Andy Updegrove writes "Before there was Linux, before there was open source, there was of course (and still is) an operating system called Unix that was robust, stable and widely admired. It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began. Those wars helped Microsoft displace Unix with Windows NT, which steadily gained market share until Linux, a Unix clone, in turn began to supplant NT. Unfortunately, one of the very things that makes Linux powerful also makes it vulnerable to the same type of fragmentation that helped to doom Unix - the open source licenses under which Linux distributions are created and made available. Happily, there is a remedy to avoid the end that befell Unix, and that remedy is open standards - specifically, the Linux Standards Base (LSB). The LSB is now an ISO/IEC standard, and was created by the Free Standards Group. In a recent interview, the FSG's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, and CTO, Ian Murdock, creator of Debian GNU/Linux, tell how the FSG works collaboratively with the open source community to support the continued progress of Linux and other key open source software, and ensure that end users do not suffer the same type of lock in that traps licensees of proprietary software products."

twofish writes "According to a Register article Sun Microsystems' new GNU/Linux-friendly Java license does not go far enough for Red Hat. Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO, says Sun should have open-sourced Java instead. The new license does have the support of Canonical (main Ubuntu sponsor), Gentoo and Debian." From the article: "He says the failure to open-source Java means that it can't be used on millions of $100, Linux-powered PCs envisioned under Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project, to bring affordable computing to children in developing nations. Negroponte wants only open source software on the machines, according to Red Hat, which is a member of the project."

fak3r writes "Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now, with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town."

lord_rob the only on writes "According to a ZDNet article, the next release of Debian should be available in December 2006. From the article : 'The date represents a dramatic improvement in the regularity of Debian's development cycle. Etch will be shipped only 18 months after the previous release, version 3.1.'

Christian Jensen writes "On the ubuntu-announce mailing list, Mark Shuttleworth announced the plans for the next Ubuntu release - 'The Edgy Eft', the successor to Dapper Drake." This release is being touted as both cutting edge (edgy) and containing several comparatively "young" software additions ('Eft' being a 'youthful newt, going through its first exploration of the rocky territory just outside the stream.') like Xen, XGL/AIGLX, and others.

OSS_ilation writes "While much has been said about Novell or Red Hat as potential targets for Oracle this week, there are some in the Linux community who believe a different distro might deserve the attention of Larry Ellison. That distribution is Ubuntu, and analysts like Burton Group's Richard Monson-Haefel believed that it would be a better fit for Oracle, which is looking only for an OS and not for any of the baggage associated with Novell, like Netware. Ubuntu, with its huge community base and version 6.06 on the way, could be the perfect fit, he said."

merreborn asks: "I work for a very small software company (10 employees) that's developing a Point of Sale solution for a small retail chain (~20 stores in several states) on the other side of the country. We're going to be shipping Debian systems with our software installed to these locations -- all of which are connected to the Internet via consumer-grade DSL, and inevitably behind some sort of NAT box. Our office is similarly connected, and we've got a couple of dedicated, co-located servers off-site with static IPs. We'd like to be able to access these systems remotely for maintenance from the office -- what would that entail? Which VPN solutions are best suited to this situation these days (IPSec, PPTP, vtun, ssh, ssl/OpenVPN)? Are there any detailed, current books on the subject? (O'reilly's VPN book is 6 years old now)"

With the recent news that Anthony Towns will be taking over as the Debian Project Leader, Linux.com took a few minutes to sit down and feel out the new DPL-elect. From the interview: "The immediate plan is to organize the various ideas I've had so that I can work out which ones are actually worth working on, and what order to do them in; and to make sure that all the people who volunteered to be DPL during the campaign, or offered their help don't go away without some good ideas about extra things they can do. "

SDenmark writes "Ever wondered what happened to UserLinux, and how it's faring now that Ubuntu has stolen the spotlight? Linux Format has an interview with Bruce Perens, founder of UserLinux, the Open Source Initiative and Linux Standard Base. Perens discusses the impact of Ubuntu, how industry bodies are helping open source and why figureheads are important for the Free Software community."

daria42 writes "Australian developer Anthony Towns has just been elected Debian Project Leader starting 17 April. In his platform for election, Towns said the most important issue for Debian was 'increasing its tempo'. 'We've been slow in a lot of things, from releasing, to getting updates in, to processing applications from prospective developers, to fixing bugs, to making decisions on policy questions, and all sorts of other things,' he said."

