Slashdot posted a notice from heise.de that Sun will charge for StarOffice 6.0.

From MSNBC: “The president of the Internet’s oversight body recommended a major restructuring Sunday, saying the goal of leaving the Net in private hands has proven unworkable. The new structure calls for governments to nominate one-third of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the private organization chosen in 1998 to take over the Net’s management responsibilities from the U.S. government.”

ESRF in France plans to increase processing speed more than 10-fold with EnFuzion from Turbolinux.

Scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), Grenoble, France, need to increase the processing speed of their computers in order to keep up with the massive amounts of data produced by the ESRF experimental stations.

In the past, ESRF has had good experiences with Clustor, the predecessor of EnFuzion. Clustor was installed on “matrix”, a 9-machine BeoWulf cluster consisting of 2-processor Linux machines. It was therefore a natural decision to move on to EnFuzion, the latest supercomputing solution from Turbolinux.

One 10-node license was bought for the Joint Structural Biology Group. Initially, it has been used for testing batch processing of protein crystallography data reduction. Already, more than a ten-fold increase in processing speed has been achieved by using multiple computer with multiple processors. “It is difficult to achieve more than this, because the disk access becomes the limiting factor due to huge amounts of processed data,” says Olof Svensson, programmer at the Scientific Software Unit at ESRF. “We intend to include EnFuzion in a web server, which will act as a front-end for data processing,” Dr. Svensson continues, “and EnFuzion will be controlled by the web server for dispatching jobs to other computers.” The Joint Structural Biology Group has around 20 SGIs of the 02 and 0200 series; the majority of these being two-processors, but with some four-processors. The group also deploys a dedicated Linux cluster of six processors plus access to the Computing Services NICE cluster which contains the
above-mentioned “matrix” cluster as well as a 26-processor Linux cluster.

The second 10-node license was acquired for the Scientific Software Unit to help scientists with occasionally large amounts of data to process, but without an everyday need for a full cluster. “After we have installed it on one of our computers, our scientists will be able to access it according to their specific needs,” Dr. Svensson states. The nodes used will be the 26 processors from the Linux cluster.

About ESRF

Operating a powerful source of light in the X-ray range, the ESRF is a large experimental facility for basic and applied research in physics, chemistry, materials and life sciences. The ESRF is a multinational research institute, presently associating 18 participating countries. According to the Convention signed in 1988 by the founding members, the ESRF is operating as a “non-profit” enterprise under French law. Management is supervised by the Council whose delegates are designated by the member parties. The research program of the ESRF is determined by Scientific Review Committees in ranking the experiment proposals submitted. While the use of the ESRF’s experimental facilities is free of cost for scientists from the funding countries, their experimental results must be published in scientific journals. Non-refereed access, usually to perform confidential proprietary research, is possible for a charge. The ESRF staff is recruited mainly from the associated countries. A total of some 500 people are
employed. While the construction of the ESRF started in 1988, the inauguration and opening of the first 15 beamlines to scientific users took place in September 1994. Presently, at the ESRF 40 beamlines are operating 24 hours a day and 7 days a week in User Service Mode. For more information, visit the ESRF Web site at www.esrf.fr.

About Turbolinux, Inc.

Founded in 1992, Turbolinux develops Linux-based software solutions for Internet and enterprise computing infrastructure, including reliable, available and scalable operating systems for workstations and servers and software clustering solutions for computing traffic management and peer-to-peer distributed computing. Backed by more than $95 million in investments from some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, Oracle, SGI and Toshiba, Turbolinux is headquartered near San Francisco with offices around the world. For more information, visit the Turbolinux Web site at http://www.turbolinux.com.

– By Grant Gross –

Court action and threats of court action seemed to dominate the news this week. Bnetd, an Open Source gaming server, was shut down this week because of threats by gaming company Blizzard Entertainment, but there was better news for those who’ve linked to the DeCSS Linux DVD-playing code.

Blizzard threatened bnetd and its Internet service provider by way of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Blizzard claimed bnetd was violating the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA by not requiring players of Blizzard games to enter their games’ CD keys. Just how that violates Blizzard’s copyright on games, we’re not sure.

In DeCSS news, the California Supreme Court will review the case in which several Web sites were sued for posting DeCSS in supposed violation of a California trade secrets law. These sites, of course, were hosted all over the place, not just California, so the case raises some interesting questions about how widely the state’s laws can be enforced. The trade secret violation itself seems rather dubious, but then, we’re not making the big bucks lawyers do.

In another DeCSS story, the Open Source Directory added DeCSS to its list of software in celebration of a Canadian Supreme Court decision saying customers have a right to post negative reviews of products on the Web.

The U.S. Supreme Court is also getting into the act by taking up a case seeking more fair use rights for the online public in a fight against copyright holders.

Another reason to use an Open Source OS …

It was widely reported this week that Microsoft’s XP media player tracks what music users listen to and what DVDs they play. Microsoft says it has no plans to sell information but we can imagine all kinds of court cases in which the company could be compelled to turn over those lists.

