Kelly McNeill of OSOpinion writes: “Several comebacks ago, Apple developed a wonderful easy to use consumer codeing enviornment called Hypercard. Sadly, Apple decided this program was too heavy to carry, and removed it for its product line. If Apple has no interest in pulling HyperCard out of obscurity, then why not make it an open-source project?”

PCWorld: “As expected, on Monday Transmeta is launching two Crusoe processors–including an 800-MHz chip–manufactured using its
new 0.13 micron technology.”

The Dot: “LinuxTag 2001 is the largest Linux and Open Source exhibition in Europe. Last year over
17,000 visitors and 100 exhibitors attended the event. This year’s event will be hosted in
Stuttgart, Germany from July 5 through July 8. The KDE Team will have a large presence
there, including several presentations and workshops, a large number of KDE developers, and of course the
KDE mascot Konqi.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, the most interesting articles include “Security: Firewalls; IPtables and Rules,” “A Readonly
filesystem on Bootable CD,” and “Secure FTP via SSH Tunnel.” Also this week, there are several articles
discussing the governments state of security. These articles can be found in the general section of this
newsletter.”

“In his introductory column Dr. Bradford introduced measurement tools and plans for future performance investigations on Linux and
Windows 2000. His focus this month is on a simple operation, memory to memory copy, and how long it takes to move bytes around in
memory.” More at IBM’s Developer Works.

AsiaBizTech: “An IBM official said: “The Open Source Community shall never be
neglected. We have no intention to complain about the latest version of
Linux, ‘Linux 2.4 Kernel,’ much less to have a great impact on the next
version ‘Linux Kernel 2.5.’ Results of the joint development by the four
shall be reported to the Open Source Community without exception, and
we will leave the Community entirely to decide if the reported technology
should be adopted.”

MozillaQuest Magazine reports: “With more than 280 bugs still targeted to it, the upcoming Mozilla Milestone 0.9.2 edition was branched overnight from the main development-tree trunk — on schedule. That´s an unusually large bug count for a newly branched release candidate… Mozilla 0.9.2 at its branching has some ten times the bugs that Mozilla 0.9.1 had at its branching… Mozilla 0.9.2 is scheduled for release on 25 June 2001.”

– By Grant Gross
–

The big news, in case you weren’t paying any attention this week, was that Linux company Red Hat posted a $600,000 profit in its last quarter. So why did one of the first profitable Open Source company see its stock rise only 11 cents, to $4.62, this week?

One answer, according to NewsForge business columnist Jack Bryar: Red Hat’s profits came mostly through investments and cutting costs, and company officials didn’t give analysts any “guidance” on where the company will find its profits next. But still, it’s worth celebrating that the Open Source business model can work, at least for one quarter. And if Red Hat can do it, maybe some other Open Source companies can get out of the red.

Taking AIM

The America Online Time Warner mega-media empire has decided that anyone using “AIM” besides AOL Instant Messenger would cause confusion among the general public. AOL has recently been sending threatening letters to programmers using “AIM” in their AIM-like products, and this week, the founder of the Open Source phpAIM project received one of those letters. Sometimes, it’s easy to cheer for AOL when it gets in pissing matches with Microsoft, but AOL doesn’t act any more enlightened about a lot of issues.

Speaking of Microsoft, his Billness himself answered a couple of questions about his views on Open Source in an interview with ZDNet. He called the mixture of Free Software and commercial software a “healthy ecosystem” for customers. Is Gates not as rabid as his co-workers who have recently called the GPL a “cancer” and Open Source anti-American? Or is he simply more of a politician?

At the intersection of politics and Microsoft, we have a story this week saying some state attorneys general are considering a new lawsuit against Microsoft for introducing new products that could hamper competition. However, the attorneys general of Iowa and Connecticut later denied reports of a second lawsuit.

New in NewsForge

Stories reported first in NewsForge this week:

News editor Tina Gasperson reports that part of Microsoft’s The Zone gaming site is happily running Linux and Apache, despite recent pronouncements from the mother ship that Free Software is bad, bad, bad.

Gasperson also has a short story about Philip Greenspun, founder of sometimes Open Source company ArsDigita, and his decision to leave the company after a long legal battle.

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field tests how various amounts of RAM affect the speed of a Linux kernel compile, and explains how more RAM can help you in other ways.

And in case you were wondering what happened to NewsForge, Slashdot, freshmeat and a couple of other OSDN sites this weekend, editor in chief Robin Miller has an explanation of our outage.

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
– Updated at 2:40 p.m. eastern time June 25 –
On Saturday, June 23, the primary controller in the router that controls access to all OSDN servers hosted at the Exodus facility in Waltham, MA, suffered a catastrophic failure. The sites affected were Slashdot, freshmeat, NewsForge, and Mediabuilder, among others.Update: The secondary controller did not automatically take over as it should have. The secondary controller did not automatically take over as it should have. OSDN network admins are trying to determine whether the outage was related to their
configurations or something related to a problem at Web hosting service Exodus.

OSDN and Cisco people, working through Saturday night, were unable to cure the problem. Sunday afternoon, OSDN employee Kurt Gray and Cisco rep Scott, working by telephone, were stepping through the router’s configuration and, says Kurt, as they worked to undo other changes that had been made, “on one reset everything came back.”

OSDN network operations were already in the process of rebuilding the company’s network to eliminate the router as a potential single point of failure.

As of 7 p.m. US EDT most of the sites were available at least part of the time, but full service was not yet restored. There may still be slowdowns or intermttent failures until a permanent fix is made.

We’ll have a more complete story within a few days. Right now, OSDN network operations staff members are too busy working to talk.

NetBSD’s site warns of a remote denial of service and buffer overflow vulnerability in ftpd, the file transfer protocol daemon, in NetBSD 1.4, 1.5, and -current.