Slashdot has links to information, including a press release at FreddBSDMall.com saying Wind River Systems has agreed to transfer its sponsorship of FreeBSD to FreeBSD
Mall.

Karen Brophy writes: TalkTech hits the airwaves — Interviews talented technology professionals involved in Open Source, Digital Rights, Security, and Games.
Karen Brophy
Colleen Nagle
Co-Hosts
TalkTech… open_radio
email: talk@talktech.org

Airs Weekly:
KFNX, AZ (1100 AM) = Tuesdays @ 1pm EST / 10am PST / 11am in AZ
WALE, RI (990 AM) = Tuesdays @ 2pm EST / 11am PST / 12pm in AZ
http://www.talktech.org
http://www.renaissanceradio.com (audio stream)

NEW YORK, NY – December 10, 2001 – For those of you just tuning in, welcome to TalkTech, a new radio show with its own take on the “talk” of technology. Join hosts, Colleen Nagle and Karen Brophy, every Tuesday as they explore the landscape of Internet and the people, products, politics, and pop-culture it manifests.

TalkTech – it’s a twist on CarTalk, but it’s got its own beat and measure. It’s kind of like hiphop for white guys spazzed-out on caffeine. The show spins nouns like XML, Perl, and PHP, throws around verbs like obfuscation, execute, compile. And whispers dirty words like Microsoft.

Each week, TalkTech focuses on relevant issues in technology and the Internet through interviews, news, tips, advice, contests, and commentary. The TalkTech Team has already lined up a series of interviews with Internet pioneers, Open Source wizards and Security gurus. Our guests have included Neopets.com, the largest entertainment site on the web; Tim Witham, Director of the Open Source Development Lab (osdl.org), and Robin Gross, Intellectual Property Lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org). TalkTech will speak to anyone about communications technology – from industry leaders, to hard-core open source developers, to artists about the impact this new medium is having on the lives of the American people and the world.

TalkTech will bring its audience answers to any of their pressing questions. The hosts come armed with a passion for helping users make the best decisions about their business or personal technology purchases, and are constantly searching for those companies who are focused on providing valuable products and services to their customers. This season, TalkTech focuses its attention on topics like the economy, politics, privacy, intellectual property, developer culture, civil liberties, consumer advocacy, home computing, and security.

Got a question you want answered? Call us, we’ll get someone on the line or through email to answer!

TalkTech… open_radio

For information: http://www.talktech.org

jeff Gerhardt writes “Tuesday, January 15th, 2002
from the home of Wayne’s World, Aurora IL
Tonight LIVE on www.thelinuxshow.com

At 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et…. Kevin Hill, Jeff Gerhardt, Doc Searls(Linux Journal), Arne Flones and Russ Pavlicek; have another cool show lined up tonight on The Linux Show!!

In Segment One – Hot News: We will be covering the hot Linux news of the last few weeks. In particular we will discuss the news about the new IMAC and the fast approaching January 25th deadline for public comments about the Microsoft Settlement.

In Segment Two- The NEW Network
Web casting continues to explode in growth. Tonight we discuss the new age of open source driven broadcasting technology and operations support. What does this mean for broadcasters and what does it offer the narrowcaster.

We are joined tonight by Bill Goldsmith (friend of our own Doc Searls), who has been working in the radio business for 30 years. He was a DJ & Program Director for various “progressive” FM stations in the 70s (including the infamous KFAT) and currently serves as programming consultant & webmaster for KPIG in Freedom, CA (where he started the world’s first commercial radio webcast in 1995). In true geek fashion, he performs most of his duties at KPIG over the net from his home in Paradise, CA – in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento – where he also runs RadioParadise.com, a 21st-Century update of the progressive radio concept.

Goldsmith has spent the past 2 years developing a Linux-based alternative to pricey radio automation systems. Using open-source tools like PHP, Postgres, Perl, and Apache, his system allows remotely located DJs to program music, record voice breaks, and completely control the playback of music, ads, and other program material – using a standard web browser. His system is designed to facilitate the kind of creative, free-form radio practiced by KPIG & RadioParadise, giving the DJs instant access to the full music library – and also integrates tightly with the station website, greatly facilitating interaction with the audience.

