Sun fires back over Open Source Java accusations, Feb 18, 2004

Sun has offered a frank response to the open letter from Eric S, Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative, in which he called on Sun to make its Java platform Open Source and described the company's Open Source strategy as 'spotty' and 'confused'.

'I'd say this is 100 per cent rant,' Sun's Chief Technology Evangelist, Simon Phipps told us. 'His simplistic accusations don't hold water... If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies.'

2.4.25 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 325
Files changed: 1774
Files removed: 40

Yum is an automatic updater and package management tool for rpm based systems. Yum automatically computes dependencies and figures out what steps need to occur in order to install packages. It makes it much easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

Netcraft reports that over the last six months Debian has been the fastest growing Linux distribution. UK-based Netcraft measured the data "by counting active sites which contain the name of a Linux distribution in the Apache Server header."

Results show that Debian gained 24.6%, followed closely by SuSE and Gentoo Linux distributions with 23.2% and 19.5% respectively. RedHat, with a reported 17.8% growth, is listed by significantly more sites, according to Netcraft.

An open source industry cluster in Victoria has asked the consumer watchdog to investigate concerns which it says have arisen from the SCO Group's announcement, on January 20, of the availability of a licence in Australia and New Zealand which "permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions."

Open Source Victoria wrote to Graeme Samuel, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on January 22, saying that the issuing of a press release by SCO about the availability of a licence "raises a number of issues of concern... to the effect that consumers may be mislead (sic) by the actions of SCO or may have been mislead (sic) in the past."

A decision to dismiss the SCO v Novell lawsuit also could have ripple effects against SCO in its lawsuits with IBM and Red Hat. Inter alia, that's because an order dismissing the SCO v Novell lawsuit could determine that Novell and not SCO is the manager of IBM's Unix license, thus SCO has no justiciable interest in whether IBM gave Unix source code to the Linux kernel developers -- which is the thrust of SCO's lawsuit against IBM.

A British tech consultant has launched an unusual project that puts tech buyers in position to do something largely unheard of in tech circles: wrangle price cuts from Microsoft.

The Incubator Club guarantees anonymity for tech buyers wanting to evaluate Linux . Founder Eddie Bleasdale of consultancy Netproject got the idea after helping the London borough of Newham test Linux desktop programs last fall.

Not long after the testing got underway, Microsoft offered Newham a 30% discount on Windows and Office upgrades for 5,000 PCs, Bleasdale says. Borough officials promptly ditched Linux and snapped up Microsoft's discount.

2.6.3 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 88
Files changed: 1906
Files removed: 35

2.4.25-rc4 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 325
Files changed: 1774
Files removed: 40

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