Open Source and Linux for seniors, Dec 14, 2003

Bill Kendrick of the Linux Users' Group of Davis, California, was invited to speak at a nearby PC users group this week -- the Mission Oaks Computer Club, which is composed mostly of seniors, and focuses on PC basics as a 'life skill.'

Since reports of the distributed denial of service attack a few days ago against SCO started surfacing, a number of people have questioned whether or not the attack went down as SCO stated. Groklaw has a piece up which casts serious doubt on whether SCO was truly attacked at all. SCO claimed that their web servers came under a SYN flood attack and were thus unavailable for its duration.

"SYN flood attack? Oh. My. Gawd. That's so 1999!"

Yes, and there has been a patch for Linux to thwart such attacks for some time now. So SCO is not terribly conscious about security, or something else is going on.

The workstation uses Spacecraft Control Operating System (SCOS) command and control software which sits on top of Linux. Two more Linux-based systems are available as back-up.

Martin Townend, ground system manager with SciSys, the UK company which developed the onboard Lander software, told vnunet.com: "Any one of the three workstations hosting SCOS can be used [for Beagle 2 communication].

Bob Young of Red Hat:

Many smarter people than me have demolished your arguments around the idea that anyone has knowingly stolen any property from you. Yet you continue to refuse to tell anyone what it is that you claim has been stolen. So your arguments against others ring very hollow. It is like my claiming you broke into the trunk of my car and stole something from me. But then I refuse to tell anyone, the police or anyone else, what was stolen, or even allow anyone to look in the trunk of my car. Your strategy would be laughable if it were not costing everyone involved huge amounts and of time and effort to correct your errors and respond to your lawyers.

Jon 'maddog' Hall of Linux International:

In times past when creating computer programs meant access to a machine that costs six million dollars, fitted to a large air-conditioned room that used kilowatts of power, more investment of money was required due to requirements for funding. Today really good software can be produced as a byproduct of solving a particular problem on already existing computer systems, and the owner has no real need to keep the software proprietary. Indeed, some people find that it is cheaper to use the GPL model and hope that others help them develop and improve the code than it is to go the traditional model and have to continue to develop the code themselves.

Names in the Linux community are very important, too. It's GNOME, not Gnome. It's the K Desktop Environment, not the KDE Desktop Environment. SUSE as opposed to SuSE. Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core instead of Red Hat Linux. There is even a very strong debate about what to call Linux. Linux is the kernel and GNU/Linux is the operating system, many will stipulate.

That, however, is a debate for another time and another place. What I wanted to bring up was a small trend amongst the commercial Linux companies to not use the Linux name at all in their branding--GNU or otherwise.

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