– 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.

Andy Tai writes “This is to announce the latest version of the “Software Wars” map. It
describes, in simple graphics, the current software world. Using the
analogy of war maps between countries, it shows the current situation
more effectively than texts in many articles. Since 1997, this map
has been periodically updated to reflect the on-going events. The
latest updates reflect the intensified struggle between Microsoft and
Open Source/Free Software. See it at

http://www.atai.org/softwarewar.png

Old versions can be accessed from the top of the web page

http://www.atai.org/index.html

Enjoy!” It speaks for itself.

The Standard reports on a group of American senators who are trying to renew the three-year old ban on Internet access and usage taxes.

Dallas News reports that the British Broadcasting Corporation will cease its shortwave service to North America, citing the higher audiences of Internet and FM listeners. The BBC world service is the latest casualty of the Internet.

ZDNet reports that Red Hat is to release its own databasing software called Red Hat Database, as part of its software strategy.

The BBC reports that iFone, a British phone developer, is planning to revive old Atari games for use on mobile phones. Among the games the company is negotiating for the rights to use are Pong, Centipede, Frogger, and Asteroids.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft’s lawyers are joining the fray against Open Source software, adding a clause in the license of a new piece of Microsoft software that prohibits it from being used in conjunction with “viral” software.

CNet reports that Lynuxworks, the last remaining Linux-oriented company to have an initial public offering pending, has withdrawn it.