ZDNet’s Jac MacCrisken says “The most frustrating aspect of the Open Source crowd is the assumption that if you’re not part of their solution you’re part of the problem — the one must choose between Free Software and the Dark Side, as represented by “traditional” software companies such as Microsoft.

“Redmond Linux, Corp., with its desktop
target and deepLinux of Mountain View, CA, creators of the ExOp Web Server
and the deepLinux Embedded Linux Toolkit, today announced that Redmond
Linux has entered into an agreement to acquire deepLinux. DeepLinux will fold
into Redmond Linux entirely, and provide, among other things, an operations
presence in the Silicon Valley.” Press release at LinuxPR.

A ZDNet Interactive Week report says that Itanium could be just the thing Linux needs to explode in the enterprise market. “At the very least, this year’s rollout of Itanium servers and workstations will help Linux
developers get their collective foot in the door in enterprise accounts–if not actually win the
business of customers that might have otherwise chosen Microsoft Windows or Unix operating
systems (OSes).”

The second edition of the Linux-Mandrake community newsletter is now online at Linux Weekly News. Topics in this edition includes a look at new and announced products, including Linux-Mandrake 8.0 for Itanium and MandrakeSecurity’s Single Network Firewall, and the top stories of the week from MandrakeForum.

PR Newswire press release: “bjective Interface Systems, Inc., a world
leader in embedded and real-time communications software and LynuxWorks(TM),
Inc., a provider of open source and true real-time embedded solutions for the
post-PC era, today announced at SUPERCOMM, the release of ORBexpress(TM) C++
2.3.2 for LynuxWorks’ BlueCat(TM) Linux. ORBexpress is Objective Interface’s
object resource broker (ORB), a lightweight CORBA-compliant product optimized
for the real-time and embedded environment.”

– By Julie Bresnick –
Open Source people –
Tim Perdue,
SourceForge engineer architect at
VA Linux, is standing on the deck of
a sail boat. His blonde hair is about an inch shy of a buzz
and details of the boat, ropes, sails, the mast, are reflected in the
tinted lenses of his wrap-around shades. He wears the stoic expression of a seasoned
sailor. Unsmiling, a bit of a squint, he looks more like a CEO than a
programmer.

Away from the sails, the way he relishes mowing the lawn suggests more of a veteran
husband and father than a 27-year-old normally would be.

But it is programming, rather than being an executive, that got him
to that boat and that earned him a lawn that it now takes about two hours to
mow with a 6.5-horsepower push mower. He was working at a “boring insurance company by day and had a lot of energy to burn at night” when he decided to start PHPBuilder and Geocrawler, the two sites which
gained him the attention of buyers and employers alike.

“I used to be a Mac hugger. In fact I was an Apple student rep and
the campus reseller for three years. It turned out, the Mac OS really
sucked on PowerPC so I got really excited about MkLinux on PPC around the end of
1994-95. I eventually was using MkLinux full time instead of the unstable Mac OS
and eventually branched into web serving on LinuxPPC, which eventually led
me starting a couple of my own Web sites, which a lot of people know me for
now, I guess, and which led to me being hired at VA Linux …”

He doesn’t work on either of those sites now. Internet.com bought
PHPBuilder and VA bought Geocrawler for cheap but Perdue, no doubt, for
a more commensurate sum. His most notable possession, before I discover pictures of his car, is the
nine-foot screen he included in his basement home theater, which is replete with
DVD, TiVo, Dolby Digital Surround Sound and stadium seating. He did, like a
lot of things in his life, build the theater himself, not in the
interest of thrift but because he’s always been a hands-on guy. It took him three
months worth of evenings and weekends to put the theater together, and he
remodeled his condo in California before he moved back to his native Iowa about a
year ago. When he was growing up his parents supported his interests by getting
him a computer and letting him charge whatever he wanted at the lumber yard.

It is his tendencies toward construction that drive him. He is a
builder at heart.

“PHPBuilder came first, but I already had the Geocrawler domain,
which was originally going to tie into a citynet-like Web site I started.
Basically, Geocrawler was going to be a location-sensitive search engine. While
building that, I got very interested in PHP and started PHPBuilder.

“Geocrawler then just became a mail archive for the PHP mailing
lists, and ever since then has been hacked and hacked and neglected while it has
grown to 10,000 mailing lists.”

