– By John Lettice of The Register –

A new organisation, OpenForum Europe, has been formed to push the benefits of Open Source software in the UK. But it is an organisation with something of a past; its moving spirits have been involved in X/Open, Uniforum UK and its successor Interforum, and the inaugural OpenForum Council membership list seems to have a considerable amount in common with the membership of Interforum. The extent to which these organisations succeeded is a matter of opinion.

According to a prelaunch OpenForum document leaked to The Register, one objective of the organisation will be to “broaden the market take up of Open Source Software (OSS) including Linux.” It also intends to avoid repeating the mistakes that were made over Unix in the 80s and 90s, but there are some people who think that organisations such as X/Open and Uniforum bear considerable responsibility for those very mistakes.

Noted Open Source evangelist Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject holds X/Open responsible, alongside “AT&T lawyers,” for “opening the spec of Unix so widely that even NT could be called Unix,” and points to the hideous mess that Unix descended into in the 90s as reason for serious scepticism about the likely effectiveness of OpenForum.

Graham Taylor, programme director for OpenForum, chaired Unix International in the UK, while Geoff Morris was a leading light of X/Open, InterForum and now OpenForum. OpenForum itself has been spawned by the IT Forum Foundation, which also founded InterForum. InterForum CEO Philip Flaxton also has track with Uniforum UK, and is one of the backers of OpenForum. These people, as Bleasdale points out and some of their own supporters confirm, do not know a great deal about Linux, but they do know quite a lot about getting backing, and having their voices heard in the highest circles of government. Although concrete effects of their efforts in this area in the past are tricky to nail down.

Speaking to The Register earlier today Graham Taylor said the organisation’s aim was to “move Open Source forward in the business world,” and that there would be a formal launch in February. He said that although mistakes had been made over Unix, “Geoff and Phil were among the people who stood up and said ‘this is nonsense.'” And he apologised profusely for sending out the press release in Microsoft Word format. “I am in the process of being converted,” he shamefacedly told The Register.

OpenForum’s intention is to focus on the commercial benefits of Open Source, and to push it in the business world. In that sense its ability to gain backing from commercial and government organisations may be useful. At the moment for example it has on board several banks, IBM, HP and Compaq, a clutch of government departments and agencies (including The Office of the E-Envoy), BT, BA, the Metropolitan Police… We needn’t say more, but there are plenty. There are also several representatives of the national and technical media — 365.com, CMP Europe, Dow Jones, Reuters, the Financial Times, but not The Register, apparently. The DTI is meanwhile co-funding a study “to measure the benefits of Open Source Software to British Business.”

One might observe that if all of these organisations had already standardised on open source software, then there would be no need to push for its adoption. One might also observe that there is a distinct dearth of companies you’d actually class as open source companies in the supporters’ list. Graham Taylor volunteers IBM and Caldera, but you could respond to this by pointing it out that this is the mouthy one that doesn’t do anything, and the weird one. No Red Hat, no Mandrakesoft, no SuSE. Entry fees are currently set at bracing levels, from £3,000 to £25,000, which doesn’t seem calculated to win hearts and minds among Open Source vendors. Graham Taylor concedes they may have to come down.

So will the veteran influencers succeed in pushing open source on to stardom in the UK (and then in Europe, for that is the plan)? Or will there simply be many conferences and white papers? We’ll see, but The Register is not confident.

All Content copyright 2001 The Register

Covalent, the leader in enterprise
solutions for the Apache Web server, and Netegrity, Inc. (Nasdaq: NETE), the
leading provider of solutions for securely managing e-business
relationships, today announced a technology partnership that will combine
both companies’ technology expertise to create enhanced Web security
solutions. As the central point of the alliance, the two companies announced
that Netegrity has embedded Covalent’s leading Apache-based Web technology
in their SiteMinder Secure Proxy Server, also announced today. The Netegrity SiteMinder Secure Proxy Server is a turnkey proxy gateway that
secures company’s backend servers, offering a flexible deployment model for
the central management of security policies and user access to e-business
resources. By embedding Covalent’s Apache-based solutions, users will
receive the benefits of Covalent’s secure, reliable and easy to manage Web
infrastructure solutions and can deploy with confidence knowing the product
is based on Apache. The proxy solution can also be combined with Netegrity’s
SiteMinderÃ’ solution to provide customers with the flexibility to use the
approach that fits best in their environments, including using a mix of both
solutions.

“Covalent has made Apache work for the enterprise,” said Bill Bartow, vice
president and general manager of the access management and identity
management business unit at Netegrity. “By embedding their technology into
our Secure Proxy Server customers are able to capture Covalent’s Apache Web
infrastructure expertise and Netegrity’s industry-leading security products.
Covalent’s technology offers customers reliability, scalability, and
unparalleled flexibility.”

