cheros asks: "I'm starting to get very puzzled by the SCO licensing scheme - am I mistaken or is licensing SCO actually about the most dangerous thing you can do as business or end user using Linux? [disclaimer: IANAL and AFAIK, so get decent legal council - I might be completely wrong ;-)] If I buy a copy of Linux from a provider, my contract is with that provider, NOT with SCO. In other words, if said provider has supplied me with something dodgy (and that is still very much an open question IMO), the issue lies with SCO and the provider, not with me and SCO, as I have no contractual relation with SCO in any way, shape or form. So, licensing SCO might actually CREATE that relationship and thus enable SCO to play further games with enforceable contractual obligations, something it currently lacks with end users. If that is correct it puts SCO in an even worse light (if that's possible) as that could mean deception as well as FUD. The latter might have become accepted in business and politics, but the former might actually be illegal in some countries. In short, as far as I can see you don't actually have a problem as a Linux end user...until you get a license. Comments?"

An anonymous reader asks: "MSDN subscribers recently qualified for a free Viewsonic V37 PDA (supposedly, around 25,000 units were given away). The software development group, at my company, just received our shipments; however, now there is contention between the developers and the company over who owns the PDAs. The company I work for (a worldwide information technology and services company) contends that that they own the PDAs because they were obtained through a subscription purchased by the company and, therefore, the PDAs are company property (and so all company policies governing the use of their property applies). This upset quite a few developers in my group who were excited to have a new gadget to work/play with and now any tinkering must be approved by the company. So, who owns the PDAs -- the developers who found out about the promotion, filled out the forms, paid for the stamps, on their own initiative, etc. or the company who purchased the MSDN subscriptions to make the developers eligible for the 'free' promotion? Also, I am curious to find out if others are having similar debates at their respective companies. Details of the offer can be found here."

Paul Johnson asks: "This article at ComputerWorld describes a sysadmin's discovery that many people in his company are installing Linux on their desktops without consulting IT. The writer is concerned with the security implications, but there is a wider issue. At present the 'official' penetration of Linux into the desktop market is something around 1%. The writer of this article doesn't give figures, but it sounds like he may have stumbled on several times that percentage of desktop Linux installations. If so then this is an important trend. Linux got its foot in the datacentre door in exactly the same way a few years ago, with unofficial installations doing odd server jobs. If you are a sysadmin, in an organization that runs Windows on the desktop, have you stumbled on many unofficial Linux installations?"

Rob Flickenger writes "While poking around on the Linksys WRT54G (one of the new Linux 2.4.5 based APs) at a SeattleWireless Hack Night session, we noticed a number of binaries in their firmware (including Zebra, PPP 2.4.1, and iptables to name three) that are released under the GPL, some of which are obviously modified. The question is, where is the source code to Linksys' modifications? Their "GPL Code Center" has the packages, but they are the pristine distributions, without any changes whatsoever. I've asked Linksys for clarification, but given Linksys' customer service reputation, I highly encourage other interested parties to ask them as well. More details are up on my weblog on oreillynet.com."

Haider writes "IBM has published two TPC-H benchmarks at the 100GB and 300GB scale factors (meaning the raw data in the database). The results are published at www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results. The two results were published with exactly the same hardware and show scalability of the solution as more data is put on it. The system was a cluster of 8 2-way nodes running 2GHz AMD Opteron cpus with 6 GB of memory on each node. The OS was SLES 8 for AMD, and the database was 64-bit DB2 for Linux. The details of this solution are described in an article at infoworld.com."

mrseigen writes "The processor that Chinese firms have been working on as a response to foreign equipment and software is now available for pre-order. The Inquirer did an article here, and the company website is here. The chip will supposedly ship with Midori Linux."

PDAJames writes "Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop after all. After an earlier, very positive evaluation of SuSE Linux Desktop, ZDNet UK has carried out a more in-depth review, running the system in a production environment for two weeks, and found it wanting. A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network. When will this stuff finally be ironed out?"

A lot is going on these days, ranging from the endlessly amusing SCO soap opera to plenty of mostly positive news about Linux and Open Source adoption by both corporate and government users, not to mention an increasing number of commercial applications being ported to Linux. And, of course, LinuxWorld is right around the corner. Bruce Perens is certainly as appropriate a person as any to help us get a handle on the current (and possibly future) state of Linux and Open Source. We'll send him 10 of the highest moderated questions, and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us. As usual, one question per post, please, and don't bother asking questions that can easily be answered with a couple of minutes' worth of online research.