Other opinions are welcome at GeekCast. If you would like to join us on the show, check our IRC Chat(irc.thelinuxshow.com #linuxshow).

Remember tune in at 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et.
Catch the Linux show at www.thelinuxshow.com

– by Tina Gasperson –
Linux distribution company MandrakeSoft stock has hit the over-the-counter (OTC) market in the United States,
according to a community newsletter released by the company January 15,
2002. MandrakeSoft CEO Jacques Le Marois is pleased.The stock trades under the ticker symbol MDKFF, and as of the market close
January 15, was selling at $4.13 USD. MandrakeSoft hopes that the
listing will increase investor trading in the stock, which Mandrake initially issued on the Marché Libre, a Paris-based
over-the-counter market. Apparently the Linux distribution company is not
completely satisfied with its performance. The price is hovering at about 4.50EUR, or $3.99 USD, on the Marché Libre.

“With its stock now
being
traded on the U.S. OTC market, MandrakeSoft effectively becomes a
full-fledged participant in the largest and most active financial
center
worldwide,” the newsletter states.

Le Marois calls the listing good news. “We wanted
to involve the United States user community, but we discovered it was
very, very difficult for Americans to access the Marché Libre system,”
says Le Marois. “They cannot use Ameritrade or e*trade, and the European
system is very complicated [for traders who don’t live in Europe].”

With the listing on the American market, it is now very easy to access
the stocks, get a quote, and place orders, which Le Marois hopes will
mean more trading activity for his company. “When you don’t have enough
trading going on, any movement can depress the stock price.” With
increased volume, says Le Marois, the stock price will more accurately
reflect the state of the company, instead of knee-jerk reactions to
small buy-and-sell orders. “We will now create a ‘virtuous’ circle —
more investor trading will cause the stock volume to increase,” and any rise
in stock price should in turn trigger more investing, he says.

Le Marois says that MandrakeSoft may eventually be listed on bigger
markets like the NASDAQ, but that’s for the future. “It costs a lot of
money to be listed,” he says. “It takes a lot of time and money.”
Besides that, MandrakeSoft does not yet meet the qualifications
for listing on NASDAQ, which include pre-tax income of $1 million,
and at least 400 shareholders. Company officials are looking for
MandrakeSoft’s pink sheet status to bolster the company’s prospects
enough to help it meet the NASDAQ qualifications sooner.

Pick up stock quotes for MandrakeSoft at Nasdaq.com.

Ensim Corporation, the leading provider of
hosting automation solutions, announced today that Canada’s largest hosting company,
Tera-Byte Online Services, has become a customer of Ensim’s flagship product,
ServerXchange(tm) 3.0, facilitating Tera-Byte’s phenomenal growth trajectory.

ServerXchange 3.0, the hosting industry’s first open hosting operations management
platform, offers centralized control of servers, applications, and appliances from a single
Web-based console. ServerXchange is unique in its support for heterogeneous software
and hardware environments. With ServerXchange 3.0, Tera-Byte can flexibly manage
scalable and heterogeneous data centers, reduce time-to-market for new hosted services,
build a profitable reseller channel, as well as enhance customer satisfaction while
lowering support costs – all contributing to the company’s projected 500-percent growth
for 2002.

“ServerXchange 3.0 captures the operating efficiencies with automated management that
will prove critical to our success going forward,” said Steve Keyser, president and CEO
of Tera-Byte. “The reseller capabilities of ServerXchange 3.0 allows us to launch our
channel on the turn of a dime, making an incredible contribution to the ROI of our
assets.”

“Tera-Byte’s deployment of ServerXchange 3.0 is a clear endorsement of the business
processes that we let even the largest hosting providers rapidly adopt for a competitive
advantage,” said Rosen Sharma, president and CEO of Ensim. “Tera-Byte has always
been a forerunner of innovation and customer responsiveness, and we expect to help them
continue in that direction.”

