LinuxNews interviews Miles O’Neal, creator and maintainer of the frequently asked questions list for the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). “It’s at a difficult point in its lifecycle; people expect it to keep growing really fast, and all the bugs to get fixed, and the performance to increase by an order of magnitude, all at the same time. It has become extremely popular all of a sudden, and there are a lot of demands for features and improvements. Far more than there are new volunteers, as far as I can tell.”

With Linux gaining momentum in applications from wristwatches to supercomputers, its backers are redoubling efforts to expand the reach of the operating system and development environment while avoiding a re-enactment of the “Unix wars” on the Linux front. From the full story at EETimes.com.

From CMP Techweb: “The Linux movement is expected to reach another milestone next month when Linus Torvalds officially sanctions the long-awaited Linux 2.4 kernel for commercial release.”

ZD Net’s Anchordesk goes through the history of chip-maker and Linus employer Transmeta, step by step.

Salon.com reports: “The three remaining watermarks in the Hack SDMI contest weren’t all ‘successfully’ broken after all — or so goes the news that is coming out of the SDMI meetings Wednesday in Washington. Although all three watermarks had hacks that passed the ‘oracle’ test (which examined whether or not the watermark had been removed) …”

By Jack Bryar –
Open Source business –
Congratulations to our new president-elect (assuming a recount doesn’t change the result). Now, fella, what are you
going to do about the dot.com recession?

It’s no secret. One by one, the most stupidly conceived, under-researched and over-hyped dot.coms have falling by the
wayside. The most recent casualty has been pets.com. But the really bad news is just starting to surface for the firms that
have been providing software, services, and equipment to these collapsing companies.

Suppliers to Internet firms are feeling the heat. Communications companies, ranging from relatively new firms like
Turnstone, to industry giants like Lucent are having problems. The reason? Slowing demand.

Many Internet service firms have scaled back as demand for their services has failed to materialize. This is not the only
major problem, however. Many local telcos in the United States have tried to brake demand for cheap broadband, as many frustrated
would-be subscribers of DSL services can testify. On top of that, the weakness of the Euro has been a particular concern.
The soft currency there has been having a depressing effect on the market for American-made chips and equipment. While
networking giant Cisco System recently beat market expectations, even it declared that it is planning to “scale back its
inventory.” Other major traditional tech firms have been dropping broad hints that they’re worried about short-term growth.
In states like Virginia and Washington the fastest growing segment of the tech industry has been firms who specialize in
auctioning off recently purchased Internet equipment.

The tech industry is showing other warning signs. The biggest tech story right now should be Transmeta. And while
Transmeta’s IPO was oversubscribed and there was a respectable first-day price runup, there’s trouble ahead.

IBM has walked away from its deal with the company. The investment community continues to point to agreements the
company has signed with developers from Sony, Hitachi, and NEC, but the Japanese computer industry has been good about
signing agreements, and not so good at delivering products people want to buy. The market for wireless and low-power
devices still looks solid, but its not nearly as explosive as many analysts were predicting a few months ago. In fact, many of
those analysts have begun to scale back their estimates about the market for the type of portable and hybrid computing
devices that Transmeta’s Crusoe chip was designed for. The weak Euro is a big potential negative for Transmeta as the
wireless market there has been far more robust than in North America.

The biggest question at this stage is not whether there’s at least a modest tech slowdown in the offing, but what
segments are going to be affected. For example, the Open Source community has drawn a disproportionate amount of its
growth from new and smaller companies. That should be a real concern. Most of the dot-coms have been in this category.
An even bigger concern has been the fact that such a large percentage of Open Source spending has been concentrated on
the suddenly-vulnerable Internet server market. Is there trouble ahead?

Perhaps. However, one of the most reliable indicators of dot-com failure has been the type of equipment they have
purchased. I’ve been tracking the Web server hardware of the most recent set of failures. I have been struck by the fact that
so many of those systems have been Microsoft-based. Now, I’m also aware that a big percentage of all of the big
commercial B2B ventures have been built around Microsoft architecture. And it
would be a stretch to suggest that the purchase of IIS servers is indicative of both technical and marketing incompetence.
Still, it remains a notable feature among the trash heap of dot-com failures that so many of them have bought over-priced
computing equipment.

Most of these same firms had trouble with controlling their finances in a variety of other ways.
Many lavished huge funds on their executive “talent.” They spent far too much on television and other high-profile
advertising. Many of these firms were effectively crippled before they even really began to develop their businesses.

But at the same time, the dot-coms have been an important contributor to the tech boom of the last couple of years. And
the blow-back from their collapse is going to have a significant negative affect on many other elements of the tech
economy. Certainly the Open Source community is not going to be immune from that collapse. The only questions are
whether or not they will be affected nearly as much as other, more mainstream vendors of computer systems and software, and whether other segments of the economy will be able to continue to grow and pick up the slack.

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

From the Register: A cracker who said he accessed several Microsoft servers through a known security hole on Friday claims he did it again Tuesday. Dimitri says he uploaded a file called oopsididitagain which mocked Microsoft’s security policy.

The Register reports that the UK patent office has opened a “consultation exercise on patenting of software and business methods, and has posted a pretty detailed and lucid questionnaire on its Web site.” A discussion group on the subject is available, and the patent office is asking for feedback by Dec. 15.

Info World reports that a software emulation technique used inside Transmeta’s Crusoe processor that hinders the performance of the low-power chip might be the reason PC manufacturers declining to ship Crusoe in their laptops.

BSD Today has how-to article on surviving disk failure: “Despite the fact that hard disks and the IDE or SCSI controllers driving them are very reliable today, occasional failures strike out of the blue and render disks unreadable. If you were smart enough to have made backups of critical system and data files, then you are in luck!”