PCWorld: “On Thursday a former hardware engineer at a Florida-based national grocery distributor was found guilty in a U.S. District Court in Miami on two federal counts of
computer sabotage.

After six days of arguments and only six hours of deliberations, the jury found Herbert Pierre-Louis guilty of planting a software virus that disabled the computer
network at Purity Wholesale Grocers for two days. Company executives testified during the trial that the June 18, 1998, incident at the $1.5 billion company cost
approximately $84,000 in lost profits, new hardware and software, and the hours needed to get the system up and running again.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “The infamous “Code Red” worm, which, together with its variants, caused millions of dollars in damage during July and August, has apparently spawned a cousin dubbed “Code Blue” which could spread across the globe. Similar to the Code Red worms, the Code Blue variant is already striking computers in China, said a worker at the police-run Computer Virus Treatment Center in Tianjin, about an hour’s drive outside of Beijing.”

PCWorld: “Code Red’s astonishing success at infecting computers has reignited a fierce debate about full disclosure–the practice of publishing information about security
holes. The discussion has even led some to question the motives of those who discovered the hole in the Microsoft software that Code Red exploited.

At the center of the storm is eEye Digital Security, the company that uncovered and posted information about the .ida buffer overflow problem in Microsoft’s
Internet Information Server 5.”

From LWN: “Build 39 is now on ftp.redmondlinux.org and we have declared it RC0. this
first release candidate includes many bug fixes [more will be coming in
further release candidates].”

From AskSlashdot: “Backwards compatibility is great for users. But it sucks for developers. After a while your normally sensible and readable code becomes a nightmare spaghetti tangle of conditions, macros and multiple re-inventions of the wheel. Eventually you have to kiss off backwards compatibility as more trouble than it’s worth.”

From LinuxDevices: “National Semiconductor today announced that Japan Computer Corporation (JCC) has developed a new Internet appliance based on National’s Geode “set-top box on a chip”, running an Embedded Linux operating system. JCC will begin shipping the new Linux-based iBOX-2 to the Japanese market in September. An English version is expected to be introduced this Fall in the U.S., with other overseas markets following.”

From DebianPlanet: “EXT3 is the journaled version of the old-faithful EXT2, as I’m sure you’ve all heard by now. For those who want to switch to EXT3 here’s a VERY-MINI-HOWTO.”

From LWN, the -pre6 release of Linux 2.4.10 has been released. Changes are in the extended copy.

pre6:
 - Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
 - Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
 - Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
 - firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
 - NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
 - me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
 - Merge with Alan
 - Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
 - Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
   directories in page cache
 - Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
 - Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
 - Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
   pl2303 driver update)
 - David Miller: sparc and net update
 - Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
   overwrite ramdisks
 - Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
 - Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
 - Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
 - Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
 - Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
 - Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
 - Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
 - Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
 - Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
 - John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
 - Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
 - Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
 - David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
 - Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
 - Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
 - Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
 - Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
 - Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
 - Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
 - Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
 - Al Viro: block device cleanups
 - Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
   for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
 - Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
 - David Miller: networking and sparc updates
 - Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
 - OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
   by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
 - Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
 - Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
 - Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
 - Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
 - Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
 - Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
 - David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
 - Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
 - Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
 - Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
 - Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
 - Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
 - David Gibson: airport driver update
 - Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support
 - Daniel Phillips: swap read page referenced set - avoid swap thrashing

– By Grant Gross –

One story dominated the news in both the Open Source community and the technology community at large this week — the announcement from hardware-maker Hewlett-Packard that it intends to buy rival Compaq for $25 billion.

There’s a lot of speculation, and not a lot of answers yet, on how the deal would impact Open Source projects at the two companies, especially at Compaq. BusinessWeek suggested the merger could boost Linux if the merged company decides to consolidate its Unix offerings. NewsForge business columnist Jack Bryar writes that the combined company could have a huge impact on Linux acceptance in corporations, if it chooses to.

Reactions to the proposed merger were mixed, at best. It was called a “survival merger” by one ZDNet columnist, and others suggested it could face European Union regulatory problems or even U.S. antitrust scrutiny. But Gateway’s CEO called the deal “cool,” saying the deal could preoccupy both companies and give Gateway a competitive advantage.

Bad news from Open Source-based businesses

There was a lot of not-so-good news from companies focused on Open Source this week:

NewsForge’s Tina Gasperson reports that Chicago-based Linux training company Linux Island is short on cash, with the company president paying the payroll out of his own pocket.

Netscape has laid off the head of the Mozilla project, and Mozilla 0.9.4 is reported to be behind schedule.

Analysts are questioning whether the Linux-based TiVo television recording hardware company can survive on its own.

Embedded Linux company Lineo announced a restructuring and layoffs of 60 percent of its workers.

Linux for work

On a more positive note, TechWeb reviewed four Linux distributions this week to see how they worked alongside Windows NT, a likely OS in the corporate environment. “Is Linux right for your business? If your business requires working with multiple platforms, and customization, stability and security, and your organization is willing to take on the potentially steep learning curve, then Linux has evolved as a useful alternative to commercial operating systems,” notes the reviewer.

Linux needs Microsoft?

A couple of interesting stories this week on how Linux is helped by the competition. NewsForge’s Robin “roblimo” Miller says Linux is benefiting from being seen as the underdog again, as the media is writing again about its underground movement aspects after the downturn in Linux businesses. Elsewhere LinuxWorld.com.au argues that Linux actually needs Microsoft because there’d be no Linux without the software monopoly.

One billion seconds

Unix fans celebrated the rollover of the Unix clock to one billion seconds this weekend.

New in NewsForge

Stories unique to NewsForge this week:

Tina Gasperson reports on complaints that the Open Source Initiative is taking its own sweet time in approving new Open Source licenses.

We report that On2 Technologies Open-Sourced its VP3vieo compression technology this week.

From AskSlashdot: “I just got into quite a long argument over on the Yahoo! message boards over the power of command line dev tools. Basically the guy told me that it is impossible to create ‘state of the art’ programs with command-line tools. But when I asked him to give me reasons why he just called me stupid and ‘behind the times’.”