PR News Wire: “Xi Graphics Inc. today announced that it has released an OpenGL Linux graphics driver for 3Dlabs’ Wildcat II 5110 workstation graphics card. The new driver is an addition to Xi Graphics’ new Summit v2.0 product line introduced last month, and is designed to run on Intel/AMD 32-bit platforms running the Linux 2.4.x kernel.” Read more in this press release.

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
I’ve been writing about Linux on the desktop and generally advocating increased Linux usability for non-technical people since 1997, but I am not going to write about LindowsOS quite yet. Or about Xandros or about any of the other unreleased “E-Z Linux” distributions that seems to be getting large quantities of “advance buzz” elsewhere. Sorry, folks, but I think we’ve already seen enough Linux vaporware to last at least 50 years, and Linux is only 10 years old.
Shall we talk about (commercial) Linux software companies that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on trade show displays before they had any products to show or sell? Most of those companies are gone now, as in bankrupt, because their products either never made it to market or were so disappointing that no one bought them.

Or shall we talk about promises of future software wonders that will make this or that possible that was never possible before? We don’t need commercial, for-profit companies (or press releases) for that. In and among the many useful projects hosted on SourceForge.net, there are ruins of many that never took off or didn’t even make it to the launching pad; that have only one developer listed; show no updates in the last year; and show few or even no downloads.

This winnowing process is by no means limited to Open Source or Linux software; plenty of Windows and commercial Unix software projects are started and later abandoned, but we don’t hear about them because their deaths take place behind closed doors, not in public.

Advance notice from proprietary software companies of “a release early next year” (or whenever) is common. I haven’t had a call from a PR person about one of those for, oh, about an hour. She was nasty, too, when I told her that Linux.com, NewsForge, and Slashdot were not interested in writing about a product that wasn’t going to be out for at least another three months. “But it runs on Linux, she stressed. “So your audience will be interested in it!!!”

She tried, very rudely, to make me feel guilty about “depriving my audience” — that’s you — of essential information about her company’s “revolutionary” product, the name of which I have already (mercifully) forgotten.

Please accept my apologies, Mr. and Ms. Audience Person, for the terrible wrong I did you by failing to write a breathless, “Isn’t this wonderful!” story about whatever piece of vaporware was being (unsuccessfully) shoved down my throat.

I finally got the PR person to hang up by saying, “Why don’t you call ZDNet? They like to do that kind of story. We don’t. When your product is released, send us a copy and maybe we’ll review it.” (Apologies to my many friends who write for ZDNet; but your sites do run product “advance announcement” stories we won’t touch.)

Maybe Ms. PushyPR will send a review copy, maybe she won’t. Maybe I just lost a chance to run the first online review of something that will save the world from cancer, Microsoft, racism, and other evils. I’ll take that chance.

We have no problem directly publishing the full text of legitimate press releases we get — clearly identified as press releases. We figure you are smart enough to realize that a press release is glowing by definition; that it is not the same as an actual, reported story about a company or an honest review of one of its products.

And now we come back to LindowsOS. Note that I have deviated from our standard practice and have not included a link to their site. That’s because there is nothing there except pure, unadulterated hype. Buried in the FAQ page (which contains no more technical information that any other page on the Lindows site), I found this sentence: “Credentialed press can obtain a copy of the LindowsOS Preview Release by contacting pr@lindows.com.” I sent off an email, and since I have plenty of press credentials I suppose I may get a review copy sooner or later.

But until then, you will see no staff-written stories about LindowOS on Linux.com or NewsForge. Nor will you see much writing about other “someday” products. There are just too many of them out there for us to track, and we’ve had so many of the most-hyped ones disappoint us when they were finally in our hands that we are almost at a point where we expect that any product that comes to us only after months of aggressive PR buildup is not going to measure up to the advance boasts we heard about it.

I almost never directly ask for comments on a story, but this is a case where Linux.com and NewsForge editors really need to know what you think (on the discussion board for all to see rather than by email, please).

Here’s the question:

Are we right to avoid almost all “prerelease” product announcements or should we start running more stories about them?

From PR Newswire: WebSideStory, Inc.
( http://www.websidestory.com ), the world’s leading provider of outsourced
e-business intelligence services, today reported that despite much hype and
expectation in recent years, Linux has failed to gain market share from
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) operating systems. As of
December 17, 2001, Linux held a global usage share of only 0.24 percent,
according to WebSideStory’s StatMarket ( http://www.statmarket.com ), a Web
development optimization service and the leading source for data on global
Internet user trends. This compares with Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s
Macintosh operating systems, which hold a combined global usage share of more
than 98 percent. For almost three years, Linux usage share has fluctuated
between .2 and .3 percent, with no substantial growth.

