MSNBC.com tells us: “Looking for the controls in dialog boxes and palettes in Adobe
Photoshop 7 or ImageReady 3? Adobe says they may appear to
be “missing”, “misplaced” or “inoperative” in the Windows 98
and Me versions when another application is running in the
background.”

MSNBC.com: “When Mac OS X is released later this month,
sources say early users will find a list of glitches that range from
annoying to frustrating.”

From ZDNET: “Some would say that we’re actually being too charitable in letting
Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin restate his original
remarks on the open-source model. As quoted in an interview that
Allchin surely must regret, he warned that “open source is an
intellectual property destroyer,” adding, “I can’t imagine something
that could be worse…for the software business.” We disagree,
vehemently, with that original statement.”

Bruce Perens, an icon in Open Source, and the Linux/Open Source evangelist at Hewlett-Packard, is passing this note around:

What's Going on About Open-Sourcing the OpenMail Program?
 Bruce Perens

 Senior Strategist, Linux and Open Source

 Hewlett-Packard Corporation
bruce@perens.com
Permission is granted to republish this letter
in its entirety, without alteration of the text. You may change formatting
to fit this letter in your presentation.
 There's been a lot of talk in the Open Source community about HP's
recently-cancelled OpenMail product. OpenMail is a server for a few
dozen different email protocols, many of them proprietary, most of
them obsolete. The most important of these protocols is Microsoft's
MAPI (Mail API) which is used by Microsoft Outlook.
That makes OpenMail capable of serving as a replacement for Microsoft's Exchange
Mail Server, and thus OpenMail might have been used to serve a large network
of Microsoft groupware clients with a Linux system. OpenMail is also useful 
because it can support an extremely large number of mailboxes efficiently.
OpenMail contains a lot of internal knowledge about how Microsoft groupware
works, and that's a good reason for Open Source people to want the program. 
With it, we could more quickly figure out how to get groupware programs like
Ximian's Evolution working with Microsoft Outlook. Then, Linux users would
work more comfortably in environments that have already standardised on Microsoft
groupware products. It's interesting to note that OpenMail already uses free 
software in its implementation - sendmail provides its SMTP support.
So, we might not have much trouble integrating it into our systems. 
 I got involved in the decision-making process for OpenMail shortly after
I joined HP in January. I was asked directly whether we should Open Source
the product. This question came from two HP General Managers, the one for
Linux and the one for OpenMail.

 My recommendation was not to Open Source the product until we were
ready to throw it away, but instead to sell the OpenMail division and continue
OpenMail as a proprietary product.
My main reason for this was that OpenMail did not benefit the average
Linux developer or user at all. That user supports Microsoft mail clients
via open protocols, and can use open groupware products such as Evolution.
Instead, OpenMail was mostly interesting to enterprise users who needed
to interface Linux to MS Outlook and could afford to pay to support the continued
development of OpenMail. I did not feel that we could support the OpenMail
development team with an Open Source product - licensing income would probably
diminish, they were not breaking even, and they are a very expensive group.
Because they are so expensive, it did not make sense to support the product
at a loss simply to sell more Linux systems. 
 My philosophy about Open Source and proprietary products is that the
two should share the market in harmony. That means there are a few things 
that proprietary products should not do. Proprietary products should not
block Open Source competitors by using patents, closed protocols, or restrictive
law. Proprietary products don't belong in the infrastructure of free systems
like Linux - they are more appropriate as applications on those systems.
Given a few rules like that, we should be able to achieve "peaceful co-existence".
 Thus, it made sense for OpenMail to retain its proprietary role to support
Microsoft Outlook, while the Open Source community continued to reverse-engineer
Microsoft Outlook and Exchange for purposes of compatibility. 
 An important point about my relationship with HP is that the decisions 
I make can't drive the company into bankruptcy. I have to find the balance 
between promoting free software and making money. Thus, I was loath to say 
"just give OpenMail away" until we were ready to throw the product
away. HP attempted to follow my advice and was not able to find a buyer who
would keep the team intact.

Linux Journal author Don Marti questions whether I am "just a pretty
face" for Open Source in this matter, or whether I have the ear of the executive
team. Sometimes I wish I was less involved with the executive team,
because the decisions that come with my job are not easy ones. I (unfortunately)
took part in killing the OpenMail division, because I could not justify keeping
the team together for an Open Source product. So, here's Mr. Open Source
Evangelist making a decision that causes developers to be transferred off
of a product that runs on Linux, and some of them will quit as a result,
and this will not do good things to their lives. Welcome to the realities
of interfacing Open Source and the corporation. 
 So, now we have announced that we're going to make one more OpenMail
release and then support the product for 5 years. 5 years is forever
 for a computer product, so OpenMail isn't going away for its installed base.
But obviously, there is now a legitimate desire for the product to be Open
Sourced, or at least continued as a proprietary product outside of HP. 
 When a company decides to release existing proprietary code as Open Source,
the show-stopper is almost always the other parties outside of that company
 who are involved. Such parties become involved through patents that have
been licensed, proprietary code that has been produced by a third party and
embedded into the product, and existing contracts relating to the product
that have been entered into with customers or other vendors. These sorts
of factors complicate the release of every piece of Open Source software
I've consulted on at HP so far, no matter what division it comes from. 
 So, if OpenMail is released as Open Source, we will have to first 
sanitise it: remove software that is connected with non-disclosure agreements
that we entered, patents that we licensed, proprietary code that we bought
but can't relicense, and so on. And we must make sure that the result doesn't 
bring us into violation of contracts we made with customers and vendors,
such as the agreements we made with customers when they licensed the OpenMail 
product. We don't know how big this sanitisation project is yet, if it's
bad, it could cost Millions. 
 So, this should make it clear that the decision to Open Source OpenMail
isn't a no-brainer. One of the biggest problems is: if we spend the money
ourselves, what do we not spend it on? Many of the other projects
that we might consider are of more direct benefit to Linux, and benefit the
average Linux user rather than only the enterprise. So, if we do OpenMail
as Open Source, do we not offer Linux support for some laptop or palmtop?
Do we release fewer HP device drivers for Linux? Does a Win-Modem never become
a Lin-Modem because of this? It may not be necessary for this to come out
of HP's Linux budget, however. Perhaps we could get another company involved.
After all, we did want to sell the product off, and perhaps someone else
could help us Open Source it. 
 We have at least 4 plans for OpenMail circulating in top management, several
of which involve Open Source. It'll take time for this to work out, so I'm
going to have to urge patience. Don't write HP management asking for OpenMail
to be Open Sourced, they already know, so that will only annoy them. Another
thing I'll urge is that you don't allow the prospect of OpenMail being
released someday to block other projects - continue the present
reverse-engineering effort and continue to develop open groupware protocols.
I'll keep working on this for you. 
Thanks
  