“We were extremely pleased to be included in one of Netegrity’s products,”
said John M. Jack, chief executive officer at Covalent. “They have
consistently developed innovative products meeting the needs of today’s
ebusiness environment. Combining our Apache-based enterprise solutions with
their products is a natural fit.”

The Apache HTTP server has seen wide acceptance and unparalleled popularity
as an open-source product powering over 19 million Web sites. Covalent has
created a comprehensive Web server enterprise solution that includes the
first distributed graphical management tool for deploying and managing
Apache Web servers, combining Apache 2.0 with a Java application server and
providing enhanced security and reliability features.

Netegrity’s SiteMinder Secure Proxy Server is available immediately from
Netegrity.

About Netegrity
Netegrity is the leading provider of software solutions for securely
managing e-business relationships. Companies use Netegrity’s products to
control user access to e-business Web sites, to seamlessly create
e-partnerships, and to secure business-to-business transactions. Netegrity
enables customers to create new revenue opportunities, reduce operational
inefficiencies, and strengthen relationships with customers and partners.
With its vast network of partners, Netegrity is securely managing e-business
solutions for over 480 customers worldwide including Aetna, American
Express, Bank One, E*TRADE, General Electric, and Wells Fargo. The Company
was the only vendor to be placed in the leader quadrant within Gartner’s
Magic Quadrant Report (May 2001). Headquartered in Waltham, Mass.,
Netegrity also has offices throughout Europe and Asia. More information can
be found at www.netegrity.com.

About Covalent Technologies, Inc.
Covalent is the leading provider of enterprise solutions for the Apache Web
server. Founded in 1998 by Randy Terbush, one of the original eight
developers of Apache, Covalent has developed a comprehensive Web server
solution offering enhanced security, reliability and manageability. Funded
by leading venture capital investors including Sequoia Capital and Granite
Ventures, Covalent is the only company offering a comprehensive suite of
products, services and support for Apache. Companies such as Lucent
Technologies, Dow Jones and others depend on Covalent for their Apache Web
Server infrastructure. More information about the company can be found at
www.covalent.net.

Anonymous Reader writes, “Lineo Inc. today announced the results of recent changes, including the spin-off of hardware businesses and changes to the executive team, along with another round of investment. The plan for a major corporate restructuring and refocusing had been announced two months ago, and a
change in CEOs was announced last month. LinuxDevices.com has more details in this news story, including an interview with Lineo CEO Matt Harris.”

Posted at LWN.net: “This is a bug fix release. Andreas (bless him) went to town and
patched lots problems big and small. Greg Leblanc was also hard at
work tidying up the documentation build.

If all goes smoothly Gnumeric 1.0.0 will appear in 1 week.”

It’s at LinuxSecurity.com. This week, perhaps the most insteresting articles include “Understanding Rootkits,” “Setting
up a VPN Gateway,” “IPsec Tunneling Between FreeBSD Hosts,” and “Five Steps to
Enterprise Security.” Also this week, two interesting cryptography articles were released:
“Quantum crypto edges closer,” and “Casual PKI and making e-mail encryption easy.”

It’s at Abisource.com. “AbiWord 0.9.6 was released this week (or rather Sunday). We’ve now entered feature freeze, and
will do bug-fixes-only releases numbered 0.99.x until AbiWord is (considered by the developers
to be) good enough for 1.0 (hopefully in late January 2002).”

MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com) reports: “Bugzilla´s HTML front-end mug is about to get a facelift. Bugzilla is the Mozilla Project´s collaborative MySQL database for tracking bugs, requests for enhancements (RFEs), problems, and other such project management matters. Bugzilla is perhaps the shining star of theMozilla Project. The Buzilla source code is open source and available for public downloading=. Many multi-developer software projects use Bugzilla for their problem management database. Target release date is 1 January 2002.” Check this MozillaQuest.com story for details, screen-shots, & download links.

Anonymous Reader tells us about this story from LinuxWorld.com: “MPlayer is a fine video player, but you need to work through an amateur-written installation, docs that exemplify how not to communicate, and boorish developers who think of themselves as a sort of intellectual jeunesse dorée.”

– By Daniel P. Dern –

I strolled the exhibit aisles at

Penton Media’s Internet World/Fall 2001 in
New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center last week — the show didn’t fill up the main floor despite being co-located with Penton’s Streaming Media East 2001 and StorageNext 2001 events. While there, I decided to troll for companies making
use of Linux, BSD, or other non-Microsoft platforms, and, by extension, some companies that have put Linux to work by buying these products and services.

