What The New GPL Means For Enterprise IT, Jul 04, 2007

GPLv3 looks good for customers: It increases user protection from patents and lock-in, while clauses that could have affected Web services have been dropped.

A researcher from France Telecom has discovered the first remotely exploitable 802.11 WiFi bug on a Linux machine.

OpenMoko, a Taiwanese startup that develops mobile hardware and software, next month plans to start selling what it claims to be the first Linux smartphone based completely on open standards.

Oracle Corp. building or buying its own Linux stack offers possibilities that would allow the company to compete with established open-source market leaders Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux, according to an analyst.

Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux, a research firm said Monday.

Juergen Geck, former CTO of SUSE Linux, is slated to finish his duties at Novell at the end of this week. Novell declined to comment.

A minor tempest in a legal teapot swirled up around litigious Linux vendor SCO on Thursday, via a posting on the open-source community site Slashdot, which speculated that SCO might be under SEC investigation. SCO said that wasn't the case.

Before I wrote this article, I went to some Linux newsgroups to find out what typical concerns among security-conscious Linux users might be. I asked, simply, what they felt were the biggest myths surrounding Linux security. Boy, did I get an earful! It was as if I had gored someone's pet ox.

Norwegian browser maker Opera on Thursday released the third beta of its namesake version 8 for Linux.

Linspire Inc. on Wednesday launched an upgrade of its Linux desktop, which includes a streamlined graphical interface and improved laptop and hardware support.

A Massachusetts state senator who had complained about the state government's effort to promote open-source software at the expense of proprietary software has hailed the state's effort to reach a compromise over future software purchases by the state.

"I think IBM is trying to kill two birds with one stone," said Florian Mueller, campaign manager of NoSoftwarePatents.com, a Munich-based association. "IBM wants to appease the open-source people in the U.S. and simultaneously influence the political debate over patents in Europe."

The newest version of the current Linux kernel was released late last week by creator and open-source maven Linus Torvalds. Referred to as "Woozy Numbat" by Torvalds, the 2.6.10 kernel includes a long list of minor fixes and changes to the operating system.

Friday's demise of general support for Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 may give alternate operating systems, such as Linux, a temporary opportunity.

The following is a partial transcript of the resulting exchange between BS&T's Ivan Schneider and Microsoft's Martin Taylor, general manager, platform strategy, on the topics of TCO, indemnification, and flexibility in IT deployments.

Attempting to regain the ground it ceded to Microsoft and Intel with the growth of Windows in the 1990s, IBM has released a low-end server designed expressly to run Linux.

A day after Linux distributor Xandros debuted Desktop 3.0, the new version of its Linux-for-desktop-PCs OS, the company announced it's powering a Microtel PC selling for under $200 at Wal-Mart's e-store.

The most secure system during the experiment was the one running Linspire's Linux. Out of the box, Linspire left only one open port. While it reacted to ping requests by automated attackers sniffing for victims, it experienced the fewest attacks of any of the six machines and was never compromised, since there were no exposed ports (and thus services) to exploit.

Linux experts slam a report naming the OS as a favorite hacker target, citing methodology flaws and "suspicious" conclusions

In 2004, we have begun to see a broader variety of implementations of critical business applications running on Linux.