ServerXchange 3.0 will automate Tera-Byte’s Linux and Windows® NT environments,
and the hosting plans that run on them.

Using ServerXchange 3.0, Tera-Byte’s will be able to aggressively build a reseller
channel with Ensim’s Reseller Automation Suite. Tera-Byte will be able to offer
differentiated, private-label reseller services that are easy to scale profitably with self-
service and automation capabilities. Resellers benefit from a framework for defining and
provisioning plans, built-in online selling capabilities, automated customer billing and
management, as well as three-tier management that empowers the hosting provider, the
reseller and end-customer with extensive self-support.

Tera-Byte will also leverage Ensim’s Private Server technology. It partitions any Linux
or Solaris(tm) server into multiple Private Servers. Each Private Server has the same
security and isolation as a dedicated server. Private Servers are economical and reliable
for virtual and dedicated Web hosting, reseller hosting, e-commerce, intranet
collaboration and streaming. Private Server is ideal for entry-level hosting plans, and
affords seamless migration for fast-growing customers and resellers to premium
dedicated-server offerings.
Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Tera-Byte (www. tera-byte.com) provides a wide
variety of services ranging from dedicated servers and shared hosting to Web design.

About Ensim Corporation

Ensim Corporation is the market leader in Hosting Automation products and services.
The company’s flagship product, ServerXchange, is used worldwide to automate the
management, deployment and sales of hosted services. Ensim is headquartered in
Sunnyvale, California with sales offices in the United States and London. The privately
held company is funded by New Enterprise Associates, Worldview Technology Partners
and other blue-chip venture capital firms. For additional information please visit
www.ensim.com or call 1-877-693-6746.

Ensim and ServerXchange are trademarks of Ensim Corporation. All trademarks or registered trademarks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

On December 6, 2001, Tony Stanco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Cyberspace Policy Institute of The
George Washington University delivered the following presentation to the World Bank’s InfoDev Annual
Meeting in Washington D.C. This speech is part of an initiative by the Free Software Foundation and The
FreeDevelopers Network (TM) to help create a software industry in every country. Only Free Software
allows each country to have its own software industry on an equal footing with everyone else, because it
requires everyone to share the same source code base. Also, a fully functional software industry
represents the best way for developing countries to join the world economy, because it doesn’t require
large, expensive plants, as do most other major industries.

By Tony Stanco:

I would like to thank InfoDev for inviting me to speak about Open Source/Free Software. I am a Senior
Policy Analyst at The George Washington University’s Cyberspace Policy Institute, where I advocate
Open Source/Free Software to governments and universities around the world. I am also the founder of
The FreeDevelopers Network. I have been asked to talk today to this august group about Open
Source/Free Software and how it can help poor and developing countries create their own IT
infrastructures.

Software as important global industry

Software is critically important to the new high-tech world we are entering. It is the cyber nerve system of
information technology, and has a disproportionate economic impact on this new world. It is no
coincidence that software has created some of the world’s richest companies. In fact, at one time
Microsoft was capitalized at over $500 billion. That was more value in one company than at any other time
in history, and it was all built on software.

Software can be such a high value product, because it has few requirements for expensive physical assets
in its production. This allows for gross margins upwards of 85% — higher than any traditional plant-based
industry. Therefore, software development provides a unique opportunity for developing countries that
missed out on the physical infrastructure build-out of the last century to leap frog into this century and
make up for lost time.

Software development should be seen as a strategic issue for the World Bank and national governments,
because its creation depends on major investments in people, not major investments in plants. And one
resource that developing countries have is lots of people. As a result, if some of those people can be
educated to create software, those countries can tap into the world economy rather quickly.

I also want to point out that software development can be taught relatively easily. It is something that 14
year-olds are relatively good at, and generally they like to do it, too. Let’s not forget that Bill Gates started
programming at about that age, and some people think he has done pretty well (though others have issues
with how it was done). There was a point at the height of the market when Bill Gates could have given $10
to every man, woman and child in the world and still have $40 billion left over.

