MSNBC reports that “a proposed settlement agreement in a series of antitrust suits may not only give Microsoft a fairly inexpensive legal resolution, it may also help the company and its PC allies further erode Apple Computer’s position in education.” Read Red Hat’s response in this report by The Register.

Government agency to enforce open standards and promote Open Source / Free Software.

Paris, Munich, Amsterdam – 2001-11-21: France Committee for e-Government announced today that the French Agency for e-Government (ATICA) would be in charge of selecting open standards to be enforced all over public administrations in order to guarantee full interoperability. The French Agency for e-Government, which is also officialy in charge of promoting Open Source / Free Software, is going to select in 2002 the copyright license, based on existing Open Source / Free licenses, under which future software developments may be published.

EuroLinux welcomes this move. An EU country now officialy endorses open standards and Open Source / Free Software through an
application law. It confirms the adoption of Open Source / Free Software within European public administrations. For Harmut Pilch, president of the FFII, “projects including the SLIS communication server for schools, the Mioga toolkit for extranet or the Yihaw portal component for Zope have proven that the use of Open Source / Free Software through customisation and maintenance contracts between public administrations and commercial software companies is an efficient and sustainable economic model for software infrastructure.”

Bernard Lang, Vice President of the French-speaking Linux User Association (AFUL) adds: “Open Source / Free Software is the best
guarantee for citizens to know what kind of information they exchange with governments”. With Open Standards & Free Software, e-Government
preserves privacy, individual liberties, and the right for every citizen to access public information. “Open Standards & Free Software
are the best technologies to build trust between e-Government and
citizens” says Luuk van Dijk, Spokesperson of the Dutch Open Source
Association (VOSN).

Open Standards and Open Source / Free Software are also required to
accelerate the construction of e-Governement at the European Union
level. As stated by French MP Jean-Yves Le Déaut back in an April
2000 proposal of Law, “open communication systems and source code
availability are compulsory in order to guarantee at the European
level a high level of interoperability between information systems
of public administrations”. EuroLinux strongly urges all national
governments and the European Commission to officialy endorse open
standards and to consider the use of open source / free software.

EuroLinux suggests to upgrade the IDA programme of the European Union into a European Agency for e-Government in charge of harmonising open standards between national e-governments and coordinating the publication of reference Open Source / Free Software implementations. The adoption of Open Standards and Open Source / Free Software in Europe is the fastest path to an open, trustable, privacy savvy, interoperable and competitive e-Governement in Europe.

“Next generation e-Government has two requirements: interoperability
and transparency. These are the two strengths of open source software.
Therefore, I am taking little risk when I predict that open source
software will take a crucial part for the development of e-Government in the years to come” summarises Michel Sapin, French Minister in charge of Public Administration and e-Governement.

References

ATICA – http://www.atica.pm.gouv.fr/

Application Law which creates ATICA –
http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/citoyen/jorf_nor.ow?numjo=PRMX0105055D

The Carcenac report which agrees to enforce open standards in public administrations and adopt open source / free software –
http://www.internet.gouv.fr/francais/textesref/rapcarcenac/sommaire.htm

The Le D̩aut / Paul / Cohen / Bloche proposal of Law which suggested the creation of an Agency in charge of enforcing open standards in public administrations Рhttp://www.treggouet.org/senat/prop_lois/PL 117 12-99.html

Michel Sapin Statements on e-Governement – http://www.fonction-publique.gouv.fr/leministre/lesdiscours/discours-
200111151520.htm

About EuroLinux – www.EuroLinux.org

The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source
Software. Companies, members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or
sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for
operating systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows.

The EuroLinux Alliance launched on 2000-06-15 an electronic petition
to protect software innovation in Europe. The EuroLinux petition has
received so far massive support from more than 90.000 European citizens, 2000 corporate managers and 300 companies.