An anonymous reader writes "The OpenGroup has published a detailed list of the conflicts between the Linux Standards Base and Posix ^? that is accessible through their website. "

James A. A. Joyce writes "It's all up now at the kernel archives. Get the full 2.6.0-test2 or a patch, whichever suits you. We need to test those new kernels! Hop to it!"

dr.karl.b writes "Lindows.com has announced the WebStation, a hard-disk-less pc that boots from a CD, similar to the now dead ThinkNIC, for $169 (no monitor). Different versions are available from 2 vendors, TigerDirect and iDOTpc.com. The TigerDirect version has a 1.1GHz Duron, 256MB PC2100 DDR, 56X CD-ROM, 10/100Mbps NIC, floppy, modem, keyboard and mouse. The iDOTpc.com version has a 800MHz C3, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, 56X CD-ROM, 10/100Mbps NIC, but without a floppy, modem, keyboard or mouse. The TigerDirect looks like a better deal, at least now ($169 = $189 - $20 rebate). The 2 different versions seem to have confused the authors at C/Net and The Register, who only report the specs of the iDOTpc.com version."

securitas writes "CNet Asia reports that China is building a 2000-processor supercomputer based on the AMD Opteron 64-bit CPU. The new supercomputer will run a Chinese-designed Linux operating system. Based on current standings, the resulting 10-teraflop machine will make it the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. The Red Grid project is being built by Dawning Information Industry and China's National Research Centre for Intelligent Computing Systems. The Red Grid/Dawning 4000A is expected to be complete by June 2004. But China has competition - weighing in at 40 teraflops, the Cray Red Storm AMD-based 10,000-Opteron supercomputer built for Sandia National Labs will become the supercomputer heavyweight next year. More at Infoworld , InternetNews and Yahoo."

focitrixilous P writes "Gamespot writes about the upcoming hybrid strategy game Savage: The Battle for Neweth, which will provide a full Linux edition on the same disk as the Windows version. The title blends real time strategy with action titles, along one player to act as a general while others do the actual fighting."

prostoalex writes "Peter Seebach decided to build his own Linux-based 802.11b wireless access point. The article on IBM DeveloperWorks talks about the hardware and software requirements, implementing the operating system on the CompactFlash card, loading Apache and Perl onto the server. The build-it-yourself wireless point is not going to be cheaper than commercially available products, but its educational value is immense." And HaeMaker writes "We have all seen the 802.11b/g booster made from a Pringles can. Well, these guys have taken the idea, put some math behind it to find the optimal can size and have turned it in to a cool product."

DriverSubversion asks: "Excuse the anonymity: I'm covering my back and that of my company. My company makes some USB and PCI peripherals, currently only supported under Windows. Several of us have pointed out that there is a large cross-over between the people who buy these things and the people who run linux - and thus it's in the company's best interest to develop device drivers for Linux,as well as Windows. Now while our boss is kind of convinced that this might sell some more units, he understandably wants to know how much it will cost to write and maintain the drivers... and where better to ask than here? So has anyone else gone though this? On scale of 1-10, how hard is it, (1 being 'extremely easy, 2 programmers could do it' and 10 is 'a team of no less than 20 programmers, lawyers and salesmen'). Keep in mind that our intent is to keep the code up-to-date, GPL-compliant and in at least some major distributions."

Besides the recent action in Australia, lots of others are choosing to make affirmative statements denying SCO's claims to own the name and code of all things *nix. Read below for a wrap-up of some recent public reactions to the SCO claims from a wide range of potential litigants (if the SCO case gets that far): Japanese conglomerates, American department stores, Bruce Perens, kernel developer Richard Gooch via Mozillaquest, and Joe ("Citizen") Barr.

ashitaka writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that an Open Source group has gone on the offensive in response to SCO's latest demands that Linux users must buy a Unixware license to avoid any possible future unpleasantries. 'Open Source Victoria today filed a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, asking it to investigate SCO's activities in light of 'unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money' against possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians.' I especially like the last bit: 'One feels that this whole fiasco is the IT industry equivalent of a Nigerian scam or internet extortion ploy.' Oh yeah.."

__past__ writes "REAL software just announced that the next version of their REALbasic IDE will add support for building native Linux applications, in addition to the Windows, Mac OS classic and OS X targets. Given that it will include a converter for existing Visual Basic projects, this could be a usefull tool for migrating existing apps written in everybody's favourite language to free platforms, something that other projects like Gambas or KBasic don't address."

Pecisk asks: "Maybe lot of you have already tired of discussing this, but I would like to know opinions (professional one would be very good) how much this case can have *legal* impact to Linux users/businesses in other regions like EU, Russia, Eastern Asia. I know that in many cases there's no effect of US court decisions to other countries, but how (for example) the EU patent law will take this, and in generally how much and do we have to be really worried about this case? This question is very important to me, and I guess, for other guys from non-US countries too. I want to know this also because when I have to speak about the using of Linux and free software in IT solutions and if someone argues about this case and it's impact to us, I would like to know what to answer (I'm from Latvia, Eastern Europe, we are going to vote for EU membership in September)."

An anonymous reader asks: "With the relatively easy instructions available from various sources (LSF being one), it's fairly easy now for just about any relatively advanced Linux user to create their own distro. I'm well into creating a distribution (for my friends and myself, nothing major), but I can't seem to find any real projects out there to actually go through an installation process. Anaconda is there, but the lack of documentation is serious. Are there any others out there? If not, what would be required to create one? An obvious start would be a stripped down, bootable Linux CD, and an application to handle partitioning, formatting, setting up the filesystem, and installing packages (of whatever sort), but what all has been done before?"