So it is clear that software development is a very important economic activity. But why is Open
Source/Free Software important?

Open Source/Free Software

It may surprise some of you that Open Source/Free Software is not just about developing great software.
It is also an international social movement that touches on the fundamental human rights of freedom and
democracy.

Professor Lessig and others say that software in the high-tech world is the functional equivalent of law.
They argue that computers are quickly becoming a cyberpolice force that mimics traditional law
enforcement. (And the recent Microsoft antitrust trial has left it already ambiguous whether national
governments will regulate Microsoft, or Microsoft will regulate national governments.)

The power of software is ubiquitous and inherent in this new digital age, because software and computers
are starting to control the way people interact with each other, with business and with their governments.
Think of what computer voting will be like and how e-government is already being defined by the contours
of software. In cyberspace, these transactions and relationships are dictated by the lines of software code,
just as traditional law defines their contours in real space.

The first concern of Free Software is, therefore, the potential impact of software on freedom and
democracy if these fundamental rights in cyberspace are left to a few white businessmen in America. This
is not what the media have reported about the Movement. They have reported that Free Software is about
superior software development, but that is only part of the story. The whole social movement aspect is
currently under-reported, but is nonetheless extremely important.

Some Open Source/Free Software facts

For those of you who don’t know of the successes of Open Source/Free Software, here are some facts.

Merrill Lynch, in an In-Depth Report on October 30, 2001, called Open Source/Free Software a
“disruptive innovation” that has the potential to topple the traditional software business model, including
that of the industry heavyweight, Microsoft.

The same report also said that GNU/Linux has a replacement cost estimated at over $1 billion using
conventional measurements. This is an amazing figure, given that the Open Source/Free Software
Community created GNU/Linux in their spare time, without a traditional corporate hierarchy or
organization, and without relying on traditional intellectual property laws that some companies claim are
absolutely necessary for the development of professional software.

Some of you may have read that Microsoft called Open Source/Free Software a cancer, a destroyer of
intellectual property, and anti-American. At the beginning of this year, the company really went after
Open Source/Free Software. Of course, all this backfired, because, with Microsoft complaining so loudly
about the threat, even skeptics naturally started to think that there was something to it after all. Otherwise,
why would the world’s most successful software company, with $35 billion in the bank and 3 separate
monopolies be concerned about a bunch of volunteers? And in the end, even Steve Ballmer was forced to
concede that Linux was “Threat number one.”

The Open Source/Free Software Community has grown to about 300,000 developers in over 70 countries.
These 300,000 people are currently working on about 30,000 software projects, and most of these were
started in the last couple of years.

According to the European Commission’s Study into the Use of Open Source Software in the Public
Sector, released in June 2001, from December 2000 to June 2001, the number of Open Source/Free
Software projects doubled. This fact alone should suggest that the future is very bright indeed for this
important Movement.

Security and Free Software

Another important fact to know about Free Software in these days after September 11th is its superior
security.

The U.S. National Security Agency likes GNU/Linux so much that it is promoting its own Security
Enhanced SELinux, which it would like to see as the platform for the country’s critical IT infrastructure in
e-government and e-commerce.

The NSA thinks that Free Software can be more secure than traditional, proprietary software, because
you can’t hide back doors in code when everyone can inspect it.

The Cyberspace Policy Institute at George Washington University, the Free Software Foundation and The
FreeDevelopers Network are working with the NSA to help make SELinux a secure
e-government/e-commerce platform for use around the world.

How is the movement doing globally?

Many countries are looking to Open Source/Free Software as a way to develop their own home-grown
software industry. Some are doing it for national pride. Others for reasons of national security. Still others,
just because they don’t like paying the Microsoft software tax. This group includes China, France, Brazil,
Japan, Germany, and India, among many others.

As an example of this trend, this past July Richard Stallman and I inaugurated the Free Software
Foundation-India and FreeDevelopers-India in Trivandrum, Kerela. This initiative was sponsored by the
public, private, and academic sectors there, with Kerela’s Ministry of Information Technology, the Indian
Institute of Information Technology and Management, and TechnoPark, all involved.