Speaking of Microsoft, NewsForge’s Jack Bryar suggests the company’s secret negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice over Microsoft’s antitrust punishments may violation an old law requiring disclosure of such talks.

Newly reviewed

Longtime Linux.com contributor Matt Michie gives us the first comprehensive view of Red Flag Linux, the distribution supported by the Chinese government. There’s all kinds of debate on this story, from politics to benchmarks to using VMware to do a review.Robin “Roblimo” Miller compares the latest OpenOffice beta release with StarOffice 5.2, the much-used office suite in the Open Source world. He says OpenOffice eliminates many of the bugs that made its older cousin annoying to use.

Vnunet reports on Tinfoil Hat Linux and its attempts to create a Linux distribution for the totally paranoid from what started out as a “secure, single floppy, bootable Linux distribution for storing PGP keys, and encrypting, signing and wiping files.”

Newly released

Kopi 2, the
“first fully featured Java compiler to implement the support of Programming by Contract and Generic Types.” It’s released under the GNU GPL.

The Mozilla project released its 1.0 project management plans.

Success story of the week

IBM reports a huge 800% increase in the number of its business partners supporting Linux during 2001. IBM and its partners say this should lead to more and more adoption of Linux in the business sector.

New at NewsForge and Linux.com

Other stories that NewsForge and Linux.com reported first this week:

Tina Gasperson picks apart the possibilities of license problems if the Gnome project incorporates the Mono project.

Russell C. Pavlicek explains how to get new life from really old computers by loading Linux or one of the BSDs.Stock news

The Nasdaq continued to fall this week, plunging more than 80 points from its Feb. 15 close of 1805.20. It ended the week at 1724.54. Just like last week, all 11 of our Open Source-related stocks fell for the week, even though six of them posted gains, along with the Nasdaq on Friday.

Taking a big hit on Friday was Wind River Systems, which had its stock fall more than 24% after an earnings report that showed a $50 million loss for its last quarter.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

Company Name	Symbol	2/15 Close	2/22 Close
Apple	AAPL	23.90	22.74
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	14.00	13.04
Caldera International	CALD	0.61	0.52
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	20.36	19.29
IBM	IBM	102.89	98.45
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e4.50	e4.20
Red Hat	RHAT	7.39	6.15
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	8.90	8.07
TiVo	TIVO	5.3987	4.82
VA Software	LNUX	1.98	1.725
Wind River Systems	WIND	16.45	11.40

Anonymous Reader writes, “VIA is a industry standard that enables high-performance communication on clusters. MyVIA is a high-performance VIA implement for Myrinet hardware in Linux 2.2.x or 2.4.x. Our group want to analyze and realize VIA specification in Myrinet hardware and develop MPI for VIA. The highest performance and stability of VIA implement are our main aims. Now the performance of MyVIA is very good(hardware: SMP AMD athlon, 512MB mem, 64bit/66Mhz PCI bus, Myrinet2000&133Mhz Lanai9; software: linux2.4.7, RedHat7.2), and it could reach 250MB/s for 4096 Byte message. We are also developing MPI for MyVIA, and the first prototype was finished, and it can pass almost all test programs in MPICH. We will improve the performance and stability of MPI for MyVIA.
You can get sourcecode from http://hpclab.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/~chenyu/myvia.html.”

Linux Journal discusses in detail the process of optimizing a server to run Oracle, complete with step-by-step benchmarks and information about what was changed.

Anonymous Reader writes: “TuxPPC has done a small Ogg Vorbis HowTo on how to use the free audio codec to store and play your music data as an alternative to Mp3.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “CMP Books has announced publication of a new technical book entitled Embedded Systems Firmware Demystified, by Ed Sutter. Sutter, a “distinguished member of the technical staff” at Lucent, has been working in embedded systems since 1983 and is the author and maintainer of MicroMonitor, an open source embedded system boot platform. This article at LinuxDevices.com provides a summary of the contents of the book.”

David Sugar tells us about what’s new in GNU Bayonne (February 23, 2002)
See http://www.gnu.org/software/bayonne for general information.

1. GNU Bayonne for Solaris
2. GNU Bayonne 0.7.5 release
3. GNU Common C++ 2 and beyond
4. New Web Site Proposed
5. Project documentation update
6. GNU Bayonne 1.0 Early Releases

GNU Bayonne for Solaris
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With recent patches submitted by Radu Greab for both GNU Bayonne proper and GNU ccRTP, it is now possible to build and use a GNU Bayonne server under Solaris. This port has been tested with the Quicknet card driver (/dev/phone) that had also been ported to Solaris and the Bayonne phonedev driver interface plugin.

This port supports X86 Solaris and as far as I know has only been tested with the Quicknet linejack card. It may be useful to see if any of the Dialogic Solaris runtime drivers work with GNU Bayonne under Solaris as well.

The changes needed for using Solaris are found in the new release of GNU ccRTP 0.7.3, and in GNU Bayonne 0.7.5.