It was left to the masses when Perdue moved on to work with some “impressive thinkers” at VA who championed the SourceForge project.

“[Sourceforge] was a VA internal idea … this was in the era of the
dot-com bubble and VA was pre-IPO and didn’t really have any sort of business
model in mind at the time. It’s really been an organic evolution, not some grand
master plan.

“SourceForge has come a long, long way since it was a project in a
small cramped room with just four people toiling away building it in
semi-secrecy. It’s actually scary and alarming to me personally how it has become so
‘universal’ and how many projects are hosted there. I think I can say that
objectively — as one of the founders of SourceForge — there does need to be some
competition, or at least an alternative. We really did not intend to build a monopoly,
and from the inside I don’t see VA as having any ill-intent.”

If anyone is sensitive to the presence of evil it’s going to be Perdue
who, growing up in the tiniest of towns in northern Iowa, attended a
regional high school of 100 students and a radical fundamentalist church that swore
everyone was going to hell.

Though he did clone the “CORVUS” login system on his elementary
school network, the only sin Perdue seems guilty of perpetrating these days is
your standard parental pride.

“We,” (last year Tim married Lisa, his girlfriend of seven years)
“looked very objectively at a lot of babies and we’re pretty certain that our
6-month-old girl, Anna, is the cutest one out there.”

Thus, like SourceForge, Perdue has evolved from the Internet boom,
into a more balanced existence. Which, like everything else he takes on, he
seems to be achieving. When I asked him to describe a perfect day he replied,
with the ease that would imply it could have been yesterday or tomorrow or any
day within a broad diameter of the year, “well, today is pretty close to
perfect.” It included an hour-long bike ride in the woods, a day spent
appreciating the sun from his home office and an afternoon/evening of mowing the lawn.

Admittedly though, Perdue’s not absolutely and completely happy. On
the contrary, when it comes to operating systems he airs more on the side
of misery.

“I think all OSes inherently suck. Linux has a lot of problems as a
desktop. Crappy GUIs, incomplete features, no interoperability or UI
guidelines. You can’t even copy and paste between programs for the most
part. Linux as an end-user OS is where DOS was in 1985 — every program has a
completely different interface, no interoperability, consistency, etc.
I’ve used Linux on the desktop for years, but it really makes me mad as
an end user. Sometimes I just want to hook something up, like a wireless
card, and it takes a hundred man hours to figure it all out. Then you reboot and
it’s all broken again for some tiny cryptic reason. What a mess.”

It’s gotten so bad in fact that…

“As of Tuesday, I installed Windows 98 and am trying that out. I
miss Xchat but it’s nice to have all the multimedia stuff actually work (ie: sound
actually works reliably, etc). I can browse into Web sites and have
Realplayer work reliably now. There are some advantages on the desktop, but this
is too flaky and unstable to be a server.”

Though Perdue’s career may have ascended to a peak so close to its
starting line, that certainly doesn’t mean it has culminated — just like Linux,
having penetrated establishment fronts, has in no way desisted its revolution.

VA Linux owns both NewsForge and SourceForge.

More about Tim Perdue

Beer, wine, liquor, or juice: “Probably more of a liquor person. Crown
and coke, whiskey sour, that sort of thing.”

Lara Croft, Meg Ryan, or Clark Kent: “Meg Ryan. My wife is fine with
that.”

Mail reader: “Mutt I guess. I haven’t found one I really like. Mutt has
problems and limitations, but they all do. Like everything on Linux, it
takes a lot of elbow grease and learning to figure out how fetchmail, procmail,
and mutt all interact and how to make it do everything you want. Once
you’ve got it figured out though, you’ve got a lot of power.”

Editor: “VIM — I can’t complain about this anymore. It beats any GUI
editor I’ve ever used, but again, it’s got a cryptic config file.”

Movie: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is pretty close to an ideal movie. Event Horizon, Hellraiser, Exorcist, those sorts of things. What Lies
Beneath turned out to be a pretty good movie too.”

Snack food: Oreos.

Video game: “I think SimCity 2000 was the game I got most addicted to a
few years back. I don’t play games anymore. I like the old Atari 2600 games
— 1 button and a joystick is all you needed. I’d love to get a PlayStation
2 but there are literally like 20 buttons on the control, so it’s too much
work.”

Hobbies: Photography, sailing.

Degrees: BS in MIS from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar
Falls.

