Asunción, Paraguay - When I first saw the editorial by Timothy R. Butler,
“The Inconsequentiality of Open Source,” I read it slowly, and
pondered about the point so well made by him. Tim was, and still is,
dead on right. I congratulated him publicly, and I have no reasons to
withdraw my commendation to Tim for his excellent article. Yet,
somehow I felt uneasy about the ideas expressed, and not in the sense
of them being wrong, but there was the lingering feeling that
something else needed to be said in order to round out Tim's point.
Finally, and after much thinking about it, I came out with some
thoughts that maybe I can share and use them for complementing Tim's
ideas.
As many pundits have speculated - including Open for Business's Timothy R. Butler - UnitedLinux will be offered under a per-server licensing scheme. The news, reported by ITWorld, seems to be the opening salvo between the Free Software community and the growing group of “Proprietary Linux” offerings.
NewsForge has an interesting report on a small, but highly effective way to improve Apache performance. “Lingerd is a daemon process that sits in front of your Apache processes to handle socket IO. What it does is free up your webserver to handle your application layer instead of dealing with clients that tie up your Apache children. This is a huge gain for sites using PHP, mod_perl or one of the Java engines. Having expensive Apache processes waiting around for clients to close sockets is a waste of resources.”
It is September, and that means brilliantly colored leaves, cooler weather, and a new Mandrake Linux release.
As the big day for Mandrake Linux 9.0 approaches, Open for Business's Timothy R. Butler talked with
Mandrake co-founder Gaël Duval about the company's past, present, and future.
The embattled, Linux pioneer Caldera announced today that it had renamed itself the SCO Group, SCO being the name of the UNIX vendor Caldera acquired assets from last year. The original organization known as SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) is now known as Tarantella, a company producing “web-enabling software.”
The KDE Project announced the availability of KDE 3.1 Beta 1 today. This release, which marks the second test release
of the KDE 3.1 series, offers many improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0, which was release in early April. KDE, which stands for K Desktop Environment, is a popular desktop user interface for Linux and UNIX systems.
Andreas Pour is well known to most everyone in the K Desktop Environment
(KDE) community. Considering that KDE is the leading desktop for Linux, if
you are investigating GNU/Linux workstations, you are sure to run into Pour's
work.
According to a story published by another LDN affiliate, LinuxandMain, the UnitedLinux consortium should release a beta to select testers by the end of the month. UnitedLinux, which launched in the end of May, is a group of four beleaguered Linux companies attempting to make a proprietary GNU/Linux “standard.” “The UnitedLinux consortium says the first beta drop of its common base system will be available to its customers by the end of August. An open beta, the consortium said, will be made available by the end of September.”