TuxReports recently published an interview with Jason Spisak of Redmond Linux.

– By Grant Gross –

It was a Linux desktop kind of news week. Our own Robin “Roblimo” Miller reviewed the Internet Computer from OEone, which he says is so easy it makes using an iMac look tough. And among the predictions for 2002, PC Magazine suggested Linux would “emerge as a true desktop operating system.” Perhaps the editors there got a sneak peak at the OEone machine?

Or perhaps they got a look at Lindows, the Linux-based operating system that’s finally supposed to run Windows programs easily. While SiliconValley.com suggested Lindows could worry Microsoft, Lindows CEO Michael Robertson released a statement explaining why the OS hasn’t been released by now, as promised. Robertson also recently wrote a chairman-to-chairman note to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, suggesting some resolution to a trademark lawsuit being pursued by Microsoft.

A few words about Word

Also somewhat desktop related was Free Software Foundation leader Richard Stallman’s suggestions of ways to get people to stop emailing you documents in Word doc format. Stallman’s We can put an end to Word attachments at NewsForge caused quite the debate; check out the more than 250 comments on the story.

No, you can’t give away software to schools

Well, at least Microsoft can’t. A federal judge tossed out that proposed settlement of Microsoft antitrust case, saying it would give a large benefit to the software giant. Well, no kidding.

In related news, the Schoolforge Open Source schools coalition officially launched this week. The coalition of more than 40 groups interested in Open Source education efforts seeks to give schools an alternative to Microsoft products.

The strange SuSE trademark issue

This was an odd court case that lasted all of about four days. As far as we can tell, early in the week, a German judge stopped shipments of SuSE, the popular Linux distribution, because of a trademark violation alleged by Crayon Vertriebs for a defunct KDE app called Krayon that was still listed in SuSE’s startup menu. Within a couple of days, SuSE and the company reached an out-of-court settlement, which The Register characterized as SuSE buying off a trademark “extortionist.”

Linux trojan? Community yawns

This week brought several reports of a “smarter” version of the “smarter” variant of the Remote Shell Trojan that did minor damage to Linux systems last September, but most security experts dismissed the risk, saying the trojan required the unlikely event that a Linux user to ran an infected binary.

Other miscellaneous stuff

Reports that the Yopy Linux handheld had been discontinued even before its launch is simply not true, according to representatives of Yopy maker G.Mate.

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, proposed in the U.S. Congress, would potentially require proprietary anti-copying technology on every digital device. It caused a lot of concern in the Open Source and Free Software communities, but LinuxJournal.com reports that the bill is dead on arrival in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to a member of the Judiciary Committee.

The word is getting out that Open Source can help IT departments cut costs, even in “mainstream” publications like Business 2.0.

New at NewsForge and Linux.com

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

Swedish lawyer and Open Source activist Mikael Pawlo makes the case for a software copyright compromise between the Free Software types and proprietary companies.

Tina Gasperson checks in on the campaign of Open Source advocate Adam Davis, a Libertarian candidate for the city council in Jacksonville, Florida.

Frederick Noronha reports on a project in India that’s helping schools use Open Source software instead of more expensive options.

Stock news

Predictions of economic recovery that bolstered the Nasdaq last week seem to be back on hold. The tech-heavy Nasdaq ended the week at 2,022.46, down from 2,059.38 Jan. 4 and down 24.78 points on Friday alone. The U.S. markets took a hit Friday after a downbeat speech by U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and what Reuters called “a slew of dismal corporate news,” including announcements of 35,000 layoffs at Ford Motor Co.

Our list of Open Source and related stocks, following a week of all 11 stocks rising, had a mostly down week, with only Red Hat, TiVo and Wind River Systems bucking the down trend. TiVo announced $14 million in financing — that can’t be bad for the stock — while Wind River that Mitsubishi has chosen the company’s software and services for high definition digital televisions.

TiVo wasn’t the only Linux-related company that received a multi-million cash infusion this week. Aduva, a company that seeks to simplify installation and management of
Linux systems, also received $14 million, this investment coming from Intel, BMC Software and others.

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

Company Name	Symbol	1/4 Close	1/11 Close
Apple	AAPL	23.69	21.05
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	16.62	16.29
Caldera International	CALD	1.05	0.93
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	23.16	22.88
IBM	IBM	125.60	120.31
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e4.95	e4.48
Red Hat	RHAT	8.25	8.71
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	13.93	13.32
TiVo	TIVO	6.43	7.30
VA Software	LNUX	2.83	2.77
Wind River Systems	WIND	18.89	19.27

Computer User reports that patches to protect against the Linux Remote Shell Trojan (RST.b) are now available.

From Advogato: “The information revolution has brought rapid transformation in the economies of many industrialized countries, and sweeping promises of a better quality of life for all. However, people living in the vast majority of other countries have been left untouched and unimpressed by this ‘revolution’ and its promises, since it has failed to improve their lives.”

ZDNet reports that “Chipmaker Intel and mainframe software company BMC Software have joined others in a $14 million investment in Aduva, a company that seeks to simplify installation and management of Linux systems, the company said Wednesday. Returning investors in the third-round funding include Cap Ventures, Evergreen Management and the Capital Group, the company said.”

