– By Grant Gross
–

It was another bad news week for Open Source business models, at least for one high-profile Linux project. Indrema, which was putting together a Linux-based gaming and Internet console, announced Tuesday it was shutting down the project.

The decision followed several weeks of questions about Indrema being vaporware. NewsForge’s own business columnist, Jack Bryar, commented on what an uphill battle the Indrema dream was. On Wednesday night, after the news had leaked, Indrema officials answered developers’ questions about what was left of the project. NewsForge news editor Dan Berkes was there, and found out that most of Indrema’s existing code won’t be released.

Indrema wasn’t the only Open Source business plan to go through changes this week. Embedded systems company ZF Linux Devices, which had recently changed its name to include the word “Linux” in it, changed its name again this week by taking Linux out. Apparently, fewer of the new ZF Micro Devices’ customers were interested in Linux than the company originally thought.

On the other hand, another report had developer interest
in embedded Linux growing at an “astronomical pace.” From virtually no interest in using Linux in embedded systems in 1999, a survey found 38% of developers considering using embedded Linux for new projects.

Torvalds: I didn’t comment on OS X

News reports last week had Linux creator Linus Torvalds ripping on Mac’s OS X, but the mild-mannered tech genius responded by saying he was misquoted. Frankly, the reports that Torvalds said OS X’s Mach microkernel was a “piece of crap” didn’t sound like the Linus we all know and love (or at least think we know).

Microsoft: We’re more secure

The only surprise should be the audacity of that statement, but Microsoft is really selling its development model as more secure than Open Source. According to Microsoft officials, nobody is reviewing Open Source code for security flaws. I know a couple of Linux security experts who might be offended at being called “nobody.”

New in NewsForge

Stories only in NewsForge this week:

News editor Tina Gasperson reported on some problems IBM created while sponsoring a KDE themes contest. IBM did respond to KDE developer complains and fixed the contest.

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field looked at the 3Com 3C905TX-C network interface card and explained how easy it is to install.

Columnist Julie Bresnick talked to Jeroen van der Zijp about his Open Source FOX GUI toolkit and asked why it kind of looks like Windows.

Happy spring holiday of your choice, everyone.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted
on our discussion
page.

As reported by LWN, the exuberant-ctags program creates temp files insecurely. They have fixed this (hopefully to use mkstemp(3)) in the latest version.

Yet Another Linux PDA project has been annoinced over on Slashdot. Project Mercury is a fusion of the iPaq, Linux, and some ideas from people at MIT.

LinuxPR has a release regarding DeepLinux: “The deepLinux package manager is now available for download from the company website. This manager adds a much needed feature to the deepLinux line of Server OS’s, which is an easy way to add, remove, and build packages for use with deepLinux.”

Mayank writes “Running out of disk space on partitions is a problem commonly and universally experienced by all of us. And although there are various solutions, almost all of them are temporary. In this article we take a detailed look at LVM, which tackles the problem in the most effective manner, making space management easy.

Tutorial here on FreeOS.com“

There’s a couple of stories, one from morons.org and another from the Associated Press that describe a security flaw
in an
Alcatel
DSL modem … that’s not so interesting. What’s interesting is that the document they released about it reveals more than they meant to reveal. It’s a Microsoft Word document, and you can go back and see the changes originally made it in. Here’s part of what supposedly was taken out: “As a result, Alcatel has started an initiative to qualify
firewall software that will provide users with the highest
possible degree of security.

(When and where will the firewall software be available? CERT has
said that they don?t believe that installing a firewall is the
answer. What are you doing to provide a legitimate fix?)”

LWN has posted about the release of PostgreSQL 7.1. Performance improvements are the main enchancements in this release.

Gnotices has a great, big list of Guadec summaries.

Someone dug up an old LinuxWorld talk, and had it posted on Slashdot. It details some of the lighter moments of Linux’s earliest days.

Debianplanet has links and information on a Debian users’ guide.