Title = Open News - Episode 29 - October 17, 2007 This is Open News for October 17th, 2007 ... Intro Hi. I'm Aaron Newcomb and this week on Open News ... But first here are some news briefs. News Briefs Brief 1 = Ubuntu Open Week = https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek If you have been wanting to learn more about Ubuntu now is your chance. Ubuntu this week announced Ubuntu Open Week "a week long series of online workshops" where you can chat with developers, attend training sessions, and even talk to Mark Shuttleworth himself. You can find out more at wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek. Brief 2 = Firefox Gains Ground = http://isohunt.com/ It appears that Firefox is gaining ground on Internet Explorer at least if you're a bittorrent user. Isohunt, a popular bittorent indexing site reported on thier blog this week that Firefox users on isohunt.com edged out IE users for the first time since they have been monitoring. Brief 3 = Amsterdam Ready To Use Open Source = http://www.nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl/English/2007/09/open_source_success.htm Apparently officials in Amsterdam have been testing Open Source applications to see if they are ready for prime time. This week the testing commitee gave the green light and now over 10,000 PCs can start using Open Source software. Any incremental costs of running the open source software will be offset by savings in license fees the would have been paid to Microsoft. And now on to the main stories of the week. Stories Story 1 = Ballmer Predicts Patent Suit = http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2200717/microsoft-sharpens-aims-patent It was a big week for patent litigation and it all started with more threating words from Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. According to Tom Sanders on vnunet.com ... "Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK. Red Hat has repeatedly stated that it will not engage in a patent licensing deal similar to the Novell-Microsoft partnership, referring to its as an 'innovation tax'. Microsoft has been the second most aggressive party in pursuing alleged intellectual property claims against Linux and open source in general. The firm ranks behind SCO, which failed in its attempt to prove that it owns the intellectual property to Linux and now faces bankruptcy. Microsoft inked a partnership with Novell last year in which Novell agreed to license Microsoft's intellectual property in exchange for a patent pledge to users of Novell's SuSE Linux. Ballmer praised Novell at the UK event for valuing intellectual property, and suggested that open source vendors will be forced to strike similar deals with other patent holders." Story 2 = Red Hat And Novell Sued = http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/hI365pnBGs68E5/Patent-Suit-Against-Red-Hat-Novell-Threatens-Open-Source-World.xhtml And Ballmers prediction came true just a few days later when both Red Hat and Novell were sued by two little little known company for patent infringment. According to an article on ecommercetimes.com ... "Two companies have hit Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell with a patent infringement lawsuit alleging their products use technology first patented more than a decade ago. IP Innovation and Technology Licensing filed the suit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Texas, a popular jurisdiction for patent cases. The suit seeks unspecified damages, asks for a trial by jury on all of the counts. It also seeks enhanced damages due to the willful nature of the infringement and an injunction to stop it. The complaint accuses each company of infringing three patents, which were apparently first issued to Xerox (NYSE: XRX) in the mid-1980s. Neither Red Hat nor Novell would comment on the complaint. The lawsuit claims that a host of the two companies' products -- including the Red Hat Linux system, the Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop and the Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server -- breach patents held by others, the lawsuit claims. The lawsuit claims that both desktop and server versions of Linux infringe on a trio of patents that together "describe a user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects." The patents, known in shorthand as patents 412, 183 and 521, were issued in 1991, 1995 and 1996, respectively, the firms say. The suit does not say who the patents were first granted to or how the plaintiffs in the case came to own them. The two firms asserted the same patent against Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) earlier this year, said patent attorney Lawrence B. Ebert." Story 3 = Mozilla To Develop Mobile Browser = http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/10/11/mozilla_plans_mobile_firefox_browser/ Mozilla, the company behind such popular open source applications like Firefox and Thunderbird, announced this week that it will develop a mobile browser for cell phones and other devices. According to an article by Cade Metz on regdeveloper.co.uk ... "Mozilla is prepping a mobile version of Firefox, the world's most popular open-source web browser. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web," reads a blog post from VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, "and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it." He says the company will introduce a mobile version of Firefox at some unspecified date after December 31, 2007. It will run Firefox extensions, and developers will have the power to build their own apps for the browser via Mozilla's user interface language (XUL). As Schroepfer points out, a Mozilla-based browser is already available for Nokia's N800 wireless handheld. But the company has yet to decide which devices Mobile Firefox will run on." Story 4 = Torvalds' Smack Down = http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2200143/linus-irate-linux-smacking Linus Torvalds wasn't pulling any punches this week in his defense of adding a tool called Smack to an upcoming linux kernel version. According to an article by Iain Thomson on vnunet.com ... "Linus Torvalds has launched a blistering attack on security programmers who object to adding the Smack application to the upcoming 2.6.24 Linux kernel. In an often heated exchange, Torvalds accused security