– By Mikael Pawlo –

One of the big issues of free software during 2001 was whether Richard M
Stallman was for or against a codified GNU GPL. Hence, did Stallman –the
father of Free Software — propagate a law to support his beliefs? Tim O’Reilly tried to press the issue in a couple of articles (see related links at the bottom of the story) and seemed convinced that Stallman and his Free Software Foundation colleague Bradley Kuhn were for GNU GPL legislation. O’Reilly suggested a system where developers themselves choose the rules under which they release software, not very much different from the system in effect today.

Eric S Raymond wrote a satire to prove how wrong Stallman and Kuhn would be to suggest a GNU GPL law. Raymond posed Stallman and Kuhn the question whether if they could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would they? Stallman and Kuhn slightly tilted toward the legislative point of view, but never gave a straight answer whether they were
for or against a codified GNU GPL. Stallman and Kuhn wrote: “We believe,
though, that with time, as more and more users realize that code is law,
and come to feel that they too deserve freedom, they will see the
importance of the freedoms we stand for — just as more and more users have
come to appreciate the practical value of the free software we have
developed.”

Free software is very simple in its construction. It uses the provisions in
copyright law stating that the author has an exclusive economic right of
his work. Computer programs are regarded as literary works in copyright
law. Thus, the author of a computer program can enter into any agreement
regarding his work. The GNU GPL is such an agreement. The agreement is
enforceable both under the principle of freedom of contract and
copyright law. As Stallman’s legal counsel professor Eben Moglen has told
us on several occasions, the GNU GPL still has not been successfully
challenged.

Copyright law is often questioned. In an article in Wired 1994, John Perry
Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that copyright was not designed to protect ideas or bits of information but only to protect ideas as expressed in fixed form. Hence, according to Barlow, copyright is dead in the digital age.

Copyright was made to create an incentive for authors and scientists to
create and explore and give them a guarantee that they would profit from
their creations. A copyright system that is too strict in favor of the
authors will work as a hinder and not an incentive for creativity. In the
epilogue of his book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhynathan states
that “a looser copyright system would produce more James Bond books, not
fewer. Some might be excellent. Others might be crappy. Publishers and
readers could sort out the difference for themselves. The law need not to
skew the balance as it has.”

Computer programs are written incrementally. That means that it is important
to be able to reuse previously written code. Hence, you need to be able to
write the computer program equivalent of a James Bond book without the original
author being present in your project. This is a strong argument
for a codified GNU GPL, while one of the cornerstones of GNU GPL is the
right to reuse previously written code.

Would not a modern democratic society benefit from a plurality of
irreconcilable and incompatible doctrines? We need the GNU GPL, but we also
need proprietary software, Open Source software, BSD licenses, the Apache
license and so forth. That would make the case for GNU GPL legislation
void. However, as Lawrence Lessig taught us in his book Code and Other Laws
of Cyberspace, the code may in itself work against plurality. If we choose
to believe Lessig, we might want to reconsider regarding computer programs
in the same way as literature.

In The Future of Ideas, Lessig suggests a reform of software copyright law
forcing computer programmers to disclose their source code when the
copyright expires. Lessig would protect computer programs for a term of
five years, renewable once. Copyright protection would, in Lessig’s proposal,
only be granted if the author put a copy of the source code in escrow. The
source code should be disclosed to each and everyone when the copyright
expires, perhaps through a server with the U.S. Copyright Office.

That much said, Lessig is very reluctant to make open code a law. In The
Future of Ideas, Lessig states that the government should “encourage” the
development of open code. Such “encouragement” should not be coercive.
According to Lessig there is no reason to ban or punish proprietary
providers. But this view is hardly consistent with Lessig’s view on the
future of software copyright law. In Lessig’s future system, proprietary
providers are severely punished. They lose about 100 years of protection,
the current copyright protection of life of author plus 70 year,s compared to five plus five years and then full disclosure.

In article published in Stanford Technology Law Review, Mathias Strasser
argues that any move toward more open code would be highly undesirable
from societal point of view, as it would destroy the market-based incentive
structure that currently encourages software producers to develop code that
consumers find attractive. By applying the utilitarian incentive theory and
the Lockean labor-desert theory, Strasser tries to explain why the current
copyright system is the best.

Stallman and Moglen have yet to convince me that the GNU GPL and free
software philosophy is the final answer to intellectual property protection
of computer programs. However, I am not convinced that either Strasser or
Lessig is right in their view of the software copyright. But I choose to
believe Lessig when he states that code is law. The code layer in the
networks may, in my opinion, affect the freedom of speech at large.

I do not think that copyright is dead in the sense Barlow told us in 1994. Copyright
is still around, and even if it’s not effective in the digital age — as
observed by Barlow — the courts enforce copyright. Therefore, we need to
find a new way to deal with copyright protection of computer programs. The
U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and prohibition on reversed engineering is
not the right way to develop copyright. We need more transparency, but
still we need to consider the points raised by Strasser and O’Reilly. It is important that the incentives for larger businesses remain even if the code is more open through a change in the copyright law. If such a change is made, we need to consider the unique characteristics of computer programs. We should not continue to compare computer programs to literary works. Books are not software.

