Komodo is ActiveState’s cross-platform, multi-language integrated development environment developed on Mozilla. New features in 1.1 include PHP debugging, Tcl support, and improved performance.

“IBM Corp., NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Fujitsu Ltd.
announced in May that they would jointly enhance the Linux OS and promote ways
to introduce the results into the Open Source community.

Apparently, a huge “pressure group” has been formed in the world of Linux, the
open-source software. The four firms are in the process of adapting Linux into their
core businesses being operated at an enterprise level with needs for higher
reliability and availability.” More at Asia Biz Tech.

The White House today named its choice for director of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy: physicist John H. Marburger, currently head of the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Marburger received his Ph.D in applied physics from Stanford University, and is on leave from SUNY Stony Brook where he served in various roles including president for 14 years. Full item at Interactive Week.

Reuters: “Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, maker of
Panasonic goods, unveiled on Tuesday a compact, shock-resistant
personal computer for use at construction sites and other rugged
environments not usually suitable for PCs.

The portable PC, about the size of a tissue box, can exchange data
wirelessly at distances up to 164 feet with an 8.4-inch detachable
touch-screen display.”

ZDNet reports that Internet service provider Earthlink will raise its monthly rate for dialup customers by $2, to $21.95/month. Earthlink reps say the pricing increase — the first in over five years — is needed to cover constant service enhancements and network upgrades.

eWEEK: “Larry Ellison likes to say the battle for the enterprise database market
is over, and Oracle has won. He should meet Steve Olson, technical
engineer at Illinois Power Co., in Decatur, Ill.

Although most of Olson’s company’s core business operations run on
Oracle8i database software, he is beginning to cast glances at the
offerings of other database vendors, particularly IBM and its DB2.
Why? IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., offers a host of XML (Extensible
Markup Language) and Java links, has the key advantage of being less
expensive than Oracle, and works on the same platforms.”

Tuesday, June 26th, 2001
from the home of Wayne’s World, Aurora IL
Tonight LIVE on
www.thelinuxshow.com
At 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et…. Kevin Hill, Jeff Gerhardt, PJ
Hyett, Doc Searls(Linux Journal), and Arne Flones have what looks to be a
controversial show lined up tonight on The Linux Show!! (and yes the Loki
tribes server is up and running)
In Segment One – Hot News: We will be covering the hot Linux news of
the week. In particular, the change for the Caldera OpenLinux Workstation
3.1 that will require a “Per System” license & Linux Community infighting
and the Andy Tai “Software Wars” Map (very cool).

In Segments Two- “More Hot News:”-
Because of the week off, last week we will have lots to catch up on.

In Segments Three- The TV Linux Alliance Is this the beginning of a
new era, and end to community control, or a non-story?
We will be joined by Cathleen Collett, Senior product marketing
manager for Lineo to discuss the announcment of the creation of a new
development co-op, the TV Linux
Alliance. We will also be joind by Fran Helms a representative
from Liberate, another member firm of this new organization.

The creation of the TV Linux
Alliance and the participation in this group by Lineo, along with Sun,
Motorola and Liberate(to name but a few), should cause one to stop and take
notice. Two weeks ago we attended a press conference announcing this new
“dot org”. We went away with far more questions than when the press
conference started.

The proposed goal of the TV Linux Alliance will be to integrate the
Linux-based digital media expertise of 24 leading companies in the DTV
market. Those “leading” companies include:

ACTV, ATI Technologies, Broadcom Corporation, Concurrent Computer
Corporation, Conexant, Convergence Integrated Media, DIVA, Excite@Home,
iSurfTV, Liberate Technologies, Lineo, MontaVista, Motorola, nCUBE, OpenTV,
Pace Micro Technology, Qpass, ReplayTV, STMicroelectronics, Sun
Microsystems, TiVo, Trintech, TV Gateway and WorldGate

The hypothetical long term goal would be to align resources to bring Linux
to digital cable set-tops, and provide a means to speed the development and
deployment of robust software solutions with lower development costs. This
new organization was annouced at the Chicago NCTA Show (Cable TV Inustry
Show) on June 12, 2001. We noted that the press conference did little to
draw the crowds away from the lines at the Playboy Channel booth.

