Recently in Open source Category

Someone's managed to get Linux booting on an iMac. It took a bit of patching to do it, but it does boot. Of course, booting is a whole lot different from running perfectly, and there may be issues around various drivers for graphics cards, etc, that need resolving. But it's still very promising.

Access, which bought up PalmSource, has confirmed that the future Palm OS will be Linux-based. You'll be able to run Linux apps on future Palm devices that use the OS, but you'll also be able to run current Palm apps (well, most of them).

PalmSource was already walking down the Linux path when it was acquired by Access. This was partially because of the complete failure of any device manufacturers to license Palm OS 6, the next generation version of the current Palm OS 5 that incorporated lots of lovely technology from the acquisition of Be's technology. The question is, will anyone bother with this new Palm OS either?

Sure, it's easier to find Linux developers than Palm OS developers. But the last big Linux PDA, which was produced by Sharp, is no longer available in the UK because of lack of popularity. Ultimately, what made Palm successful was the Palm interface in combination with existing software. If there are no good reasons to move to the next OS, you lose compatibility with a swathe of software and the Palm interface gets replaced with something more Linux-y, why bother migrating?

I get the suspicion that by the time the last Palm device gets made, it'll still be running Palm OS 5, not Linux.

Information Week has posted a story arguing that Windows is more secure than other operating systems. It uses the CERT security advisory, which lists three times as many vulnerabilities for Linux, Unix and the Mac OS as Windows, as 'proof'.

It strikes me there's an almost cognitive dissonance going on here. While the world is still reeling from the Windows Meta File vulnerability, we're expected to believe that Linux, Unix and the virus-less Mac OS are more insecure than Windows. Don't trust the evidence of your own eyes, believe the lies of these stats.

The Information Week article lists a number of reasons why the stats shouldn't be taken at face value; one reason is that Linux, Unix and Mac OS vulnerabilities are lumped together. Looking just at Mac vulnerabilities gives you a little over 25.

But no mention is made of how important these vulnerabilities were: is the ability to crash a program as important as a privilege escalation bug that can compromise the whole system? And no acknowledgment is made that a vulnerability without an exploit is only a theoretical vulnerability at most.

Equally, breakdowns on vulnerabilities in core packages versus peripheral packages is an important factor. Unix, Linux, the Mac OS and indeed Windows are composed of thousands of different programs, some of which may never be used. A vulnerability in the Windows fax software is never going to be as important as a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. On the Unix and Linux side, so many packages are optional installs that many of the supposed vulnerabilities would never exist in the vast majority of systems.

So remember to read the stats rather than the headlines. Count the actual Windows viruses and Trojans, then count the Unix/Mac/Linux ones. Which would you rather face: 2,300 theoretical vulnerabilities, only a small proportion of which could ever affect you, or the 800 or so vulnerabilities of Windows, most of which have exploits in use in the wild today?

Sun is to open up more of its enterprise software. Ever-falling marketshare forced the decision, I suspect, and making everything in its stack open source is bound to get it goodwill from the techies.

It's not a position they would have taken if they could have avoided it: I remember asking the UK MD of Sun at the launch of their first Sun Linux products whether they would open up Solaris. His response? “What, and give away the crown jewels?”

Technorati Tags: Open source, Sun

Two stories on Microsoft's 'opening' of the Open Office XML standard: take your pick as to which one is better and understands the nuances of so-called open standards better.

Technorati Tags: Business IT, Open source, tech journalism

A group of the major browser developers had a meeting recently, to decide the best ways of improving both the security of the browsers and the way they represent that security. There's a report of the meeting from one of Konqueror's developers, which suggests that Mozilla, Konqueror, Firefox, IE and Opera are all going to get the same similar interface for displaying the security of particular sites. Microsoft's IE blog has further details and screenshots of how IE 7 has already been changed to incorporate those ideas.

Technorati Tags: browsers, Open source, security, web development

Who's the biggest fan of open source on the IT block? IBM, right? Apparently, though, it isn't completely in love: it has reservations. In fact, IBM's just fine and dandy with open source as long as it doesn't have to compete with it with its own products.

With MySQL on the rise, IBM has decided that it needs a way to boost DB2 and is considering creating a free, cut down version of DB2. This won't be open source, though. Anyone else guessing that perhaps IBM makes too much money from DB2 to want to give it away to the community? And that IBM's love of open source is limited to areas where it means they can give it away with their hardware, thus saving them licensing costs, or in areas where they don't make money from their own software and fancy a little help with the R&D?

Technorati Tags: databases, IBM, Open source

ZFS is a pretty nifty file system used by Solaris. Sun has just made it available as an open source product. It's of limited use anywhere except the server, so I wonder how much porting will be done on it. I imagine with Reiser and all those other FS ported to Linux, it won't be long before ZFS makes the leap.

