– By Grant Gross –

The manager of Advanced Micro Devices’ software research and development group says the chip-maker is committed to making Linux work with AMD’s not-yet-released 64-bit architecture.

Wayne Meretsky, an AMD fellow, says AMD “went out of our way” to include the Linux community when AMD announced its x86-64 project last summer.

Meretsky promised that AMD would fix the closed-source license on the x86-64.org project site to port Linux to AMD’s 64-bit architecture. The license, which appears on the front page of the site, and several other pages, including downloads to Open Source tools such as GCC, should be pegged only to proprietary downloads on the site by mid-month, Meretsky said. GPL-licensed tools will have the GPL linked to their downloads.

“It was a clear oversight on our part,” Meretsky said of the license. “It’s obviously silly, and we’re getting it addressed as soon as possible.

Developers working on the Linux port to AMD’s architecture have defended the company for including Linux in its plans for its 64-bit chips from the very start. AMD, which is excited about the growth and potential of Linux, has its heart in the right place, Meretsky said. AMD, unlike some competitors that guard their intellectual property, made its architectural specification available at no cost “when the ink was dry” on its 64-bit announcement, he said, so that “people can actually get to work.”

AMD’s goal is to have its Sledgehammer and Clawhammer chips based on the x86-64 architecture in the second half of 2002, according to the company’s processor roadmap. AMD eventually plans to have the 64-bit architecture work on a variety of Linux distributions, including SuSE and Red Hat, plus most other major operating systems, including Windows, Solaris, DOS, and OS/2. In some cases, the chips will work in 32-bit mode before they’re tested for 64-bit mode.

Meanwhile, AMD is learning about Open Source, Meretsky said. “There a whole lot of things we’ve learned along the way,” he said. “This was my first interaction with the Open Source community of this magnitude.”

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ZDNet has a review of several recent worms that have targeted Linux.

ZDNet UK reports on Bruce Perens’ plans to challenge big tech on intellectual software patents at a meeting this summer. “The open source community is planning to meet IBM, HP and
others that are making fat profits from open source software,
and ask them to relinquish intellectual property in return.”

An anonymous reader tells us about an ZDNet story about an internal struggle between Microsoft’s Office team and the NetDocs team. “Microsoft’s powers-that-be have come down on the side of proprietary platforms, instead of standards-based ones.”

The Register has a story saying, “Foot and Mouth, BSE and the Hatfield rail crash could all have been avoided if the
British government had the right approach to information sharing, at least according
to Richard Stallman. He reckons that all three disasters were largely to do with bad
attitudes to data, and that if ministers understood how free software works then they
would not be in such a mess now.”

CNet reports that the cure may hurt worse than the disease. “Responding to the rash of e-mail viruses that started with Melissa and I Love You, the Redmond,
Wash.-based company is clamping down on the types of file attachments that will work with the
newest version of its Outlook e-mail software.”

A ZDNet column features the Linux Standard Base. The column says the LSB has been slow to produce a full specification, but the wait’s been worth it.

LinuxGram has a way with words in this pumped up press release: “LinuxForce Inc, the little US company that Corel bought a third of back in December of 1999 thinking to use it to
service its desktop Linux accounts, has spun out an outsourcing operation to monitor Linux servers.

Corel’s failure to make any progress in the Linux market threw LinuxForce back on its own devices and the company
says its experience consulting for customers such as the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia and the
Fortune 50 insurance cartel American International Group (AIG) persuaded it to package up the Debian operating
system and the Debian administration, monitoring and reporting technology as a family of commercial products that
the spin-off, AdminForce Remote LLC, will peddle to its customers.”

From net-security.org: The Linux-based kernel in the Watchguard Firebox has
problems handling certain types of malformed packets. If
the firewall is subjected to a burst of around 10.000 of
these packets, it will cause a kernel fault and either
crash or reboot.

Both TCP and ICMP are affected by this and the burstrate
needed to achieve a kernel fault was about one megabit in
our testlab, which isn’t that uncommon these days.

LinuxGram has this story: “An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months. An angel-funded start-up by the name of Cylant Technology in Bend, Oregon has been quietly beta testing a new
non-signature security schema at Cisco and IBM Global Services for the last few months … Internally it’s called BARS, reflecting the fact that it’s a behavior anomaly response system. For public consumption
it’s called CylantSecure and works on Linux initially.”