Why did Kerela look to Open Source/Free Software? Kerela is one of the poorest states in India, but one
with a high literacy rate. Some enlightened politicians and developers there realized that India has one of
the largest software developer communities in the world, but that it does not share the wealth produced by
the world’s software in a fair way.

In looking at the issue, they believed that the problem is not that Indian developers are not as good as
American developers, but that traditional proprietary software companies exploit the developers in India
by paying them less, and that these companies sometimes require the best and brightest to leave India and
work elsewhere. They further believe that Indian developers were treated as second-class software
citizens, because they didn’t have the right to study and analyze the code as did some developers in other
countries, thus giving their competitors an unfair advantage. As a result, the forward-thinking people in
Kerela adopted Open Source/Free Software for some e-education and e-government projects.

Open Source/Free Software allows India to place its software developers on an equal footing with
American and European developers, so that the products produced by the Indian developers are the result
of their abilities, and not hindered by restricted access to secret code. It was this ability to educate future
software developers to create their own software industry that attracted Kerela to Open Source/Free
Software.

I believe that Open Source/Free Software can help InfoDev bring other such innovative IT projects to
developing countries, thereby helping them create their own software industries, so that they, too, can
enjoy the fruits of the world economy in self-sustaining ways.

By the way, we are looking for more Open Source/Free Software participants and partners, so if you are
interested please contact me. Thank You.

Tony Stanco, Esq.

Senior Policy Analyst

Open Source/Free Software and e-Gov

Cyberspace Policy Institute

George Washington University

2033 K Street N.W., Suite 340

Washington, DC 20006

202-994-5513 Fax:202-994-5505

Stanco@seas.gwu.edu

Tony@FreeDevelopers.net

http://www.cpi.seas.gwu.edu

Jeremy writes: “KernelTrap has spoken with Linux guru Alan Cox. He is perhaps the second most
influental Linux kernel hacker, next only to Linus. In this interview he talks
about himself, his history with computers and Linux, working for Red Hat,
Marcello and the 2.4 kernel, the DMCA, the future of Linux and much more.”

NewsFactor Network writes: “Networking under Linux was designed by experts, for experts. You can read all the documentation and install all the networking software available, but unless you intrinsically understand specific things about gateways, specific files and configuration protocols, you won’t get your network going. What’s worse, documentation is constantly outdated or “deprecated,” as they say in the geek world. For example, much of the networking information I found on my Red Hat 7.2 documentation CD shows examples using a program called “netcfg.” Unfortunately, those individuals that documented the software seem to have forgotten the fact that netcfg doesn’t come with Red Hat 7.2.”

Dave Jones: “Various pending items, and a merge with some of the bits from
Alan’s new 2.4 branch. This one also includes some more experimental
bits, Aunt Tillie may want to give this one a miss.”

Patch against 2.5.1 vanilla is available from:
ftp://ftp.xx.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davej/patches/2.5/

 -- Davej.

2.5.1-dj15
o   Merge selective bits of 2.4.18pre3ac1 & ac2
    | Drop rmap (except for rate-limit oom_kill change),
        | IDE changes & 32bit uid quota
o   Add 'nowayout' module param for watchdogs.          (Matt Domsch)
o   BSD partition fixes.                                (Andries
Brouwer)
o   wavelan_cs update                                   (Jean
Tourrilhes)
o   Numerous LVM fixes.                                 (andersg)
o   Prevent ramdisk buffercache corruption.             (Andrea
Arcangeli)
o   MS_ASYNC implementation.                            (Andrea,
Andrew Morton)
o   Truncate blocks when prepare_write() fails.         (Andrea,
Andrew Morton)
o   winbond-840 OOM handling.                           (Manfred
Spraul)
o   Natsemi OOM handling.                               (Manfred
Spraul)
o   Eliminate some stalls in i386 syscall path.         (Alex
Khripin)
o   Export release_console_sem()                        (Andrew
Morton)
o   Remove bogus sbp2 changes.                          (Christoph
Hellwig)
o   Remove i386 mmu_context.h                           (Me)
o   Remove reiserfs build warnings.                     (Me)
o   Fix ignorance of SCSI I/O errors.                   (Peter
Osterlund)
o   Fix IDE floppy thinko.                              (Luc Van
Oostenryck)
o   Radeonfb compile fixes.                             (Erik
Andersen)
o   Radeonfb flat panel support.                        (Michael
Clark)
o   Remove bogus extraneous return.                     (Paul
Gortmaker)
o   Fix potential oom-killer race.                      (Andres
Salomon)
o   Fix bio + highmem bounce BUG().                     (Jens Axboe)
o   PATH_MAX fixes.                                     (Rusty
Russell)
o   Frame buffer _setcolreg changes.                    (James
Simmons)