Press Contacts

France & Europe: Jean-Paul Smets – jp@smets.com +33-6 62 05 76 14
Germany & Europe: Hartmut Pilch – phm@ffii.org +49-89 127 89 608
Denmark and Northern Europe: Anne Østergaard – aoe@sslug.dk
Belgium: Nicolas Pettiaux – nicolas.pettiaux@linuxbe.org
Netherlands: Luuk van Dijk – lvd@mndmttr.nl

Permanent URL for this PR: http://petition.EuroLinux.org/pr/pr15.html

Legalese

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.All other trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective companies.

ZDNet: “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, where the beer was golden and the prawns leaped gladly onto barbies from Darwin to Sydney, there was a plucky villager. Sitting on his dunny one day, thinking about the all the poor kids who’d never even seen a Windows error message, he had a bright idea. ‘Why not get all the old computers from companies that don’t want them any more,’ he thought, ‘and give them to the schoolkids so they can acquire valuable IT skills.'” Unfortunately this story does not have a very happy ending.

Linux Journal: Usually, the first approach taken by administrators in virus prevention is to install a desktop virus protection program. However, by far the most common entry point for viruses, especially macro viruses, is corporate e-mail systems. Still, this is usually the most neglected piece in any virus detection solution. This article explains in detail how to set up a more virus-free e-mail environment in your network.

ZDNet: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked telecommunications companies to make changes in their state-of-the-art networks to make it easier for the FBI to conduct surveillance, according to a report.” Read more here.

OSNews: An informative and detailed review of AtheOS, the promising 32-bit GPL Operating System. The article describes the installation process, the GUI, usage, internal design, development and much more.

David Sugar writes: “What’s new in GNU Bayonne (November 21, 2001)”
=============================================

See http://www.gnu.org/software/bayonne for general information.

1. What is this?
2. GNU Common C++ updates
3. A GNU ccAudio release
4. GNU ccScript updated
5. GNU Bayonne and PRI spans
6. Apennine reaches new heights
7. Packaging help
8. GNUCOMM User Agent
9. What is next?

What is this?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After some thought, I have decided to have a more structured document to publish as important things are going on in GNU Bayonne. I decided against a weekly format like many projects have chosen to do simply because I did not wish to have to find things every week, or to highlight something that would otherwise be trivia in a slow week.

As it happens, there have been weekly updates for the last few weeks because of many different things going on simultaneously in GNU Bayonne and related packages. For the most part, this particular what’s new will happen to cover what is more recent and relevant since last weeks update in this area.

As it happens I will be away next week in the Netherlands attending Linux Kongress and speaking about GNU Bayonne. We may try to do some further work while there, but it is unlikely there will be much new before December. I will also be speaking at next year’s GNU/LinuxWorld being held in NYC, about DotGNU.

GNU Common C++ updates
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After a couple of weeks, we found it was necessary to release GNU Common C++ 1.9.1. This release attempts to fix many of the new problems that were created by the great leap forward from 1.6.x to 1.9.0. This release fixes and extends native win32 builds by making sure all major classes are properly exported. Support forward for gcc 3.0 and backward for some older gcc compilers have also been fixed. I believe there is still a problem with Solaris targets, although that is being worked on.

In addition to these changes, we have tried to introduce support in the win32 native build of GNU Common C++ for the native build of GNOME libxml that is provided by Igor Zlatkovic. We still have some problems with using these, so this will have to wait for the next release. Ideally, we do want xml parsing in all platforms for the GNU SEE daemon and for the GNUCOMM user agent, but more about that is covered in GNU ccAudio…

A GNU ccAudio release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to GNU Common C++, we had a new release of GNU ccAudio. With this new release we have now made GNU ccAudio depend on GNU Common C++. This solved several problems, including having to use duplicate tests for things like namespace support between the two, and being able to use the GNU Common C++ macros for constructing portable compilable classes as shared libraries.

Another reason for this change was to be able to use GNU Common C++’s dynamic class loader to support distribution of freely licensed software codec’s as part of future GNU ccAudio releases. Software codecs are important for many current and future projects in GNUCOMM, including GNU Bayonne, the phone client project, and the IP gateway proxy.

Finally, we expect to now be able support more multimedia features in GNU ccAudio. This can include simple things like a thread operation to play an audio prompt, or more complex audio operations. GNU ccAudio will also need loadable module support from GNU Common C++ to do soundcard interfaces, so that one can seamlessly plugin oss based audio, esd, arts, or any other audio interface at runtime. In particular, supporting full duplex audio in some form is necessary for the GNUCOMM user agent.