Will Apple do anything with it? After all, wasn't its virtual file system support one of the great high-end features touted when OS X first leapt onto our computers? What have we got so far: FAT, FAT32, UFS, HFS+ (journaled), case-sensitive HFS+, plus a few CD file systems and a limited, community port of NTFS. Not very impressive so far. ZFS support could be the kind of thing that could make enterprises think really seriously about OS X Server.

Technorati Tags: Macs, Open source, servers, storage

Steve Jobs apparently offered OS X for free to the MIT $100 laptop project. And they turned it down because it wasn't 100% open source. So now hundreds and thousands of kids are going to forced to use desktop Linux.

That's the way to get them interested in computing. (Smacks forehead)

Maybe in five years time, that would be viable, but if most corporations won't install Linux on people's desktops because of the learning curve required, pity the poor kids.

Technorati Tags: Macs, Open source

Just in case y'all didn't know, there's a high-quality live stream of XFM available. You'll need to use Windows Media Player to listen.

Just in case you thought I was being ignorant and ignoring all the open source apps out there that can also listen to WMP streams, I mean you will definitely need WMP to listen to it. It actually has a user-agent sniffer that rejects other apps. Talk about pointless restrictions, but maybe they just don't want you recording the radio.

Oh wait. That's stupid. Anyone got any better suggestions as to why this should be?

Technorati Tags: indie music, Open source, radio, XFM

Despite the bottom falling out of SCO's case against IBM ages ago, many CIOs are still worried about lawsuits if they use open source tech (that's according to the research of CIO Connect anyway). So good news for them that there's a new indemnification policy being made available in case they really think they've something to worry about. They probably haven't (I don't think my article on the subject needs any real modification).

Obviously fed up with MySQL grabbing marketshare at the bottom, Oracle has just put out a cut-down version of its 10g database called 10g Express Edition.

It's sure to help Oracle regain some mindshare, particularly among students who know exactly how much Oracle DBAs get paid and who currently find it hard to get hands-on experience with 10g proper. It will, however, have little effect on the hosting market, since it's not free for that group of users. That means the LAMP stack will continue to dominate that arena until any further changes of heart hit Oracle.

Sun is still trying to flog its desktop dead horse. It now plans to offer JDS to Linux vendors, so they can include include it in their distributions.

The problems with this seem two-fold. First, they haven't worked out a price. Given a choice between the free desktop systems available now and the Sun Java Desktop System, I know which I'd go for if I were Red Hat. I'd also have to pass those costs on to the end user, which is death in what is effectively a commodity market. If Sun wants JDS to be a standard, they should just open it up and license it for free.

The second problem is that there are some good desktop systems out there. Sure, there's no single standard, but KDE and Gnome are both de facto standards. To shift the whole Linux market over to a new desktop standard will require mindshare, compelling technology and a cost of zero. JDS offers none of that.

Sorry, Sun. Must try harder.

This week's craze has been kicking Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. Everyone's at it now. Some of the criticisms are valid: it's good at technical, poor at the arts; it's badly written; and it's often inaccurate. The Guardian
has been at it today, getting experts to look at the Wikipedia entries for their specialist areas and seeing how well they measure up to their own expert knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the entries don't do too well, with haute couture getting 0/10 from the editor of Vogue.

But here's a thought. Wikipedia is supposed to be a community effort, right? People who know about specialist areas are supposed to add their expertise to the encyclopaedia, making corrections when they spot mistakes, or improving the writing when it slips to Buffy-fan level. In all these critical articles, I've never seen any of the critics actually go in and change the articles when they've spotted mistakes. They've never edited the writing to improve it. They've just laughed and moved on.

Understandably, being busy, professional writers for the most part, they probably want to be paid for their efforts. But it seems churlish to me to criticise people with less expertise who are willing to give their time when they themselves are the very people who should be writing the Wikipedia entries.

And yes, for the record, I have amended several Wikipedia entries that I found were wrong. I'm not telling you which ones though.

Just installed Podzilla – aka Linux for the iPod – onto my 4G iPod photo. My advice? Don't bother just yet. It'll be worth it when they get all the features up and running and you're fed up with the low frequency audio sampling available with the iPod's built-in OS: Podzilla let's you go all the way up to 88Hz audio sampling, rather than the 8Hz sampling available natively.

I'll keep my eye on it though: it'll be nice to be able to use my Griffin iTalk for recording phone interviews. Right now, it's way too soft. I haven't yet braved using my Belkin Universal Microphone Adaptor to record an interview, preferring my Olympus DS-330, its compressed DSS files and its OS X-friendly dictation software. Still the thought of having WAV files that will work in Express Scribe, the Mac version of which doesn't play DSS files, is extremely tempting.