L-P Huberdeau

RedHat has always been one of the Linux leaders. A while back they droped the public distribution and created the Fedora project. Today, they released the first issue of a web magazine. I have been surprised by the quality of the content. Of course, it contains a little publicity for the RedHat products, but overall, it’s very good information. If you ever wondered what SELinux or User-Mode Linux actually was, you will find detailed and accessible answers. Enjoy.

The goal of the magazine is probably to attract some attention on RedHat and pull them out of the shadows. With Novell and IBM making a lot of noise, most tend to forget RedHat still exists. Let’s hope the effort will last.

They even have a blog to announce the new issues, which comes with an RDF/RSS 1.0 feed.

The legal system is facing a huge problem right now with software. Complaints and lawsuits are stacking up a lot faster than they are actually resolved. Recently, Novell started a war against Microsoft, Microsoft is warning Asia against a nuclear war and as always useless patents are used against Amazon. All these within a few days. Considering they will all take a few months or years to resolve, the balance does not look great.

It seems like an entire economy is being built around useless patents. Companies seem to live around those wars. This madness needs to stop so developpers can do what they are the best at.

Well, Bush has once again declined to sign the Kyoto treaty. The excuse this time is that it will cause job loss. It’s quite sad to see that jobs today worth more than life tomorrow. I don’t actually see how it will cause job loss in the first place. It’s probably just an other lame excuse. I actually hope it does not reflect the opinion of the average american.

Is the american way of life they are trying to protect really about egocentrism? As a general idea, every single decision made totally ignores the rest of the world. They elected Bush once again, even if the entire world was against it.

It’s nice to see the way major problems are simply ignored. Kyoto has not been a key element during the year-long campain (which probably costed more than signing Kyoto would). Less than a week later, the decision is made. Has everything else been done or I simply don’t understand what priorities are?

As a followup to Microsoft’s FUD campain against Linux, Novell opened a website to turn down all of Microsoft’s arguments: Unbending the Truth: Things Microsoft Hopes You Won’t Notice. The website is definetly part of Novell’s marketting campain for SuSE Linux enterprise servers. While generally promoting Linux and Open Source, many references are made to the recently purchased distribution.

Microsoft has been very active fighting to prove the Windows 2003 Server TCO is lower than administrating a Linux system. They financed multiple studies to support their arguments. It’s clear that Linux means either loss of market share or price reduction for them.

Novell recently made Linux a central part of it’s solutions and they are trying to impose themselves in the community as defenders of Open Source. In a public anouncement, Novell indicated that they could use their own patents against those threatening Linux with software patents. They also guarentee protection against lawsuits for their clients (even if everyone knows SCO’s lawsuit won’t win). Tux now has two giants to watch his back.