From the Associated Press (on Wired.com): “The Justice Department said Thursday that only about 10 percent of the public comments it has received by e-mail about the Microsoft antitrust settlement were substantive, while others ranged from form letters to pornography.

Overall, the department said it received about 7,500 comments from people in favor of the settlement reached by the federal government and nine states, while 15,000 opposed it. Another 7,000 comments were dismissed as opinion, like ‘I hate Microsoft.'”

M. Kincora writes, “Sun is jousting with storage giant EMC by stressing the ‘openness’ of its new storage systems. These new products support all platforms, including Linux.
http://searchwindowsmanageability.techtarget.com/o riginalContent/0,289142,sid33_gci800801,00.html.

LinuxSecurity Contributors writes, “This document outlines running Postfix on EnGarde. Wietse Venema, author of Postfix and several other staple Internet
security products, describes Postfix as an “attempt to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Postfix
attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and hopefully secure, while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to
not upset your users.”
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/feature_stories/featu re_story-91.html.

Posted at LWN.net is the changelog. “More ->get_sb() patches: nfs. It still acts as nodev – what we want to
(and can) do now is to give it enough smarts to recognize that same tree
might be already mounted.
“

I. Valdes writes, “Douglas Lenat, leader of the Cyc project, a ‘600-person year’ effort to create a common-sense reasoning AI, has been interviewed on Sourceforge. The interview details why the open source version of Cyc, OpenCyc, has been delayed from its August 2001 release date. Short version: it is taking a year longer than we expected.”

bkuhn writes, “The FSF has released a draft version 1.2 of the the GNU Free Documentation License for comment by the Free Software community. Comments should be directed to fdl-comments@fsf.org.”

Damien Mc Kenna writes, “The Phoenix Developers’ Consortium (http://phinixi.com, aka PDC, aka Phoenix), an open-access group of software and hardware developers, is having an open-house IRC conference this coming Sunday, the 10th of February, at 5pm GMT.

Server:ozonefarm.2y.net
Date:Sunday, 10th February 2002
Time:5:00 pm GMT
Channel:#Phoenix

This meeting will be in two sections:

• Channel #Phoenix is open for everyone to chat, both members and prospective members.
• There is a closed channel for NDA-covered discussions. NDA-signed members will be invited into a closed channel for NDA-covered discussions. Members who are new to the server will be told how to join upon arrival.

At the PDC we have been developing plans for several months and are looking for as many members to join in our efforts as possible, in particular we are particularly looking for extra programmers.

The full list of topics for discussion will be available on the day.

This is the first in what will be a regular series of open-house IRC conferences, to be held monthly.

See you there!

Turbolinux(R) Inc., a worldwide leader in Linux operating environments and multi-platform software deployment and management products enabling computing assets to be quickly redefined on demand, announced formally today that the company’s server provisioning product, PowerCockpit, won the Best-in-Show Product Excellence Award for best Network/Server Application at Linux World Expo which concluded last week in New York City.

PowerCockpit automates the process of configuring, deploying, or redeploying systems on a network — whether client/server or mainframe — turning every server on a network into a recyclable asset, computing power that can be reallocated and scaled to meet current business demands. PowerCockpit deploys the entire server software environment, including the operating system, middleware, and application software. IT professionals configure one server software environment, collect the software image and then deposit the image in an image repository. Now, through deploying those images, the functionality of servers can be quickly and dynamically defined. As such, the benefits of PowerCockpit are exponential: images of server software environments can be captured, stored in a library, deployed to thousands of servers, and re-used whenever they’re needed, even months or years later.

“PowerCockpit was up against formidable competition, so it’s a considerable validation to be recognized in this forum,” said Pete Beckman, vice president of engineering at Turbolinux and one of the lead developers of PowerCockpit. “PowerCockpit’s ability to classify servers by their processing power, rather than by their software, is changing the face of network infrastructure, allowing enterprises to create a flexible and responsive technology infrastructure without the need to purchase new equipment — and we’re excited that our colleagues recognize this value proposition.”

Finalists for the Best-in-Show Product Excellence Award for Best Network/Server application included: Computer Associates: eTrust Access Control; Covalent Technologies: Enterprise Ready Server; Egenera: BladeFrame rel. 1.1; IBM: IBM DB2 for Linux; Sistina Software: Logical Volume Manager; Ximian: Red Carpet Corporate Connect.

About Turbolinux

Founded in 1992, Turbolinux Inc. is a global software company providing Linux operating environments and multi-platform software deployment and management products that allow computing assets to be quickly redefined on demand — enabling true flexible processing power. Backed by 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.”

Slashdot has a link to a Sun press release saying the company is “rolling out a multipart program that will significantly broaden the offerings of Linux on low-end Sun servers and commit new resources to the ongoing development of the Open Source operating system.” C|Net also has a story.

–
By John Lettice of The Register –

Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice have taken the judge’s hint and confirmed that they’ll consider changes to the proposed antitrust settlement, following public comment received on it. This seems to have resulted in a straight two to one win for those opposed — 15,000 comments against, 7,500 for.

Apparently another 7,000 or thereabouts were junked as opinion, along the lines of “I hate Microsoft.” Still some kind of barometer of the public mood though, we’d say.

Judge Coleen Kollar-Kottely had earlier taken the unusual step of asking the parties to report whether they were likely to be making changes in the settlement in light of the public comments received. Her job now is to decide on appropriate remedies, and while she has the authority to just sign off the MS-DoJ deal, she also has the authority to sling it, and impose whatever she might think more appropriate.

So her apparent interest in matching the deal to the comment is significant, and given the way that comment has split (even if we charitably presume that no attempted ballot-stuffing by noted historical gerrymanderers has occurred), it’s also significant that the unholy alliance has opted to retire to its tents to consider its options.

They now have to gamble. The current deal is just about the maximum Microsoft would accept, and the minimum the DoJ thought it could get away with. Both parties may now be calculating that while it’s something the two of them can live with, it’s not actually going to play with the public or the judges. So they may have to return to the negotiating table, although this time they’ll be on the same side trying to second-guess the bare minimum they can both get away with.

That said, they still have a fair bit of latitude. During the settlement talks it was clear Microsoft wasn’t going to go significantly further than the deal that was actually arrived at. However, from Microsoft’s perspective the remedies proposed by the holdout states (open-source IE, license Office) would be infinitely worse, so it has the motivation to move quite a bit further, if necessary.

All Content copyright 2002 The Register