There are many areas of multimedia operations and signal processing that we would like to take GNU ccAudio forward to in the future. Being able to perform FFT’s on sample buffers and perform host based tone detection is one area of interest. Another is in audio mixing and equalizing. I would also like to see if we can create packet frame mpeg decoding to issue frames of mpeg audio out to sound devices such as telephony hardware (GNU Bayonne), sound cards, or IP channels (GNU ccRTP).

GNU ccScript updated
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Along with other core GNUCOMM libraries, there is a new release of GNU ccScript available. In this new release, we simply have extended the use of runtime loadable ccScript extension modules by moving some core language elements into external modules. In particular we have
externalized date and time handling.

GNU Bayonne and PRI spans

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Naturally, there is a new release of GNU Bayonne, 0.7.3, now out this week. I had some plans to provide standardized applications as part of GNU Bayonne for voice messaging, debit calling, and acd call queuing. In fact, none of these were complete enough this week to be part of this release.

Rather we chose to provide a new release of GNU Bayonne at this time so that people can start testing and deploying PRI based applications. We have had a great deal of success in completing ISDN support on PRI spans for GNU Bayonne using the Dialogic hardware. This was largely due to both the help of Mark Lipscombe, and the facilities of OSDL. We can now demonstrate and deploy PRI hosted applications, both for inbound and outbound calls, and so this seemed a good opportune moment to create a new release.

At the same time, we have worked at improving and standardizing call progress analysis in GNU Bayonne. This has been done across all existing drivers, and should further expand the functional capabilities of GNU Bayonne for outbound dialing applications.

Apennine reaches new heights
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some may recall I created Apennine to provide a generic XMLRPC server that can sit on top of all of GNUCOMM, including GNU Bayonne. By using dso modules, one can add functionality for those GNUCOMM services running on each machine.

Originally Apennine was looked upon simply as a way to bridge phpGW to GNU Bayonne. For example, one might be able to use Apennine and some changes in phpGW to get the phpGW address book to use GNU Bayonne to dial out phone numbers when you click on their entries. Another example might be unified messaging that interconnects phpGW with GNU Bayonne.

Since XMLRPC is carried on http, to a very real extent Apennine is also a web server. I have thought of broadening it’s mission, so that in addition to attaching dso modules for xmlrpc, one could map web space to loaded modules. There are places where presenting GNUCOMM services thru a web interface may be very useful. For example, being able to browse the “status” of active GNU Bayonne connections. I think if we add web pages to Apennine for things like this, they should be exported as .xhtml, so that they may easily be browsed and parsed by other automated systems.

Packaging Help
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It has been awhile since we had GNU Bayonne and associated applications distributed in pre-packaged binaries. I would like to re-introduce this, and in particular introduce .deb’s, as well as actively maintain the FreeBSD ports entries for these packages.

As it happens, a new Debian developer has come to me offering to package Bayonne. I would like to see if we can get more volunteers to maintain other pre-packaged formats. I do not have time to do this on a regular basis, and having volunteers do these would be very helpful.

GNUCOMM User Agent
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Plans are moving forward to introduce a GNUCOMM “user agent”, or softphone. This would use GNU Common C++ as the base for plugin support, GNU ccRTP for the realtime audio transport, oSIP for call signaling and text messaging, the FOX GUI for the user interface, and GNU ccAudio for audio processing.

The GNUCOMM user agent will be both an instant messaging client and a VoIP telephone for use in the rest of GNUCOMM. The use of plugins will allow the GNUCOMM user agent to provide plugin services and visual interface extensions for role specific applications. Imagine, for example, a GNUCOMM user agent for an ACD agent on a IP telephone network, where the user agent provides thru a plugin information on call queue status and common ACD phone controls, in addition to acting as a standard client.

Ideally we would like to make the GNUCOMM user agent the centerpiece for all inter-user communications on free platforms, and to do so in a fully integrated and unified fashion between voice and messaging, as well as offering support for connecting to the public telephone network thru gateways, point of presence detection, and user directory services, perhaps all done thru SIP.