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writes up Red Hat's giving up on the Fedora Foundation: 'In an open letter distributed to the Fedora community earlier this week, Red Hat employee and Fedora project leader Max Spevack states that Red Hat is no longer interested in establishing an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project. Instead, Red Hat will revive the Fedora Project Board, which will include five Red Hat representatives, four members of the Fedora community, and a chairman appointed by Red Hat who will possess veto power.'"

Jane Walker writes to tell us TechTarget has an interesting article on HP's new TestDrive program. For many small business owners this new site could allow for the benefits of testing many different platforms without having to make the investment up front. From the article: "The program, called TestDrive, is accessed online via the TestDrive Web site. It allows free-of-charge access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SuSE Linux and other open source operating systems like Debian, FreeBSD and OpenVMS. After registering with the site, each user is allowed 1 GB of space in which to work and is granted access to HP hardware housed at the HP Linux Expertise Center in Marlboro, Mass. Access to the system includes the use of 64-bit processors like Integrity, Alpha, and PA-RISC; and SMP x86 and Opteron ProLiant servers."

At the beginning of this month we sent your questions to Isam Bayazidi of Amman, Jordan. He's a Slashdot reader, founder of the Jordan Planet blogging community, and (I know this from personal experience) knows the best places to buy discount-priced computer components in his home town. Enjoy!

Here are OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen's answers to your questions, many of which were spurred by the recent release of an OSDL co-sponsored Linux TCO study (that anti-open source commentator Rob Enderle has already/inevitably questioned).

Ravi writes "Any system or network administrator will know the importance of applying patches to the various softwares running on their servers be it the numerous bug fixes or vulnerability checks. Now when you are maintaining just a single machine, this is really a simple affair of downloading the patches and applying them on your machine. But what happens when you are managing multiple servers and hundreds of client machines? How do you keep all these machines under your control up to date with the latest bug fixes? Obviously, it is a waste of time and bandwidth to individually download all the patches and security fixes for each machine. This is where this book named "Linux Patch Management - Keeping Linux systems up to date" authored by Michael Jang gains significance. This book released under the Bruce Perens' open source series aims to address the topic of patch management in detail." Read the rest of Ravi's review

nanday writes to tell us that Newsforge (Owned by VA Software, just like Slashdot) is running an interesting look at the, recently reported on, GPLv3 by the Debian team. From the article: "Initially, Branden Robinson says, he was worried about GPL3. 'The amount of secrecy around the initial draft process had me very nervous,' he says. In addition, after the Debian consensus rejected the GNU Free Documentation License, he was concerned that GPL3 might become equally contentious in Debian. 'I'm glad to say that my fears are assuaged,' Robinson says. 'I was impressed with both the large and small changes. In a nutshell, I like it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has a great interview with Martin F. Krafft, the author of "The Debian System". From the article: 'Despite Debian GNU/Linux's important role in today's computing environment, it is largely misunderstood and oftentimes even discounted as being an operating system which is exclusively for professionals and elite users. In this book Krafft, explains his concept of Debian, which includes not only the operating system but also its underpinnings. Debian is not only a robust and scalable Linux distribution, but it has many other features which are worth looking into, like its open development cycle and rigorous quality control.'"

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a possible release date for the long awaited Optimus keyboard, yet another extension in the Blackberry court case, lakebed theory on Mars possibly all wet, US-CERT statistics perhaps not all they are cracked up to be, stem cell investigation reveals papers were faked, the FTC objects to the Netflix settlement, and a new Crossover Office fixes the WMF exploit among other things. Read on for details.

anon mouse-cow-aard writes to tell us the Register is reporting that the Nokia 770, originally scoffed at by many as useless, is doing quite well. There is even an open source platform development site, maemo, that offers quite a bit. It uses wlan for connectivity and has 'cpu transparency' so you can build apps for normal Debian (albeit with a custom set of libraries) and then run a sort of 'checkout' for the ARM processor, and it will run on the handheld. There is ssh and VOIP coming soon. Overall it is shaping up to be pretty cool.

Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Gazette has a new filesystem benchmarking article, this time using the 2.6 kernel and showing ReiserFS v4. The second round of benchmarks include both the metrics from the first filesystem benchmark and the second in two matrices." From the article: "Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks." We reported on the original benchmarks in the first half of last year.