Given the nature of the events, which include companies providing
high-end network/networking equipment and services, it’s hardly surprising that I was able to turn up some examples of Linux being put to work. Here’s what I found. Please note, this in no way purports to be an exhaustive list or survey; I simply
asked a number of likely-looking candidates — odds are there were more.

Surgient Networks

Surgient‘s EQ2500 convergence platforms
for computing, storage and networking are running Red Hat Linux. The devices are intended for input/output-intensive applications such as Web serving, streaming apps, caching, and middleware and storage virtualization.

Surgient went with Linux for “the openness of the OS,” the ability to see the source and customize it, says a company representative. “The core stays the same but we add drivers.”

Surgient customers are currently in beta, so the company wouldn’t name names at this time. but its target markets include large content service providers, and large enterprises.

FileFish

FileFish‘s SEA (Storage Environment Aggregation) Server is software that aggregates data from multiple, heterogeneous storage systems (including Windows and Unix file servers, NAS, SANS, and desktops),
into a single meta-file system, providing Web accessibility to data,
including from Blackberry pagers and Palm handhelds as well as PCs.

FileFish’s SEA software currently runs on Red Hat Linux. Why Linux?
“Because our prospective initial users were already using Linux,
so they wanted something that ran it. So we’re starting with that
first,” says Gary Kapner, senior director of sales, who notes that FileFish
sells software. The customer has to provide the hardware, including the
OS environment. “And supporting Linux is conducive to our road map.”

FileFish is planning to add support for Windows and Solaris in the future.

A start-up, FileFish is still recruiting its “early access partners,” in other words, beta testers. Target users include financial institutions, insurance companies,
legal and high-tech companies, and professional services organizations —
companies with lots of data and lots of remote/mobile professional users
seeking to access it.

SysMaster

SysMaster is running its own stripped-down distro of Linux for its Network Management Platform family of network management appliances, which does things like load balancing and firewalling, and is intended for small- and medium-sized companies up through ISPs, large-scale enterprises, and data centers.

“We liked the idea of using Linux because of its availability and scalability,” says a SysMaster spokesperson. “Our product is based on tools we’ve been using internally for several years.” The company is European-owned, and most of the developers are there.

Linux NetworX Inc.

Linux NetworX specializes in clustering solutions for high-performance/availability, and the company was showing its ICE Box 1500 cluster management appliance, which lets administrators locally and remotely monitor node and environmental conditions and control notes.

“We use a modified version of Red Hat, which we optimize for clustering,”
says a company spokesperson.

Linux NetworX’s customer list alone should end any question or debate as to whether Linux is being used by real companies for real work. The company created the world’s first commercial Linux cluster, for Brookhaven National Labs; other customers include Boeing, Compaq, Dow Chemical USA, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Labs, Sandia National, and the U.S. National Security Agency, as well as ISPs, ASPs, Web hosting centers, and companies doing molecular and chemical modeling, fluid dynamics, and seismic research.

Network Engines

Network Engines provides the hardware and software for “high-density, scalable appliance server and storage platforms.”

Rick Cricenti, director of sales operations, estimates that
about 40% of the systems the company delivers are running Linux.
Other OSes customers run include Windows 2000, Windows NT, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Customers using Network Engines’ products include Open Systems.com, Geodetics, Access Orlando, Picture IQ, and Previo.

I’ve no doubt there were many more vendors there
also making use of Linux and other Open Source OSes and tools, especially given
that Compaq and IBM were among the exhibitors. There was also one network
appliance vendor who had done its own operating system — proprietary, not
Open Source. Go figure. And even one entertainment appliance running Windows CE.
In any case, if there are any doubters still out there who don’t think Linux
is being put to serious use by companies needing high availability and scalability,
just point them back here.

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer. Most recently he was executive editor of Byte.com. His Web site
is www.dern.com.

Dave Jones: “Keeping the ball rolling.. Fix up some merge errors, scoop
up another bunch of pending fixes, and back out some problem bits
for now.”

Patch is available from:
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/patches/2.5/patch-2.5.1-dj2.diff.bz2

Some of these fixes still haven't found their way back to Marcelo yet
but should show up in 2.4.17-rc2 / 2.4.18pre1 with any luck.

2.5.1-dj2
o   bio fixes for qlogicfas.                    (brett@bad-sports.com)
o   Correct x86 CPU helptext.                   (Me)
o   Fix serial.c __ISAPNP__ usage.              (Andrey Panin)
o   Use better ide-floppy fixes.                (Jens Axboe)
o   Make NFS 'fsx' proof.                       (Trond Mykelbust)
    | 2 races & 4 bugs, hopefully this is all.
o   devfs update                                (Richard Gooch)
o   Backout early CPU init, needs more work.    (Me)
    | This should fix several strange reports.
o   drop new POSIX kill semantics for now       (Me)