What we need is balance. In Sweden, we have one word that I have not
encountered outside of Sweden. The word is “lagom” and it defines the space
between too much and too little. What we need is lagom copyright protection
for computer programs.

Related links:

The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html

Lawrence Lessig homepage: http://www.lessig.org/

The GNU homepage:
http://www.gnu.org/

Mathias Strasser’s article:
http://stlr.stanford.edu/STLR/Articles/01_STLR_4/index.htm

Tim O’Reilley’s My Definition of Freedom Zero:
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/526

Richard M. Stallman and Bradley M. Kuhn’s Freedom or Power:
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/08/15/free_software.html

Eric S Raymond’s Freedom, Power, or Confusion:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-17-016-20-OP-CY

Mikael Pawlo is an associate of the Swedish law firm Advokatfirman Lindahl.
On nights and weekends he works as an editor for the leading Swedish Open
Source and Free Software publication Gnuheter, which he co-founded with
Patrik Wallstrom.

Dorkus123 writes, “While reading news over at CNet I came across a story about Microsoft signing a deal with Scale Eight for services to MSN. Those services include streaming video, audio and storing photos for MSN customers. After some digging around on the web I found a ZDNet article that says, ‘Scale Eight runs proprietary software that manages data stored across an array of standard Intel-architecture servers running Linux.’ It seems Microsoft maybe more reliant on Open Source software (link to The Register) for their online services than they care to admit.”

Vivienne tells us about this letter: “I am writing Chairman to Chairman to discuss the lawsuit your company filed against our use of “LindowsOS” for the LINUX based operating system we are advertising and developing. As I understand your lawsuit, you say purchasers will be confused because of our use of ‘LindowsOS’ and Microsoft’s use of ‘WINDOWS’ on its ‘XP PROFESSIONAL’ and ‘XP HOME’ operating systems. The corresponding and quite different logos placed next to each other are set out below for your convenience.”
It’s at Lindows.com.

WorldLingo has seen the future of the Web — and it’s not in English. While the vast majority of commercial Web sites
today are in English, a surprisingly large number of Internet users-perhaps as many as 50%, according to some
observers — don’t speak English. And that number is growing. By 2004, according to research firm Global Reach, only a
third of Internet users will speak English.

To succeed in this electronic Tower of Babel, businesses will need instant translations of foreign-language email.
Fremont, Calif.,-based WorldLingo is aiming to meet this need, by combining the brain-power of humans and computers
in a unique approach to online translation. The company uses its automated translation systems to provide a rough
translation of foreign language email. Along with the translation comes a quote for a more exact translation, done by
one of WorldLingo’s human translators.

The service is proving popular with large Web portals and ecommerce sites. But to handle the translation demands of
these large customers, WorldLingo had to be prepared to scale its computers rapidly.”Our traffic can go in peaks and
valleys, and we have to be able to cater to the peaks,” says WorldLingo CEO Phil Scanlan. “But more importantly, a new
customer can add very significant volumes to our traffic, and we need to be able to respond to that very quickly.”

WorldLingo found the answer to this challenge, says Scanlan, in Turbolinux Cluster Server 6. The company runs its
business on three clusters, all using Dell PowerEdge 2450 computers running Turbolinux. One cluster hosts
WorldLingo.com’s Apache Web servers, another the company’s application servers, and the third is home to the servers
that do the actual translations.

WorldLingo found that Cluster Server 6 gave it the flexibility it needed to handle a rapid boom in its business with
minimum trouble. Each time his company adds a large Internet portal or major ecommerce site as a customer, says
Scanlan, it may have to add 30 or 40 machines. Cluster Server makes that easy. “When we get a new customer,” he
says, “we just plug in more machines. We don’t have to change any programming code.”

As a startup, cost was a big consideration in WorldLingo’s technology decisions. WorldLingo briefly considered going with
servers from some of the big Unix vendors, but wanted the cost advantage of using off the-shelf PCs. With Cluster
Server, says Scanlan, “it’s not only fast for us to increase the capacity, it’s also very affordable.” Another selling point
for WorldLingo.com was the operating system. “Cluster Server is based on Linux,” Scanlan says, “so it’s’ stable
technology. We know we can trust it.”

For WorldLingo, Cluster Server 6 takes much of the headache out of running the system on a day-to-day basis. “It
takes care of managing the nodes, divides up the jobs between them, and handles all the load balancing,” Scanlan says.
“That makes our lives much easier.”

“We wanted a system that could handle high volume, and that would scale easily and affordably,” says Scanlan.
“Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 gives us just what we were looking for.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Robert Love announced the release of a preemptible kernel patch that is compatible with Ingo Molnar’s new 0(1) scheduler. The patches both now work together in the stable 2.4 kernel tree and the 2.5 development kernel. There’s more information here at Kerneltrap.org.”