From DebianPlanet: “As you might know, Sony released in Japan a hardware kit
to run the port of GNU/Linux on a Playstation 2 some time
ago.

They’re now questioning wether the kit should be released in
other places. They have set a poll site for Europe and US.
Please send your vote if you find it interesting.”

LWN.net tracks Linux throughout the year. “2001 was yet another interesting year for the Linux community. The bubble economy was long past, and reality caught up with most
Linux companies. Some did not survive, and most of the rest are smaller and far more careful. But Linux is stronger than ever, and
continues to grow.”

TheStreet.com reports that Red Hat’s third-quarter net income excluding charges was $1.3
million, or 1 cent a share. Shares of Red Hat were trading up 3.8% to $8.20 this morning after closing at $7.90 Tuesday. Here’s the earnings announcement at LWN.net.

Augustus writes, “LinuxHardware.org has just posted its review of the Enermax 431W power
supply: “After our first look at PC power supplies there was a call for even more
coverage and one company stood out as the one most people wanted to know
about: Enermax. Enermax has taken the enthusiast market by storm lately by
flooding the retailers with fairly inexpensive, feature-rich power
supplies that offer options such as multiple fans, variable speed fans,
and power output up to 500W. Now the question we want to answer is: “How
does an Enermax supply stack up to the supplies reviewed in our previous
test? Let’s get right into the specs and the numbers to find out.” Full review.

ActiveState, the leader in open source programming tools, announces the release of Komodo 1.2 for Linux and Windows. Komodo is a cross-platform integrated development environment for open source technologies and XSLT programming. It is optimized for programming languages such as Perl, Python, and Tcl and now features cutting-edge XSLT and PHP editing and debugging capabilities. Support for consuming Web services has also been added. This release also offers significant performance improvements over previous versions.

“Komodo has all the power tools that Linux and Windows programmers at any level would need,” said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. “The intuitive design and innovative editors and debuggers make it a breeze to work with a number of powerful programming languages all in one development environment.”

Komodo has all the features of a professional IDE, such as a language aware editor, graphical debugger, regular expression toolkit for Perl, and distributed development support. The intuitive environment is also ideal for occasional programmers, with syntax checking, AutoCompletion, and a powerful debugger to catch errors fast, as well as tutorials, templates, online documentation, and dynamic help.

Key new features include:

• Performance – significantly improved debugging performance and resource memory management
• XSLT debugger – takes the pain out of XSLT by making it simple to
  find problems in both input data and code
• XSLT automatic output preview – eliminates time-consuming steps so
  you can view your transformation results immediately
• PHP – PHP AutoCompletion, syntax checking and debugging plus
  debugging of PHP files locally or on a remote Web server
• Web services – consume Web services for Perl, Python or PHP
• Tcl editing & debugging with a membership to ASPN Tcl; use Komodo’s syntax checking and debugging with Tcl

“I’m a strictly emacs kind of developer, but I brought home a copy of Komodo, decided to play around a bit, and is it ever good. I’d previously lost a collection of scripts for managing my website, and not only did I rebuild the whole script I’d lost in hours, Komodo makes turning ‘use strict’ on so painless that I went back and rebuilt a lot of other stuff from memory just for fun. Fantastic stuff – ActiveState’s made programming a pleasure again,” Clay Shirky, Writer and Consultant, Shirky.com.

“I’m quite pleased at this Komodo release. The Komodo development team is especially proud of the Linux version, which is particularly important for PHP users and others doing multi-platform development,” said Dr. David Ascher, Komodo Project Lead.

Komodo 1.2 is $295 for a commercial license. A non-commercial version is $29.50. Previous Komodo releases are available for educational use for free.

About ActiveState:
ActiveState is the leading provider of open source based programming products and services for cross-platform development. ActiveState’s key technologies are Perl, the Internet’s most popular programming language; Python and Tcl, user-friendly scripting languages; PHP, the dynamic Web programming language; and XSLT, the XML transformation language. The ActiveState Programmer Network (ASPN) offers these technologies with the latest information and productivity tools, empowering programmers with the freedom to work with their preferred language and development environment.

Media & Analyst Contacts:
Lori Pike, ActiveState

ActiveState, ASPN and Komodo are trademarks of ActiveState Corp. All other company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

© ActiveState Corporation 2001.

“Yes, OK. We know you’re busy people. But our passion for bringing obscure Linux
file system announcements to your attention remains undiminished. Especially when
they’re important, and this one is certainly worth keeping tabs on.” More at The Register.

NewsFactor Network writes” “Recent news articles celebrated the fact that the first Web page went online approximately 10 years ago. I remember what it was like being involved with software development at that time. My initial feeling was that using markup in a browser was less than optimal because it leaves too much of the presentation details up to the browser. Thankfully, new technologies are around to make my life easier.”