Sellout or Savior?, Aug 06, 2004

There’s a sense of dissonance in the office of Miguel de Icaza. On one hand, here is the celebrated hacker—as in programming whiz, not virtual trespasser—wearing a T-shirt, looking boyish and rail-thin, and resembling an impoverished graduate student who has been living on coffee. But here also is the vice president of product technology for staid software giant Novell, entirely at ease as he takes command of a plush corporate conference room in Cambridge, MA, with a view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline. It’s a dissonance, however, that de Icaza is quick to wave away. “There are a lot of motivations in the open-source community, like the freedom to choose software platforms and the chance to innovate,” he says, referring to the global community of programmers who write software that others are free to download and modify. “Now one of my motivations is that I’m being paid to do this, and I have to deliver products.”

A test version of UserLinux, a product intended to give corporate customers the utility of Red Hat Linux but not its price tag, is set for release at the start of September.

"Beta 1 will be released on Sept. 1," said UserLinux founder and open-source advocate Bruce Perens in a talk at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. "UserLinux is enterprise Linux without the big price tag."

Off the cuff, Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman dismissed Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz's floating of the idea that Sun might buy Novell. Messman suggested that people simply read what Schwartz has written, and what others have written about his suggestion.

In case you haven't been following it, the consensus among both analysts and IT professionals is that the idea of Sun Microsystems Inc. buying Novell Inc. is an asinine one. One Fortune 500 company technology buyer said he hadn't heard such a silly idea "in a month of Sundays."

The idea of using Linux on corporate desktops was a laughing matter only a few years ago, as the fledgling operating system began invading corporate data centers. It lacked wide application and driver support, and it was foreign to nontechnical employees familiar with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.

But few at this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in the Moscone Center here are laughing anymore.

Six vulnerabilities in an open-source image format could allow intruders to compromise computers running Linux and may allow attacks against Windows PCs as well as Macs running OS X.

The security issues appear in a library supporting the portable network graphics (PNG) format, used widely by programs such as the Mozilla and Opera browsers and various e-mail clients. The most critical issue, a memory problem known as a buffer overflow, could allow specially created PNG graphics to execute a malicious program when the application loads the image.

The SCO Group is looking to bundle its controversial Linux licences with its Unix products.

SCO claims that Linux users need to buy the licences because Linux contains some of its intellectual property, placed there without consent.

In his latest blog post, Andy Oram discusses InstallShield's presence at LinuxWorld and how their software is drawing interest from other commercial software vendors as a way to install their programs under Linux. I would argue that Linux already has a better solution, and that vendors would do better to do it "the Linux way" than try to shoehorn the flawed solution Windows users have to deal with.

 View older news this year: Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999