This at least is the outline of what this package will encompess. We are looking for some additional volunteers who would be interested in helping with getting the user agent project going forward. In particular, there are some areas in GNU ccAudio that needs to be completed before much further work can be done on the user agent proper.

What is Next?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the short term, I want to complete work on the standard application set that will comprise GNU Bayonne in the future. One should be able to take GNU Bayonne out of the box and create or modify standard applications without having to build new ones from scratch.

We also have been given a Brooktrout card to play with, and I hope to be able to introduce Brooktrout support in GNU Bayonne soon. We are always looking to expand the telephony hardware that we can support, and this often requires assistance or hardware to test with from different vendors.

In OSDL, now that basic digital operations are complete, we hope to look at supporting Intel/Dialogic audio conferencing (mixer) cards. There is already some support and architecture in place for making GNU Bayonne into an audio conference bridge using Pika hardware. We want to generalize this to other drivers where possible.

In the CAPI driver, a “soft” or non-TDM version of “join” was created. I would like to introduce this into other non-TDM capable telephony drivers. Some “soft” audio conference mixing might also be possible.

The current Intel/Dialogic ISDN support is based on the existing digital runtime. I would like to see a new pure GlobalCall implimentation of the GNU Bayonne dialogic driver get created.

Fax support has been overlooked, and I think we should provide it as we can do interesting things like user guided faxback systems with GNU Bayonne. Completing RTP and OH323 trunking is also a priority item to have GNU Bayonne act as a softswitch application server.

There are many other areas being worked on. We always can use more
help…

David”

UnixReview: “Although Linux has been embraced by major computer manufacturers as a server OS, it still gets little respect as a
desktop or workstation operating system. Dell, for instance, pulled their Linux desktop and workstation lines earlier
this year, but they’re still doing great business with Linux servers. If you want to run Linux as a desktop or
workstation OS, you’re probably better off either building your own workstation or buying from a smaller computer
company. In this review, I’ll look at a workstation from Pogo Linux, a vendor that focuses almost exclusively on
Linux.”

MSNBC: “The security settings in some of the Microsoft
Office 2000 applications can be bypassed by an
altered document. This will allow macros to run
that would normally be blocked.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Enterprise-scaled management tools for the IT department are nothing new — software that will organize resources, monitor systems and automate processes is a necessity for companies that have LANs and WANs to take care of. Microsoft will sell you a pre-built “solution,” or refer you to a contractor for something specialized. IBM, Intel, HP and Novell each has its own brand of network management software. Even Red Hat provides what it calls “Enterprise Systems Management” consulting.And Caldera has Volution Manager, a product that is pre-packaged but quickly customizable for the unique needs of enterprise. HON Industries is the biggest mid-market office furniture maker in the United States. They use Volution Manager to take care of their continental scale WAN. A case study at Caldera’s site reveals that Jon Syvertson, HON’s UNIX systems manager, needed to run the company’s network from one location. “We had planned to create our own tools for network management internally-until we found Caldera Volution Manager,”
Syvertson said.

“Volution Manager could do exactly what we needed. We didn’t have to spend the time or money creating our own management solution because Volution Manager was already packaged and could be customized to fit our specific network management needs.”

Another benefit of using Caldera’s Volution Manager is the ability to preset profiles and policies so that IT managers don’t have to spend time configuring individual systems.

Volution will run on several Linux distributions, including Caldera’s own desktop and server products, and Red Hat, Mandrake and TurboLinux. You’ll need $2,995 per server installation.

Caldera’s Volution recently was recognized by Network World as a “Category Breaker” favorite product for 2001. “The important thing is that Volution marks almost a ‘coming of age’ for Linux,” wrote Network World columnist Dave Kearns. “The management utilities your CIO wants to see for business-critical operating systems are now available for Linux in a policy-driven, directory-enabled package.”

If you’re interested in Volution as an enterprise solution, you can try before you buy. A free 60-day evaluation version of the Volution product line is available for download at Caldera’s site.