At OSCON a few minutes ago, Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf what will change in the future specifically with regard to Microsoft dealing with F/OSS projects regarding patents.

(The context is that Hilf had just said that Microsoft has made mistakes in certain areas.

Hilf’s response was… priceless. “I get a lot of e-mail.” “People like to subscribe me to crazy newsletters and spam.”

Uh, thanks.

Original post by chromatic

Hi! I’m Kevin Farnham, a career software developer, and sometimes editor and writer. Most of my software development work has been on Unix/Linux platforms, but I also have significant experience on Windows (especially on the server side). My core experience is in the areas of complex scientific programing (mathematical modeling and simulation) and high volume data processing and data access. I’ve worked with multiprocessor systems, and developed multithreaded applications, for a very long time.

As you can see from the articles I’ve published on the O’Reilly Network (click the Articles tab on my O’Reilly Network profile page to see the articles list), I’ve worked with quite a few Linux distributions. My current favorite is Gentoo — because it lets me have exactly what I want to have in my system, and nothing more. I use XFCE as my desktop environment. Again, it gives me what I need, without extraneous clutter.

I’ve just started working on a new project involving Intel’s Threading Building Blocks, a C++ template library that simplifies development of multithreaded software for use on Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems. With multicore processors quickly becoming the norm, software development is going to have to change — otherwise, applications will utilize only a small portion of the available processing power on modern PCs. I’ll be posting quite a lot about that specific topic area in my blog on the Intel Software Network Blogs site.

As for other interests: I often find myself “overly” fascinated by subjects that would appear to many to be obscure, such as how bootloaders work, the poetry of the Middle English author known as “the Pearl Poet”, the significance of quantum mechanics, algorithms, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophy of Nature. Right now, in addition to my studies of Threading Building Blocks, I’m reading “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics” by David Bohm, and I’m rereading John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. All quite good brain exercise, I think!

What’s up next for me is: OSCON! I’ll be attending next week for the first time. It will also be my first visit to Portland, Oregon. When I’m not attending tutorials or sessions, you’ll probably be able to find me hanging out at the Intel and O’Reilly booths, or somewhere nearby. Let me know if you’d like to connect.

And I’ll be sure to post here, from there.

Original post by Kevin Farnham

Thanks to everyone who commented on The Dubious Benefits of Porting F/OSS to Windows. There are a lot of good points in the comments.

For example, Simon Hibbs responded that more users of a piece of software increased the value of that software. This is important for programs that follow open standards, such as Mozilla Firefox, or OpenOffice.org and Abiword. In one sense, I see the value of open standards and unfettered access to data as more important than the four software freedoms. If I had to choose one over the other, I’d choose open standards… but I think that’s a false dilemma.

Yet I still wonder. How many people have switched to free platforms after realizing that they already used or could switch to completely free software that did what they needed?

I’ve seen plenty of people switch from a free OS to a proprietary system which includes some free parts (let’s call it “Mac Something Something”… or how about “Something OS X” to protect the innocent), justifying that choice by saying “It can run all of the applications I love from Linux or *BSD, and look it’s shiny!”

I’m not sure that that case really helps the goal of spreading free software.

Again, I realize that not everyone shares that goal with me, and it’s fine. I’m also not saying that porting free software to proprietary platforms is bad, or wrong, or makes you an evil person. I’m sympathetic to the idea that plenty of people develop on non-free platforms and deploy to free platforms. In my last full-time development job, I would have gone crazy if not for Cygwin. (I ended up using its X server to connect to our GNU/Linux test machine just so I could use decent development tools.)

Yet still I wonder… is there concrete evidence that people do switch to free platforms after using primarily free software? Is there concrete evidence that open standards gain significant acceptance due to the presence of free software or software that otherwise promotes those standards effectively? (I’d like more than one case; it’s possible that Mozilla is an outlier.)

(I haven’t brought up the case of writing free software that supports only a proprietary standard, but that’s a different post altogether.)

Original post by chromatic

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, about Jabber servers. Quite a few of them seem to play nicely with LDAP; the trouble with the setup here is that we have LDAP + Kerberos, and it’s the Kerberos part that seems problematic. There is of course the “roll your own” option but I am currently preferring to steer clear of that in favour of accepting that users will have to create themselves a separate Jabber account rather than having everything tie together neatly. It’s not terribly difficult to do, after all!

A couple of things to bring to your attention: firstly, the usefulness of cron-apt (for apt-using systems) is probably well known already, but since I only encountered it about a year ago, I commend it to anyone else who hasn’t done so yet. It runs a daily cron-job to check for package updates for you. I recommend setting it to download only, not to automatic install, and also to only email if there’s an update waiting. To actually run the upgrades once you’ve checked the email to ensure it’s not done anything foolish, you can then use either ClusterSSH to run apt-get upgrade, or some form of roll-your-own solution, such as this:

#!/bin/sh
# Script to automate apt-get run across machines
# Usage: deb_aptget.sh "machine1 machine2 machine3"

case $@ in
"") echo "Usage: `basename $0` \"machine1 machine2 machine3 ...\""
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

# Authenticate root passphrase
ssh-add .ssh/root_key

# Run command on each of listed machines
for arg
        do
                echo $arg
                ssh root@$arg -i .ssh/root_key apt-get -y dist-upgrade
        done

# Deauthenticate root
ssh-add -d .ssh/root_key

Customary warnings apply, in particular the fact that I am not responsible if you use this & do something dramatically awful to your system(s).

Secondly, you may be interested in this article about OpenGuides, a Perl-based wiki that allows people to build open-source guides to cities. I confess to being biased, since I’ve been a contributor (on the content, rather than the code, side) to a couple of OpenGuides wikis (& know the author of the article!), but it is a very interesting project and well worth a look.

Original post by Juliet Kemp