Linux PR reports, Compaq Computer Corporation today announced new Linux products and partner-based offerings that will enable its Linux customers to achieve new levels of enterprise availability, scalability and management.

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller –

NewsForge, like all decent Web sites, gets updated periodically. We’re getting ready to do our next update, and would like to hear your ideas on what changes we should make. You can either post your suggestions here or email them to editors@newsforge.com. Should we have more reviews? Should we expand more into book and software reviews, areas we have almost avoided up to now?

Are we placing too much emphasis on outside links and not enough on original reporting? Or is it the other way around?

Are there areas we’re covering too heavily for your taste? Areas to which we should be paying more attention?

Do you like the comics? Not like them?

Any other thoughts, comments or suggestions on content? We’d love to hear them, whether they’re positive or negative.

Site design

Our design is far from perfect. How can we make it better? (No, we can’t remove the ads unless you’re willing to pay for the site out of your pocket.) What about the way we show older NewsForge Reports (original stories) and links? Do you think we’re doing this properly or do you have ideas on how we can do it better?

How about polls? We avoided them at first because everyone seems to have a poll these days, and we worried about following the crowd. Should we think about adding polls now?

What about comments? How should we handle them? Attached to each linked-to story? We really don’t get all that many comments except on a few high-profile reports right now. Should we encourage more comments? If so, how? (When we started the site, our thought was that Slashdot was getting enough comments for a dozen sites, and while NewsForge may be Slashdot’s relative, we certainly didn’t want it to be an identical twin.)

We don’t know everything

This may come as a surprise, but NewsForge editors are not omniscient. We really do want your input, and promise to consider every rational suggestion carefully, and implement as many of your suggestions as we can when we start working on the site update, probably in September.

Thanks in advance for your help,

– Robin “Roblimo” Miller
NewsForge (and OSDN) Editor in Chief

Scour.net founder Dan Rodrigues defends his search engine against claims by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, who say his service is essentially the same thing as other file-sharing Web sites, according to a Salon.com story.

From an OSopinion column by Tom Adelstein: “Can we
trust corporations who have made questionable or inferior technological decisions in
the past to make better technological decisions in the future? Or will the sway and
tug of marketing … nobody ever got fired for buying IBM … as well as the
reductionist thinking continue to hold?”

From a LinuxPlanet interview with TrollTech CEO Haavard Nord: TrollTech has been vilified by the Free Software community — i.e., the Free
Software Foundation and later the Debian organizers — for not releasing Qt
initially under the GPL. While undoubtedly TrollTech made some mistakes, the
reaction among the Free Software crowd has continued to be shrill and out of
proportion to any complaints they may have. Plus, it’s hard to stay mad at a
bunch of round-faced Norwegians, which (judging by some time spent at the
TrollTech booth at the recent LinuxWorld Expo) seem to make up a good
chunk of TrollTech employees.

Linuxdevices.com takes a look at how far embedded Linux has come in the past year, with information from the just-past Linux World.

The rumor is Intel is about to share its file-sharing vision, based on Napster. eWeek’s John Taschek says that’d be a silly idea.

MP3Board.com, a small MP3 search site being sued by the record industry for allegedly helping to spread copyed songs online, is spreading the blame to America Online, according to a story on CNEt. The company is asking that a judge declare its searches of the free-ranging Gnutella file-sharing network to be legal. But if those searches of Gnutella aren’t legal, then AOL — which employed the programmers who originally created Gnutella — should share some of the liability, MP3Board’s lawyer says.

There is an author in my family. Yes, Tom Yates the eminent co-author (with Wes
Sonnenreich) of Building
Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls fame is my brother’s wife’s sister’s husband. “So you
see,” I tell my mother as she signs the bill for yet another dinner, “I was
powerless against my destiny. Writing is clearly in my blood.”
Inspired, I went to a Borders to find the book. There were at least nine shelves of
books on Linux. There were other Linux related books scattered throughout function
specific sections but these nine shelves held books that simply boasted “LINUX” straight
up their spine. This was the Linux section. And the three columns next to it were
occupied by Apache and Perl and… clearly someone’s making money off Open Source.

When I found it I was encouraged. It is more than just a manual on how to build
firewalls but, rather, as eloquently stated by the authors themselves, this text is
indeed “a sequel to the greatest book of all time: Hamlet.”