programmers of being too concerned with theoretical problems and not enough with practical applications. Smack uses Linux Security Modules (LSM) which some researchers believe could be used to aid attacks on systems using the code. The researchers would prefer to see Security-Enhanced Linux as the option of choice. "If LSM remains, security will never be a first class citizen of the kernel, " said Linux developer James Morris. "Application developers will see multiple security schemes, and either burn themselves trying to support them, or more likely ignore them. "On a broader scale, we will miss the potential of Linux having a coherent, semantically strong security architecture." But this set Torvalds off on a rant about the impossibility of satisfying the demands of security researchers. "You security people are insane. I am tired of this 'only my version is correct' crap," he wrote. "The whole and only point of LSM was to get away from that. And anybody who claims that there is 'consensus' on Security-Enhanced Linux is just in denial." Torvalds got so riled that he started posting some comments in block capitals, which in discussion terms represents shouting. Torvalds concluded by stating that LSM will stay in the kernel and that this is his final decision. He added that he might change his mind if security people made decent arguments, but that this was as likely as "hell freezing over or pigs nesting in trees"." Story 5 = OSI Approves MS Licenses = http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/16/OSI-approves-Microsoft-shared-source-licenses_1.html And this just in ... it was announced yesterday that the OSI has approved two Microsoft licenses as open source licenses. According to infoworld.com ... "The board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has approved two Microsoft licenses that allow proprietary source code to be shared, a move that is likely to inspire protest and spur controversy for die-hard open source proponents. The Microsoft Public License (MPL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (MRL), two of Microsoft's "shared source" licenses, are now viable OSI licenses for distributing open source code alongside more widely used community licenses such as the GNU General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. "Today's approval by the OSI concludes a tremendous learning experience for Microsoft, and I look forward to our continued participation in the open source community," said Microsoft general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy Bill Hilf in a press statement. Red Hat executive Michael Tiemann, who also serves as president of the OSI, said Tuesday that while some in the community balked at the OSI accepting licenses from a company that historically has not been open source friendly, in the end, the licenses spoke for themselves. "They do have two licenses that went through the community process and did sustain the open source definition," he said. "I've received three e-mails in the last hour from people who say, 'To heck with the OSI, you guys are just now pawns in Microsoft's game ... you have made a deal with the devil,'" he said. However, Tiemann believes the OSI had a responsibility to be fair and impartial in letting Microsoft submit its licenses. "What would you think of a club that would say, 'We won't take any members that come from the city of Chicago, even if two people in Chicago meet the criteria for entry?'" he posited. "We said from the outset that we would be fair and, to be honest, some people said, 'No, you don't.'" Tiemann said it remains to be seen if any companies other than Microsoft will license code under MPL or MRL. However, he said if Microsoft plans to embed patented technology in software licensed under an OSI-approved license and "call it open source" -- as some open source proponents fear -- they had better think twice." Releases It's time to take a look at some releases that came out in the past week. Release 1 = Fluxbox 1.0 = http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/ Flubox, an alternative window manager that runs on top of X, released version 1.0.0 this week. This release includes many bugfixes, new styles, updated language support, better shaped corners and much more. You can find out more at fluxbox.sourceforge.net. Release 2 = Puppy Linux 3.0 = http://www.pramnos.com/story69-2322.html Puppy Linux 3.0 was released as well. Puppy Linux is a small linux distribution designed to run off of a usb stick or cdrom and is great for older PCs. This release includes includes upgrades to many applications, new startup and shutdown scripts, a 2.6.21 kernel, the netsurf web browser and more. You can download a copy at puppylinux.com Tip Of The Week = SSHFS = http://www.debianadmin.com/mount-a-remote-file-system-through-ssh-using-sshfs.html SSH has become the defacto standard for secure terminal connections to remote Linux and Unix clients. SCP can be used to securely transfer individual files from one system to another. However, sometimes you need access to an entire filesystem or directory and that's when you can turn to SSHFS. SSHFS is a secure way to mount a remote filesystem on your local host and it couldn't be easer. The command structure is the same as SSH commands so it should be familiar already. SSHFS run on top of FUSE and can be installed on most systems with just a single package manager command. For Debian based systems you will need to instsll sshfs and fuse-utils. For Fedora you will need to install fuse-sshfs. Once the software is installed mounting a remote filesystem securely is as easy as typing sshfs name@host:filesystem mountpoint. For more details you can go to our website and click on this episode's tip of the week. If you would like to send in your comments or share a tip with our listeners you can email us at opennewsshow@gmail.com or visit our website at opennewsshow.org where you can find links to all the news stories we comment on by clicking the link that says Latest Stories. Also remember to be watching our sister site at thesourceshow.org for our coverage of the recent Ohio LinuxFest and upcoming coverage of what Sun is doing in Open Source. Until next time I'm Aaron Newcomb ... have a great week. ** Other peoples works that are cited on Open News can be referenced at http://www.opennewsshow.org/aggregator/categories/1