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Friday, April 08, 2005
Open Source Friday: Some Say
I was mildly disappointed with the Fox News documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, but that might've had more to do with the turn out than the DVD. My favorite part of the documentary was the "some say" expose. Rather than provide an actual source for an inflammatory accusation, your favorite Fox News bobbing head simply falls back to, "Some say that Bill Clinton's heart problems stem from his long-standing practice of basting his illegitimate black children in barbeque sauce before eating them...". To which Alan Colmes, of course, peeps the mildest of objections. The "some say" practice, despicable though it is, is gaining traction:Some industry experts have suggested that Mozilla lacks the resources to fix bugs in a timely way, but Minchak disagrees. "Many of the software engineers who work on Firefox and other open source projects are paid employees of companies that want [open source software] to succeed."
More Mozilla
A new version of Mozilla and Firefox is due to roll out any day now. Watch your throbbers for the alert:"We're getting ready to wrap up this 1.0.3 release," Dotzler wrote on his blog. "I'm gonna be very cautious about calling any thing a "final" candidate, but this one feels close."
The biggest fix in 1.0.3 will be to eliminate the JavaScript bug disclosed last week that leaves Firefox (and its Mozilla suite sibling) vulnerable to attack.
Sage the official news aggregator of 3WN has been updated to 1.3.1. Sage is a tool for monitoring RSS feeds. RSS feeds are a way to check whether your favorite web sites have been updated. This blog, for example, has about 3 RSS feeds -- all the same basic data, but in different formats.
Open source annoyances
Sure, I love the open source software. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. For example, applications often have lousy names. If the name isn't awful, expect it to change. For example, Mandrake became Mandrakesoft whic is now Mandriva. Yikes. I just switched from Mandrakesoft back to Fedora Core, which used to be Red Hat. See? Annoying.No one uses it, but everyone's adopting it
Linux. Behold its majesty. I'm a sucker for stories like this:This snowball effect is contributing to the rising profile of open standards. Some applications are entirely open source, and their code is available for developers to examine and improve. Others are proprietary systems designed to run on open-source platforms. In either format, such applications add versatility and usefulness to the operating systems.
The December 2003 release of the Linux 2.6 kernel erased many of the impediments that had limited Linux, said Derek Rodner, senior program manager of Linux enterprise server marketing at Unisys.
"That kernel had a number of new features in it that really made it robust and ready for the enterprise," Rodner said. Because of the growing availability of applications, Unisys debuted in the Linux market in 2004, equipping servers with Novell's SuSE Linux Version 9.
Microsoft doesn't like competition, so it's out to crush Linux. If the Yankee Group's survey is correct, it costs about the same to deploy a Linux or a Microsoft server. If cost is the same, then reliability becomes a key issue. Rather than actually be more reliable, Microsoft buys studies to report that its products are more reliable. After Microsoft commissions the study, it's easy to get uncritical news coverage (see here and here). It's part of Microsoft's grand tradition of competition through obfuscation: FUD, for short.
Magazines
Oops, I missed at least one Linux magazine in last week's update. Linux Gazette is out there, too. I like the Answer Gang.New Gnu
GNOME 2.10.0 is rolling out for the brave.