We were told during the meeting that the new alliance will define a standard
application programming interface (API) that will simplify the
implementation of TV middleware and device drivers for the Linux operating
environment, allowing network operators to select from a variety of vendors
whose offerings are interoperable with the common API. The alliance plans to
capitalize on Linux designs already underway among various founders and
harmonize early work across the industry to ensure that Linux is delivered
to the digital set-top under a common framework of evolving standards-based
specifications. Linux is a proven, stable, and robust open source operating
system with a strong developer community, making it an intelligent choice
for network operators, infrastructure providers, and hardware manufacturers.

We at TLS understand how this standard API will help people in the supplier
chain and the operators of cable networks. However there are a number of
issues here that need to be explored. First and most important, WHY is
there no participation in this group by a single existing community “dot
org” or development project. It is primarilly cable channel providers(and
wannabees). The web site seems more a marketing opportunity than the
typical “Dot Org” development site.

Plus, there a a couple of long term implications we should look at here.
This alliance has the potential of being looked back on as a
landmark toward preserving a future without digital Tyranny. But, it could
also be looked back on as a day when a major part of Linux was pulled away
from community control.

The new Linux specification developed by alliance members is expected to be
available later this year. Parties that are interested in tracking the
progress of the TV Linux Alliance or in accessing resulting specifications
should visit www.TVLinuxAlliance.org. A listing of all participating TV
Linux Alliance members and their contacts can be found at
www.TVLinuxAlliance.org

Other opinions are welcome at GeekCast. If you would like to join
us on the show, check our IRC Chat(irc.thelinuxshow.com #linuxshow).

Remember tune in at 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et.
Catch the Linux show at
www.thelinuxshow.com

– By Julie Bresnick –
Open Source people –
Matt
Hahnfeld, founder of Open Source software company EverySoft and maintainer of its
newest initiative, EveryAuctionDB,
doesn’t know why things interest him but at 23, he certainly
knows what interests him.Ever since elementary school he’s been the first one to “mess
around” with any new machines. Like his father, many of his friends’ parents
worked for Dow Chemical, the chief employer in their hometown of Midland,
Mich. In an effort to pioneer the telecommute, Dow issued computers and modems
to many of its employees. In the Hahnfeld household, Matt was its
primary user. He ran his own BBS off two 5 ¼-inch floppies.

“It was really a new thing for everyone. Computers weren’t in every
home back then like they are now. Everything was plain text back then and
there was email but it wasn’t anything like it is now.

“The cool thing about BBSes is that they really build up a
community. You would be talking to actual people that you really knew from around
town because BBSes were so localized.”

Community was the most compelling motivation when he started
EverySoft, too. After taking programming classes through school and studying computer science and communication
at the
Slashdot
breeding ground of Hope College in
Holland, Mich., he decided to organize an effort at producing
freeware and started EverySoft. At first, he thought his vision of freeware would be more conducive to cultivating a community than some Open Source projects.

“Some of my friends had Open Source projects and they build
something and people would take it and just leave with the code and you’d find
another project shooting up somewhere else with their code. I wanted the
community there, so I restricted distribution. Now all of my stuff is in Open
Source because I think it’s a better way to do things to let people
redistribute the code and share that code.

“I thought that once I released it as Open Source, the community
might die, and instead of that the community has really grown and it’s come to a
point where because people can contribute code it lets me get out and work on
other projects. When I was freeware, I had to do everything. If
someone gave me a code patch I’d have to go in and patch the code. I’d have to
take care of administering everything. I’d have to take care of enforcing
the copyright, doing all of that. After I went to an Open Source license I
still maintain the code but I play more of an advisory role than actually the
god of the software.”