Currently contributing to: OpenAI (hosted on SourceForge).

– By Grant Gross –

If using Open Source software makes government computer systems susceptible to terrorists as a forthcoming white paper by conservative think tank Alexis de Tocqueville Institution claims, then ADTI’s own Web site is at risk. ADTI.net runs a version of … Apache.
This fact was pointed out by Richard M. Smith on Declan McCullagh’s Politech email list. So I went to Netcraft.com and checked for myself. Sure enough: “The site www.adti.net is running Rapidsite/Apa/1.3.20 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6 on IRIX..” Web host Rapidsite uses a customized of the Open Source Apache Web server, and Adti.net also runs OpenSSL, the Open Source Secure Sockets Layer toolkit.

ADTI president Ken Brown, whose white paper says Open Source software provides hackers/crackers its “blueprint,” volunteers the fact that the site runs on Apache before I can ask him about it during a chat earlier today. “We’re pro-Open Source here at de Tocqueville,” he says.

My response to Brown: “Huh?”

Brown answers that his white paper specifically questions the security of the GNU General Public License, not other BSD-like Open Source licenses, such the Apache Software License, although I’m not sure what difference that makes, because both allow access to the source code. “[Open Source] is great for experimentation, and it’s great for research,” Brown says. “We’re talking about national security, and when it comes to the whole issue of hacking a system, we conclude and we will defend to the end, that more information is better [for hackers/crackers]. If you provide more code, you’re giving a [hacker] person more information. At the end of the day, you’re educating people about what you’ve done, and we don’t see any real benefit to that, especially if it’s a bad person.”

So we have a think tank that doesn’t put its money where its mouth is. Smith, on Politech, also says the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has gotten funding from Microsoft in the past, and a a story at Wired.com today confirms that. The think tank has been a Microsoft antitrust apologist in the past. (That’s just one of more than a half dozen pro-Microsoft papers on ADTI.net, pointed out by OSDN programmer Jamie McCarthy on Politech.) Why isn’t that a surprise?

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t always put its money where its mouth is, either. Remember Microsoft’s anti-Unix site Wehavethewayout.com, which was originally running FreeBSD?

I ask Brown about Microsoft funding for this specific study, and he says it’s against ADTI’s policy to comment on who funds its studies. I suggest that not disclosing the paper’s financial backers may cause people to question the validity of the study.

Brown answers: “I have a lot of faith in the American people. If somebody wrote something tomorrow that everyone should move to California, people aren’t going to get up and move to California. It has nothing to do with a travel organization funding the study, it has to do with common sense. We think that something should be challenged on its merits.”

So Brown and I move on to the merits of the white paper’s conclusions. He agrees when I suggest Microsoft products have a long history of security problems. “Our position is not that one system is better than another,” Brown adds. “We never said that. Our paper is about Open Source, that’s it.”

Still, I press Brown on the Microsoft alternative to Open Source, given Brown’s theory that Open Source can be exploited by terrorists. He claims “volunteer” organizations like Open Source projects don’t have much of a chance of competing with huge corporate initiatives.

His reasoning: “You get 10 smart people together in a room, and they’ll come up with some pretty good code. You get 100 smart people together, and they’ll come up with some even better code … and on and on from there, assuming there’s some break-off point and somebody can’t make it any better.”

He continues: “Now, let’s change the model from numbers of people to accountability, warranties, customer service, manuals, that kind of thing. You take an organization that doesn’t have any accountability, that provides no warranties, no guarantees for its services, is not financially rewarded necessarily for providing its fixes, I don’t think it can compare in efficiency to an organization that does. You can’t say a volunteer group is necessarily always going to as efficient as a group that’s contracted.”

I don’t even know where to start to respond to that statement. The hundreds of horror stories about getting tech support from Microsoft and other large computer companies run through my head. Brown has limited time to talk, so instead I suggest that people often do better work for volunteer organizations than their employers, because they’re doing what they love, not what they’re getting paid for.

“The fact is, I want a guarantee as a businessman, I want accountability,” Brown answers.

Okay, I point out, in the case of security, it appears as if the Open Source model somehow works better, especially when compared to Microsoft. Even when I take into account that many Microsoft products are used by millions of people, many of whom shouldn’t have gotten a license to operate a computer in the first place, Open Source products seem to have fewer serious security problems, not to mention that Open Source bugs seems to get fixed a whole lot faster.