Had Shakespeare been born today, he would have been Open Source savvy. Maybe not a
hacker per se, after all, his plays were commercially successful mass media, he was a
pretty mainstream guy, but he would be employing it to develop a venue for his craft.
He would be a believer.

Just like Wes and Tom, who dedicated months of sleepless nights to bringing the world
a book on building firewalls with cost-effective software.

I can’t help but imagine, had I originally encountered them in some unrelated chat
room, I might have assumed their book was about arson. Okay, maybe more so Wes than Tom,
whose British tendency toward loquacity soon reveals his earnest nature, but Wes, who
asked me if I wanted to see the scars he incurred during his inaugural computer science
class, is skilled at adolescence.

After he taught me the term “derelicious” he shared the painful roots of his writing
career.

“In high school I used to write long love letters that took hours to write and were
subsequently torn and burned. Those that survived invariably led to abject humiliation
and crushing despair, and were eventually torn and burned by the recipients. I didn’t
know it then, but I was already in training to become an author.”

Perhaps more could be attributed to these heartbreaking beginnings than his books.
Perhaps too, it is the source to the apparent precariousness of his sanity which seems to
be a running theme in dialogue surrounding him — what Tom says about him, what Wes says
about himself. Lunacy is even cited as the inspiration for it.

He has written not one book for Wiley but two. For the book on search engines
there was a different co-author who Wes says “was more effective at avoiding the
publishers” by disconnecting his phone, changing his name and moving to Haiti. Wes was
more up front and told the people at Wiley Computer Publishing that he was not “ready to
go through the months of torment and self-mutilation again.” To which they responded
sympathetically, “we understand, all authors feel that way”.

But after a year of pursuant phone calls, Wes acquiesced and tagged Tom, for his
networking expertise, as co-author. Tom, judging by his official dedication, was unable
to pass the task off to his wife, Caroline, and agreed to saddle up. And their long
journey into night began.

Save the few thousand lines of Fortran he wrote for his Ph.D., shopping lists were the
only writing Tom had any experience at. But after sharing a few “rude trumpet player
jokes” any trepidation was assuaged and the two grew confident about the collaboration.

Save some severe sleep deprivation no one was actually hurt in the making of this book
but the book, could potentially save a lot of people from enduring a lot of pain. Wiley
had approached Wes with the subject but Tom was the perfect addition. He is almost as
adamant about the importance of firewalls as he is about that of Open Source.

“I wouldn’t dream of exposing a machine to the Internet without firewalling it first,
no matter what OS it was running. More and more people are getting broadband, permanently on’ Internet connections, more and more people will be coming home to a
machine possessed if they don’t put something between themselves and the Big Bad World.”

Is this not the pinnacle of responsibility? In addition, not only does he provide
free Linux support for home users but he’s got his mother up and running on Linux as
well. This is how he gives back instead of contributing code.

Linux was also Wiley’s idea though it was not an issue especially after Wes tacked on
the OpenBSD part. Wes gives back by participating (some of his favorite projects are
Mindbright’s Mindterm Java SSH implementation (www.mindbright.se), ICE.com’s JCVS Java CVS client,
VNC, and IPFilter) but he is notably grown up about the realities of the open source
paradigm.

“The biggest problem with open-sourcing software,” I can practically hear him stepping
out of his banter, “is that you need to gather momentum before it actually becomes a
major project. People assume that there’s thousands of programmers who will immediately
start working the minute you open-source it. This might be the case for a major
initiative that helps everyone (like Apache) but for the vast majority of Open Source
projects, the initial programmer is the only programmer.”

What happened to the lunacy?

“I’d love the free software concept to get as strong as possible but I also like the
idea of open-yet-not-free software. There are still a number of applications where the
major commercial players significantly outshine the free software alternatives … If I
need to acquire the not-free software for my business, then I’m much happier if there’s
some way I can see the code.”

Of course he recognizes, and condemns, the open-but-not-free licenses that don’t
actually let you tinker with the code but it is an interesting option that allows for the
commerce while not sacrificing the quality.

Perhaps Wes and Shakespeare have more in common than a literary relationship with
Hamlet.

Wes and Tom are an appropriate team to bring Open Source into the future. Smart,
spirited, natural yet pragmatic and industrious, I hope to notice their well timed nudie
jokes amid plenty of guides in the future.

2600 responds to the court decision regarding its distribution of links to DeCSS code.