Kernel space: Full disclosure for security holes, Jul 25, 2008

Linux developers fix kernel security holes out in the open. Is a bug a bug, or do security-related fixes deserve special treatment?

A new Linux filesystem gets rid of the 256-petabyte limit, and adds a checksum feature for the journal. But developers want you to know that it's not yet ready for production systems.

What do you see as the biggest danger to open-source software today? On the one hand, there's still a locus of resistance. Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and indeed necessary model. And so as long as a company that sells a billion dollars a week in software is in that sense fundamentally still trying to [fight] the free way of doing things, Microsoft remains a very dangerous party.

Linux development is more like a social network built on trusted relationships and less like a democratic community of individuals dedicated to a single development process, according to Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog.

Virtual world hype trumps open source hype, so little virtual ink has gone into discussing the open source initiative that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, established to further its development.

Adding Windows XP to Asustek Computer's Eee PC will double the price of the low-cost laptop compared to existing versions running Linux.

Some surprising moves, such as the much-maligned mission statement, can help corporate open source projects work, said Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick at the Google Speaker Series.

Qumranet's Solid ICE product moves desktop users' Linux or Microsoft Windows installs onto virtual machines in the data center, allowing the users to run their applications and OS of choice from thin clients or from Windows or Linux PC clients.

The Linux kernel project's "git" revision control tool offers up some numbers on which developers, and which companies, contributed the most code to Linux, and who's reviewing other people's code.

IBM added a delicious twist on its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology.

It’s a busy time for the members of the Debian Project. Sam Hocevar took over as the new Debian Project leader in April, right around the time the long-awaited Debian 4.0 or ‘Etch,’ hit the streets. And, in mid-June, hundreds of active Debian developers, contributors and other software visionaries from around the world met, many for the first time, in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the Debian Project’s annual developer conference.

The U.S. delegate organization to the powerful ISO standards body is now almost sure to vote against approving Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

As more than 11,000 attendees prepare to converge on San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo next week, one industry analyst says customers are evaluating open-source software the same way they evaluate proprietary software: It has to be priced right and work well.

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth has declared more publicity would be generated for open source software if the three large desktop projects of KDE, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org agreed on a common and regular release cycle.

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday.

... Linux's filesystems are looking increasingly crufty and we are getting to the time where we would benefit from a greenfield start-a-new-one.

The Green Party is accusing the Berlin city government of lacking a coherent IT strategy and thus not being in a position to adequately judge the merits of open source software.

Exhibitors want isolated booth networks, attendees want more bandwidth, and nobody has much money. Here's how VLAN and QoS support on Linux routers helped keep a conference network up and running

In an interview earlier this week, [Bob] Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft Corp.'s rival Office Open XML document standard.