Martin Andrew (a.k.a Mayhem) writes: “You can now download the 2.5.2 Linux Kernel from here or any of the mirror sites, changelog:

final:
 - Matt Domsch: combine common crc32 library
 - Pete Zaitcev: ymfpci update
 - Davide Libenzi: scheduler improvements
 - Al Viro: almost there: "struct block_device *" everywhere
 - Richard Gooch: devfs cpqarray update, race fix
 - Rusty Russell: PATH_MAX should include the final '' count
 - David Miller: various random updates (mainly net and sparc)

pre11:
 - Davide Libenzi, Ingo Molnar: scheduler updates
 - Greg KH: USB update
 - Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA and wireless updates
 - Jens Axboe: bio/block updates

pre10:
 - Kai Germaschewski: ISDN updates
 - Al Viro: start moving buffer cache indexing to "struct block_device *"
 - Greg KH: USB update
 - Russell King: fix up some ARM merge issues
 - Ingo Molnar: scalable scheduler

pre9:
 - Russell King: large ARM update
 - Adam Richter et al: more kdev_t updates

pre8:
 - Greg KH: USB updates
 - various: kdev_t updates
 - Al Viro: more bread()/filesystem cleanups

pre7:
 - Jeff Garzik: fix up loop and md for struct kdev_t typechecking
 - Jeff Garzik: improved old-tulip network driver
 - Arnaldo: more scsi driver bio updates
 - Kai Germaschewski: ISDN updates
 - various: kdev_t updates

pre6:
 - Davide Libenzi: nicer timeslices for scheduler
 - Arnaldo: wd7000 scsi driver cleanups and bio update
 - Greg KH: USB update (including initial 2.0 support)
 - me: strict typechecking on "kdev_t"

pre5:
 - Dave Jones: more merging, fix up last merge..
 - release to sync with Dave

pre4:
 - Jens Axboe: more bio updates, fix some request list bogosity under load
 - Al Viro: export seq_xxx functions
 - Manfred Spraul: include file cleanups, pc110pad compile fix
 - David Woodhouse: fix JFFS2 write error handling
 - Dave Jones: start merging up with 2.4.x patches
 - Manfred Spraul: coredump fixes, FS event counter cleanups
 - me: fix SCSI CD-ROM sectorsize BIO breakage

pre3:
 - Christoph Hellwig: scsi_register_module cleanup
 - Mikael Pettersson: apic.c LVTERR fixes
 - Russell King: ARM update (including bio update for icside)
 - Jens Axboe: more bio updates
 - Al Viro: make ready to switch bread away from kdev_t..
 - Davide Libenzi: scheduler cleanups
 - Anders Gustafsson: LVM fixes for bio
 - Richard Gooch: devfs update

pre2:
 - Al Viro: task-private namespaces, more cleanups

pre1:
 - me: revert the "kill(-1..)" change.  POSIX isn't that clear on the
   issue anyway, and the new behaviour breaks things.
 - Jens Axboe: more bio updates
 - Al Viro: rd_load cleanups. hpfs mount fix, mount cleanups
 - Ingo Molnar: more raid updates
 - Jakub Jelinek: fix Linux/x86 confusion about arg passing of "save_v86_state" and "do_signal"
 - Trond Myklebust: fix NFS client race conditions
"