The Grinch Who Stole Linux, Nov 07, 2003

Long-time Groklaw reader Scott Lazar has written a parody, "The Grinch Who Stole Linux," which he sent to me. I found it delightful, and with his permission, I am sharing it with all of you. Sometimes, it's nice to take a break and just smile. Thanks, Scott.

PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of the Web. And now Sun Microsystems has teamed up with a PHP toolmaker, Zend Technologies Ltd. Netcraft says PHP is found on 52% of the 14.5 million Apache-based Web sites that it inspected, compared with 19.4% using Perl, another open-source language. PHP and Perl are used to get disparate parts of a site to work together. PHP is used particularly in building dynamic pages that are produced in response to specific requests from a visitor, says Shane Caraveo, senior developer with ActiveState, a maker of tools for open-source and Microsoft scripts and a division of anti-spam software firm Sophos plc.

Webmaster's note: Interesting comparison of Linux and Open Source development methods with the world of US presidential politics

The metaphor of choice for Howard Dean's Internet-fueled campaign is "open-source politics": a two-way campaign in which the supporters openly collaborate with the campaign to improve it, and in which the contributions of the "group mind" prove smarter than that of any lone individual.

Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has admitted on numerous occasions that his time in Silicon Valley affected his thinking about politics. "I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems," Trippi told cyber-guru Lawrence Lessig in an August interview. "I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?"

Open-source software conferences tend to attract a typical assortment of long-bearded geeks, tech evangelists, and the odd business suit. But at the Linux Desktop Consortium conference, which will take place on Nov. 10 at Boston University, one of the stars will be Dr. Martin Echt, an avuncular cardiologist from Albany, N.Y. Dr. Echt, chief operating officer of Capital Cardiology Associates, an eight-office practice, will discuss his decision to shift his network of PCs to Linux from Microsoft's (MSFT ) Windows, the operating system that controls the basic functions of computers running on Intel (INTC ) microprocessors.

In response to my article last month about Linux dependency problems, a reader suggested via email, "Hey dude you need to use Lindows and let go of the anger." It just so happened that I had other reasons for wanting to try Lindows, so I decided to follow his thoughtful suggestion. After a week of testing, I'm a bit surprised to find myself quite happy with Lindows.

Why surprised? I had expected Lindows.com's LindowsOS 4.0 to be simplistic, maybe stripped-down, aimed at making Windows users comfortable. But while the KDE-based user interface is clean and familiar, the power of Linux lurks just below the surface.

There's a school of thought among long-time Linux watchers that the real Holy Grail for most Linux companies isn't the death of Microsoft or even mere profitability, but salvation by buy out.

Pushing Linux in and of itself is a dead end, goes the theory. The only hope these people really have is to 1) make a product so good that enterprises cough up the dough on a yearly basis for updates, or 2) be swallowed by IBM and become a Linux R&D division for big iron.

This particular outlook won some water cooler bragging rights this week, as the two most viable commercial Linux outfits, SUSE (ne้ SuSE) and Red Hat, announced acquisition by bigger fish and formalized major business model shifts, respectively.

Borland Software's Kylix development software remains in limbo, with no new release having been issued for a year and the company not saying whether there will be an upgrade.

Kylix is a rapid application development environment for Linux that supports both C++ and Delphi development. An attendee at the BorCon conference in San Jose, California, this week expressed doubt, during a question and answer session, that the company would ever upgrade the product.

 View older news this year: Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999