GNU Bayonne 0.7.5 release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We had been busy in several areas the last month, but this seemed to be a good time to do a new release of the current GNU Bayonne distribution. This new release covers many interesting bug fixes, especially for Dialogic ISDN support. Our goal in the 0.7.5 branch is to increase stability and code quality in the current code base rather than expand features, and this is part of that effort.

Another reason for the new release is that some of the recent changes in GNU Common C++ 1.9.x. Ideally we should have maybe one or two more 0.7.x release, including one for the new Aculab driver. We are looking to continue some development forward on 0.7.x, and bug fixes on 0.6.x production releases.

GNU Common C++ 2 and Beyond
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Development on GNU Common C++ “2” is moving along. A complete prototype of the release has been tested under GNU/Linux. There are still problems with FreeBSD and a few other targets which keep it from general release.

The initially distributed release of GNU Common C++ “2” will be commoncpp2 0.99.1. I have already built a test release of ccAudio (1.0), ccRTP (0.99) and ccScript (2.0) which will become available concurrent with the new release. The Bayonne 1.0 source tree has already been migrated to these.

GNU Common C++ “2” can be installed side by side with GNU Common C++, and all the updated libraries will be able to be installed side by side with the older ones that depend on the older release of GNU Common C++ on the same platform. This will allow one to switch between production releases and soon to be released development releases of GNU Bayonne 1.0.

One thing I have chosen to do is directly “version” the library names themselves based on the major release and a new base include directory. This has made it easier to assure the two families of libraries can co-exist, and is something I have seen others start to do. I also version the package name for RPM builds for the new library releases so one will be able to have RPM’s from the old and current releases loaded concurrently, and this also I have seen others do. Hence, we will have a new set of RPM’s, “commoncpp2”, “ccaudio1”, “ccscript2”, and “ccrtp0”.

GNU Common C++ “2” can be found in cvs from subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/commoncpp under module name “commoncpp2”. The cvs for ccAudio is subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/ccaudio (co ccaudio), for ccRTP is subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/ccrtp (co ccrtp), for ccScript is subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/ccscript (co ccscript), and for Bayonne 1.0 development is subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/bayonne (co BayonneNG). With that, by installing GNU Common C++ 2, and ccScript, ccAudio, and ccRTP from current cvs, one can develop on the Bayonne 1.0 tree, and do so without disrupting current stuff.

New Web Site Proposed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To help development and deployment of Bayonne move along faster, we are thinking of redoing the web site. In particular, I would like to see nightly cvs based builds added for snapshot downloads, and to organize the different release families (0.6, 0.7, and 1.0) into easy to comprehend download sets. I also have thought about adding a page that shows the status of each telephony driver, a link for downloading any needed drivers, and a link for who’s working on it or the primary contact for it.

This and other work will depend on the efforts of different volunteers. Jason Spence has indicated he might wish to help with this. We need at least one other person to help with keeping the web site updated.

In about a week or so GNU Common C++ 2 will become available in preliminary form. The initial release will be of GNU Common C++ 2 pre-1.0, and an official 1.0 release of GNU Common C++ “2” (or 2.0 release of GNU Common C++, if one wishes to look at it that way) will be distributed a few weeks after that.

The principle “visible” change in GNU Common C++ 2 is that the entire library has been rewritten to conform to a single set of programming standards that are described with the new package. Other changes are more subtle, and covered in a vast list of bug fixes, portability improvements, and some new and changed classes, as found in the ChangeLog. These changes will mean that ccRTP, ccScript, and ccAudio, will all also be rewritten over a one week period. The result will be GNU ccScript 1.0, GNU ccAudio 1.0, and GNU ccRTP 1.0. All three should be fully portable and compile native under both posix and win32 systems. Another option being considered is absorbing ccAudio, ccScript, and ccRTP directly into the Common C++ 2 package, as this would make setup and deployment simpler.

One reason for GNU Common C++ “2” rather than just GNU Common C++ 2.0 was to make it easier to install both versions on the same target system for both development and runtime. Furthermore, Bayonne 0.7.x (and any 0.8.x) will NOT be rewritten for GNU Common C++ 2. Rather, the 0.9.x/1.0 code base will be changed, before it is distributed. This pushes the initial distribution of Bayonne 0.9 to early March.

Project Documentation Update
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those that have so far volunteered to help with the new manuals and project documentation have suggested that the new manual be split between a developers guide and an administrators guide. Rich has offered to write a new “INSTALL” file for the current production releases. A few other pieces of documentation might be done by others, but we still need more volunteers for this.

GNU Bayonne 1.0 Early Release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As soon as GNU Common C++ “2” is ready for release, I am going to release the other updated libraries and shortly thereafter a formal test build of Bayonne 1.0. We may have a new facility in Austria which will be used primarily to develop CAPI support for Bayonne 1.0 (and any improvements in current 0.7 releases) and we will use OSDL for Intel/Dialogic development.

Anonymous Reader tells us that Free Software foundation lawyer Eben Moglen gives his view on the Microsoft settlement at http://linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue18/lu18-Free_ Software_Matters.html.”