Ottawa Linux Symposium day 4: Andrew Morton's keynote address, Jul 26, 2004

The Ottawa Linux Symposium wrapped up its busy 4 days with a 6-hour long bar party at the Black Thorn Café across the street from the American Embassy in Ottawa. And for some, it was that social aspect that they came for. For most attendees, though, stable Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton's keynote address was the highlight of the day.

Webmaster's note: The staff here at Linux Online wants to congratulate Pamela Jones on this award and thank her for this great resource that she provides.

Things have been so busy, I am just now getting to tell you that Groklaw has won the 2004 Linux Journal Editors' Choice Award, for Best Nontechnical or Community Web Site. You are a large part of what makes Groklaw what it is, so I wanted to make sure you knew our work has been recognized.

Last week, Grashopper released their newest version of Pagestream desktop publishing software for Linux. PageStream5.0, available in standard and professional versions, runs on x86 Linux installations with Gnome+2.0/GTK+2.0 packages or newer and at least 30MB of hard drive space.

In the world of open source programming languages, few have had the success that Perl has enjoyed for the past 17 years. This week, the Perl 5 Porters, the group responsible for maintenance and development of Perl, released the latest version, Perl 5.8.5.

"Perl 5.8.5 implements a number of minor bug fixes, and provides improvements in specific areas, such as threads and unicode support," Perl 5 Porters contributor Paul Fenwick told internetnews.com.

Students, faculty, and staff returning to Golden Gate University this fall will have remote access to database, printing, and E-mail functions from any Web browser, no longer having to connect through the school's network. The reason for this newfound freedom: open-source software.

The implication of the San Francisco institution using open source goes deeper than simply trying an alternative to proprietary products. It shows how the popularity of open source is influencing the strategy of proprietary software vendors, especially how they deal with older products.

Golden Gate this summer is testing iFolder, iPrint, and NetMail software, products that Novell turned over to the open-source community. Novell, which has a long-standing reputation for providing a solid network operating system, two years ago contributed once-proprietary code to the open-source community. Last year, it went a step further into open source, acquiring operating-system vendor SuSE Linux and Ximian Inc., a maker of Linux desktop software.

The idea is straightforward: Instead of giving employees computers packed with features they rarely use, companies could save cash by distributing simple machines tied to powerful central servers.

Computing vendors have had marginal success over the years with variations of this "thin client" concept. Now IBM Corp. is betting that with some tweaks, the technology can become a big hit, challenging the traditional approach pushed by Microsoft Corp.

While questions surrounding Linux’s reliability have left some companies skittish, the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association (HKAOA) is looking the other way and is more committed than ever to the open source operating system that powers the organisation’s online information system.

Representing pilots and flight engineers employed by Cathay Pacific Airways, the HKAOA has over 1,000 members based in Hong Kong, Europe, North America and Australia, and Asia. And because of this large worldwide member base, maintaining communication is their core business objective.

When Unix vendor SCO Group launched its legal attack against Linux in March 2003 it did so with the confident assertion that the open source operating system contained elements of its Unix System V code and that IBM, which it was suing, put it there.

Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction however, SCO's evidence of Unix System V code in Linux has proved elusive and the question of Unix code in Linux has slipped further and further from court. As Linux users, developers and vendors continue to go about their business, SCO's search for code of mass destruction will have to continue if SCO is to convince the world that it did not launch its war against Linux on a false premise.

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