The dbXML source code was donated
to the Apache Software Foundation in December 2001. The 1.0 release of Xindice
represents the conclusion of the work undertaken by the dbXML project and
the official commencement of new development on the Xindice code base. The
development team has added two new members and it is expected we’ll add
several more in the coming weeks. Future development will focus on improved
performance, ACID properties, better standards support and better integration
with other Apache projects”

bryam writes: “The Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol is a high-performance file access protocol designed specifically to use InfiniBand architecture as a standard memory-to-memory interconnect between application servers and shared file storage. DAFS promises to improve the performance and reliability of Internet and enterprise applications in data center environments. Read the history here.“

Anonymous Reader writes: “LawMeme has a quick and dirty background and legal analysis of the bnetd case.”

– by Peter Gebauer –
Hear ye, hear ye: Microsoft will revolutionize the way software is developed. Or perhaps not. These past weeks I’ve been skimming the Internet in search of proof that Microsoft’s latest technology, .NET, will actually make a difference.

But as I suspected, it proved to be nothing more than Microsoft doing what it has always done: take a good, old idea that has worked well on other platforms and turn it into something “magical” and “revolutionary” for the Microsoft platform, while in real life, the actual problem began with the company’s backward thinking in the first place.

I developed software, both as a pro and enthusiast, for Microsoft platforms a long time (try a decade) before I made the switch to Unix. This is the path
many developers walk, but I have never seen a Unix guru switch to Windows. It is obvious that Unix is made by engineers for engineers.

Anybody who has tried developing software on any Unix knows that the tools available make a programmer feel like a king. And rightfully so. You have at least five or six
“standard” programming languages to choose from and a vast number of Open Source libraries that can be linked on almost any Unix/Posix platform. We are not talking
about a mere developers platform, we are talking about programmer heaven!

Before we go further into the depths of technology, let me make a statement about myself: I am not a programming guru. I have the skills needed to please my customers, and I indulge in Open Source development whenever I have the chance, but I am no Linus, Alan or whoever your personal Open Source hero might be. Very often, I ask many of you out there for help in mailing lists and IRC channels (thanks, by the way) and that’s how I get by.

Back to this new technology, .NET: I won’t claim that I am
right and .NET is wrong; these are just the thoughts that most likely have passed through any Unix programmer’s brain.

What does .NET do anyway?

With .NET you can use any language to interface the APIs available for the .NET development platform.

I’m using C, C++, PERL, Python, ELisp and PHP for my development and never have I had problems with inter-lingual library bindings. Because most languages will let
you interface native code, anything built as a shared object is well within reach for those languages.

.NET will enable you to write your code on one platform, but run it on any platform.

This can be done even with low-level code written in C on Posix platforms. We, the Unix users, already have cross-platform capabilities. If Microsoft would just build
Windows on Unix technology and join the Unix community, Windows users would have that, too.

You can develop software using any tool you want that has .NET support.

Will there be .NET extensions for gcc? And perhaps a .NET LISP package for Emacs? If not, I’m not interested. My experience is that it is only when developing on
Microsoft platforms that the project leader has to make an active decision on what development tools will be used by the developers. Never in my life have I been told what
code editor, or even operating system, to use when using Unix as development platform. If Windows users want this benefit they can install GNU utils, build tools and BASH instead of .NET and a “Visual-Crap-Zap Studio PRO++ Extra Edition.”

.NET provides a large library of APIs and it will grow.

The Unix platform probably has over 10,000 libraries available for use, covering most aspects of programming. Many of them are open, so they are easy to learn
and implement. The actual number of libraries available is unknown, I’m simply making a qualified guess, but Debian Linux (my favorite distro) alone comes with more than 3,000 libraries, and they have always satisfied my needs, no matter what programming language I’ve been using. To make a long answer short: Unix has enough libraries and more will come.

.NET will have a “Common Language Runtime” part that will handle memory and trap errors.

I always thought this was the part the kernel was supposed to handle. I must have been sleeping too much during my “OS engineering” classes in school. We all know that
Windows will let user space applications abuse the system and that the win32 kernel doesn’t always manage to handle memory and errors that well. I can only speak for
Linux and Solaris (the two kernels I am most familiar with) when I say: My operating system already does the memory handling and error trapping for me,
thank you very much.

You may have noticed a touch of sarcasm, but it is justified. I think Microsoft is trying to take what the Unix community has had for decades and turn it
into its invention, one inferior to the original.
Even though runtime environments like Java and .NET sound nice in theory, remember they are needed only because of the backward “closed platform” thinking
Microsoft stands for. If everybody used Posix compatibles, there would be no need for any runtime environment other than the OS itself.

I am upset that the very thing I enjoy most about the Open Source community and Unix is now being turned into a Microsoft technology. The honest truth is that I’m scared that Microsoft will win this PR battle, and greed and ignorance will overcome science and knowledge. At first, I just smiled when I read about .NET and the “Common Language Runtime,” like it was a poorly formulated joke. But when I realized that some people were seriously
considering implementing this stuff I got scared, although I still consider .NET a joke.

I love programming as a science. I live for it. If the Open Source community is destroyed and loses its place in the computer industry, I will quit programming and
do something else. Only once in a while would I boot FreeBSD or Linux on my old PC to write a few lines of BASH hack that effectively do what four DVDs of expensive
.NET software can almost do.

Peter Gebauer is a
hobbyist and professional software developer.