Bruce Perens

goingware writes “the article
Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
at The Linux Quality Database suggests that web application developers validate their HTML against W3C standards to ensure it will render in any browser, and use a load generator during development to stress test your server software to identify performance problems early.”

– By Grant Gross –

IBM’s $1 billion-plus investment in Linux is starting to show dividends in several ways, the latest being an ad campaign in print, online and on billboards touting peace, love and Linux.

A reader even wrote in to tell us where we could view the ad, and reports this week say IBM is even paying its partners to learn Linux. With what appears to be the full force of IBM’s marketing efforts behind it, the Linux industry may have the shot in the arm it’s needed lately. Now if we could figure out how to translate IBM’s marketing efforts into Linux stock price bumps.

HP’s curious dance with Open Source

Hewlett-Packard, another big tech company that’s been embracing Linux, announced this week that it’s discontinuing its OpenMail messaging product line after version 7, which is scheduled to be released this month. The closed-source OpenMail product had been a source of consternation with some in the Open Source crowd, including newly hired HP Linux advisor Bruce Perens, but others are concerned that discontinuing OpenMail kill Microsoft’s only real competition to the Microsoft Exchange Mail Server. Perens wrote Sunday urging patience from the Open Source community as HP considers several options for OpenMail.

In other news of the HP/Open Source romance, some reports this week at the company dumping Windows CE for Linux on its Jornada handhelds.

New release

KDE 2.1 was released this week, and reviews said nice things, like how the new KDE makes Linux ready for the enterprise.

And in a little inter-community sword rattling, LinuxPlanet took Richard Stallman of the free software movement to task for comparing the GNU General Public License to the Declaration of Independence. Delusions of grandeur, or something like that, LinuxPlanet says. Maybe that should be musket rattling, instead of sword rattling.

New in NewsForge this week

Stories you may have missed:

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field checks out the hardware support improvements in the Linux 2.4 kernel. “Hardware support becomes more efficient, the possibility for data loss lessens, 3D games run (or if they ran before, they run better), and overall the world becomes a better place.”

Editor in chief Robin Miller reviews the Opera browser for Linux and finds that while it’s a fast little browser, the annoying accompanying ads and the $39 price tag hurt it when compared to Open Source browsers available.

Business columnist Jack Bryar previews the next Linux coming down the pike, a Transmeta released designed to work on mobile devices.

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

Steve Litt writes “Linux was the platform of choice for the XML tutorial in the March 2001 Troubleshooting Professional Magazine (http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200103/200 103.htm). Besides the obvious reasons of stability and lack of licensing gotchas, the availability of the GPL Dia diagramming package on Linux but not Windows was a key issue. The tutorial used Dia as an XML learning tool.”

Bruce Perens writes: “Please see http://www.perens.com/Articles/OpenMail. I give you permission to serve this article directly from your site, you don’t need to link to mine unless you want to.

Thanks. — Bruce.”

Linux has been ported again, this time to the 64-bit PowerPC architecture that IBM uses in its high-end servers. Slashdot has the full discussion.

Anonymous Reader writes “The March issue of LinuxFocus (MultiLingual magazine about Linux) is available.

You find the English version at:
http://linuxfocus.org/English/
Translations to other languages are ongoing.

This time we have the following articles:

System Administration
• Real-time data mirroring under Linux , by Atif Ghaffar
• Using different ISPs for your Internet access , by Guido Socher
  
  Games
• Game Review – Penguin Command , by Harald Radke
  
  Applications
• Real-time mp3 recording , by Philip de Groot
• The Easy Fax Server , by hacklinux.org
  
  Software Development
• GNUstep, the open source OpenStep , by Georges Tarbouriech
• Avoiding security holes when developing an application – Part II
  by Frédéric Raynal, Christophe Blaess and Christophe Grenier
• Book review: Beginning Linux Programming , by Katja Socher
  
  Graphics
• Povray IV: The Use of Textures in Povray , by Antonio Castro

If you like the articles in this magazine, then please join us and help us translate them to your native language.”