Linux keeper, SpikeSource CEO talk up open source
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InfoWorld - SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Accommodating large patch sets in Linux is expected to mean forking off of the 2.7 version of the platform to accommodate these changes, according to Andrew Morton, lead maintainer of the Linux kernel for Open Source Development Labs (OSDL).
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InfoWorld - SpikeSource&#160;CEO Kim Polese is an industry veteran who was head of the Java team at Sun in the 1990s and also founded &quot;push&quot; software company Marimba, which was eventually bought by business software company BMC Software.
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Blog: I interview Iain Gray, VP of Global Support at Red Hat, to find out how the world's largest open source company structures its support offerings, and how they differ from proprietary software support.
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BOSTON -- MicrosoftÂ Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer addressed a gathering of software industry leaders here on Wednesday, touting his company's vision for a bright future, while casting doubt on alternatives to his company's Windows operating system, in particular Linux.
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Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier will help share with Novell the thoughts and concerns of OpenSuse Linux users and programmers.
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Company wants to create an OpenSolaris-based OS familiar to Linux and Solaris users in a long-term attempt to propagate the software.
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Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) officials indirectly confirmed what many suspected: Linux is not its open-source panacea.
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Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.
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While open-source software is new to the Middle Kingdom, Beijing is looking to change that. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik explains why.
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TechWeb - An Indian Institute of Technology professor--and open-source evangelist--discusses the role of Linux and open source in India.
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(InfoWorld) - A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun's interest in serving the open-source community, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces. "I wanted you to hear this from me directly," Schwartz wrote in an entry on his blog. "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner." Schwartz was defending Sun against comments Torvalds made in a post Tuesday on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds suggested that Sun is keeping some of the more interesting features of its OpenSolaris open-source project -- such as ZFS, a file system in Sun's OpenSolaris Unix OS that is generating a lot of buzz -- close to the vest because the company doesn't want to help Linux, which has hurt Sun's position in the market. Schwartz begged to differ that Sun is punishing the Linux community for how commodity servers running the OS trumped Sun's Solaris-based hardware after the dot-com bust, a phenomenon that eventually led Sun to release Solaris as an open-source project. "Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work," Schwartz wrote. "I draw a very sharp distinction -- even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture." Torvalds also took issue with the fact that Sun has not released OpenSolaris under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2), which currently governs Linux. The license for OpenSolaris is the Community Development and Distribution License, which Sun created based on the Mozilla Public License. However, Schwartz is leaning toward supporting GPLv3 (GPLÂ Version 3), which should be released in its final version in the next few weeks as an option for OpenSolaris and other Sun open-source projects before GPLv2, which Torvalds prefers. In fact, the differences between GPLv2 and v3 have caused a public rift between Torvalds and other key members of the open-source community. "We love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed," Schwartz wrote. He cited a "variety of mechanical reasons" why it would be difficult to license OpenSolaris under GPLv2 and insisted it has "nothing to do with being afraid of the community. "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate," Schwartz wrote. "Indulge me when I say it's different than starting from scratch. I would love to go faster, and we are all doing everything under our control to accelerate progress.... It's also a delicate dance to manage this transition while growing a corporation." Torvalds in his post seemed unlikely to buy such an argument. "To Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," he wrote. As to whether Torvalds would accept Schwartz's offer, he joked in an e-mail Wednesday that while he does not get to the San Francisco Bay area very often, "free food is a big draw." Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. He also said that though his post was not strictly meant for Schwartz, he appreciates the executive's response, especially his assertion that Sun would not seek patent fees for ZFS, as some in the Linux community wanted to port the file system to Linux. Still, Torvalds' mistrust of Sun's motives in the open-source industry is deep-rooted, though he remains optimistic that Sun and the Linux community still can come together on common interests. "I'll just have to say that I still have the old Java licensing mess fresh in my memory, and I'll take a 'wait and see' attitude to what actually comes out of Sun," he wrote, saying he is the kind of person who "would rather be pleasantly surprised by people's (and companies') actions, than expect too much and be disappointed." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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Don't expect a patent deal between Microsoft and Ubuntu Linux distributor Canonical anytime soon. CEO Mark Shuttleworth says he won't pay for something he thinks has no legal merit.
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Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire.
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InfoWorld - At the annual LinuxWorld Conference &amp; Expo this week, top-tier vendors in the Linux space will roll out a raft of enterprise products, with a few vendors laying out road maps for pushing their open source strategies higher in the enterprise.
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Red Hat, the top seller of Linux, has hired a former Sun Microsystems executive to head its push to get the open-source operating system on desktop computers.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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Speaking to members of the Massachusetts Software Council, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touted a bright future for technology but warned his listeners to think twice before adopting open-source products like Linux.