The “many eyes squash many bugs” explanation seems to hold water, and although most Open Source projects aren’t created by 100 smart people sitting in a room together, the model Brown likes, they are created by hundreds of people talking on the Web together, and these are generally people who care as deeply about their projects as Boston Red Sox fans care about another late-season choke. No, Open Source coders aren’t paid, but neither are the rabid Red Sox fans.

“In the case of security, it appears that Open Source products have fewer security vulnerabilities,” I say to Brown. “So somewhere, there’s an efficiency there.”

Brown seems to back off: “What we’ve been suggesting in our study … is that this deserves more study. And that’s where we stand. We think there should be a commission to do a rigorous test and do a study. We didn’t do a [security] study comparing proprietary software to Open Source, and I’d like unbiased community of people to do this kind of study.”

I point to studies like a recent one from Gartner Group that suggests Microsoft security would benefit from an Open Source-style review. But, I add, the Open Source community would probably welcome an unbiased study of that sort. So Brown and I finally find some common ground.

The white paper, which has gotten unquestioning coverage at places like ZDNet, is scheduled to be released Friday and will also include critiques about Open Source attitudes about intellectual property and Open Source. Brown, who says he has four years of experience writing about technology, authored the study with help from several others after more than six months of interviews about Open Source, he says.

I remain intrigued by Brown’s assertion that showing the source code “blueprint” makes Open Source software more vulnerable to terrorists. That theory leaves out the assumption that sysadmins have a variety of tools at their disposal to make systems more secure. Most people who know much more about information security than I do would advise people worried about security to never install a default Web server or operating system, whether its Open Source or proprietary. You need to take the precautions available and keep up with the security updates, and you need to realize that no system is totally invulnerable.

As Brown says he has to get off the phone, I give him another blueprint scenario:

Let’s pretend you and I are burglars, I tell him. We’re considering breaking into two houses. We have the blueprint for the first house, let’s call it the Open Source house. We know how the house is laid out, we know where the doors are, but we also know that there are locks on the windows, there are dead-bolt locks on all the doors, there’s a burglar alarm installed, there are two 100-pound Rottweilers living inside, and the owner keeps a loaded double-barrel shotgun in his bedroom.

Let’s call the second house the Microsoft house. We don’t have a blueprint, but we know the owner doesn’t have locks on the windows, has no dogs, guns, or burglar alarm, and tends to leave the back door unlocked.

So, I ask Brown, which house are we going to break into? Does the blueprint really help us?

Brown doesn’t really have an answer to that, other than to say he doesn’t understand the criminal mind, so he doesn’t know which house he’d break into.

An anonymous reader writes: “Rauch Medien (http://www.rauchmedien.com)
is proud to announce the release of the Prolinium 1850 server system. The
Prolinium 1850 is the first 1U system based on the AMD 760MP chipset for dual
AMD Athlon capability. It features the capability of 225 GB of storage, Dual
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rack-mount chassis.

760MP Power

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v2.2 or v2.4 based distributions.

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The Prolinium 1850 features easy setup and management. It simply plugs in and
features an easy to use web interface to aid in the installation. In addition,
administration can be performed remotely with its built-in web-based control
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via this web-based control. Email alerts can also be setup to allow the
administrator to be alerted on service failure via email. In addition it allows
you to customize it with up to 225 GB RAID array, two hot-swap SCA SCSI bays
(optional 3rd SCA bay available), one or two 1.33 GHz+ Athlon
processors, and up to 3 GB ECC DDR RAM.

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The Rauch Medien Prlinium 1850 Server is available now, and can be ordered on
our web-site at http://www.rauchmedien.com.
It comes in a sleek black 1U rack-mount chassis and prices start at $2,384 (USD).

About Rauch Medien

Rauch Medien is based out of New York, USA, and produces various business and
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called OSFAQ.com (http://www.osfaq.com).

News Release
For Immediate Release
For More Info Contact
Robert Lodato
Sales & Marketing
Rauch Medien
sales@rauchmedien.com“

CNET: “Hoping that two Athlons prove better than one, Advanced Micro Devices
on Tuesday launched chips that will allow high-end computers to use two of AMD’s flagship
processors simultaneously.”

The Standard: “Japanese game maker Sega
Corp and Sony Corp’s game unit plan to enable
users of their consoles to play video games via
the Internet.”