EverySoft’s initial release was EveryChat. Layover.com, where Hahnfeld now works
full time, contracted Hahnfeld to develop modifications to EveryChat.

“That was way back. I didn’t know a lot about programming then. I
did it for next to nothing and the relationship kept building and I was
doing a whole bunch of work for him and he invited me on full time.”

Working for Layover, where he is a programmer and systems
administrator, meant moving from Michigan to Pennsylvania right after college and now,
three years later, it means moving from Pennsylvania to Florida where
he will be working on the systems in the company’s Melbourne office.

His hiking habit may take a blow with the change of landscape, but that just means his weekend excursions into the wilderness will be more of the aquatic variety. It’s not really a blow at all if you consider the eminent presence of his kayak, which is always on hand either in his office or on top of his jeep. And the career in
computers that he had a hard time fathoming as a kid who dreamt of
being a park ranger, will earn him a few good trips to Snowmass during the ski
season.

Now if he could only find a radio station in Florida for which he
could do some production and maybe a little DJing, he’d be as happy as a
hippie at a Grateful Dead show. Actually, he’s more a rocker than a roller,
playing classic rock bands like Led
Zeppelin and Metallica
during the two-hour show he hosted at his college radio station. At that
station, too, he started one of the countless little programming projects that
enhance the nooks and crannies of his daily life. That one is called
AutoPlay and its legacy, AutoPlay DJ, is now hosted on SourceForge.

“It’s a radio station automation software that runs on top of Linux.
It allowed us to put in all our CDs as we got them and record them as
MP3s and then the computer could play when we didn’t have a live DJ on duty. We
almost got to the point of having it announce and we had a request
system.”

Though he is avid about his weekends away from the computer he does
allow himself a few indulgences on the trail.

“All the people in the [hiking] club make fun of me because I carry a
GPS … and sometimes a Palm Pilot. I wrote a little interface where it
interfaces with the GPS so I can do mapping stuff on it.

“I’ve got about 8,000 things I’ve started and none of them are in a
place where they can be released. I start a lot of things and they just do
something kind of useful and they just die out and I never get around
to really finishing them. Maybe some day I’ll get webspace somewhere and
dump my entire development directory into it so other people can play with
my stuff.”

Despite all the programming classes he’s completed, he says he
learned far more working on Open Source projects than he could ever learn in the
classroom. Indeed, Hahnfeld is all about first-hand experience. Any
apprehension he may feel regarding his impending relocation is minute.
He says the more places he lives, the better, and he describes himself as
spontaneous, ready to jump in his Jeep at whim and explore new
territory. His most pressing goal is to hike the entire Appalachian
trail and the only arcade game he likes is old fashioned pinball because it’s
more physical than virtual. He personally restored the Gottlieb 1981 Black
Hole Pinball Machine that now stands in the middle of his living room.

So considering that one of his goals for the future is for EverySoft
to have a few more programs out there, we can certainly expect some.

More about Matt Hahnfeld

Favorite book: A Walk in the Woods, by Bill
Bryson

Linux distribution: Debian

Mail reader: Pine

Text editor: VIM

Pet peeve: Bloated software

Windows manager: WM2. “It’s a minimalist window manager — the
author’s motivation is that icons are crap, menus are crap so all this does is
let you open/close/move windows.”

Snack food: Gummisavers

From a paper published by the Oxford Review of Economic Policy: “Open source software development is a production model that exploits the distributed

intelligence of participants in Internet communities. This model is efficient because

of two related reasons: it avoids the inefficiencies of a strong intellectual property

regime and it implements concurrently design and testing of software modules. The

hazard of open source is that projects can “fork” into competing versions. However,

open source communities consist of governance structures that constitutionally

minimize this danger. Because open source works in a distributed environment, it

presents an opportunity for developing countries to participate in frontier innovation.”

SiliconValley.com‘s roundtable is all about source code sharing and openness, spurred by MS’s recent announcement of its ‘shared source’ initiative.