One longstanding Unix tradition is best summed up thus: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together." On a Linux machine, this philosophy is most clearly visible from the command line, where Unix hackers continue to provide simple, flexible tools that talk to one another and don't have the huge overhead of a graphical user interface.
A Linux-based home router appears to be attracting a growing community of hackers. However, in responding to hackers' requests for source code for its Home Hub, distributor British Telecom (BT) may not be complying fully with Linux's GPL license terms, according to a story at TheRegister.
Yoggie Security Systems is now shipping its credit-card-sized, Linux-based security device for mobile and remote workers. The Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro is said to offer in-depth enterprise-level protection for PCs operated outside of corporate computing environments, regardless of what OS is running on the PC. The venture-funded Israeli startup announced the Yoggie Gatekeeper in September. The device is based on an XScale PXA270 processor and has two Ethernet ports. It runs sophisticated firewall, VPN, and monitoring software on a hardened Linux kernel, according to Yoggie.
Six months after delivering Flash Player 9 for Windows and Mac OS X, Adobe Systems has finally got around to releasing a version of the new generation multimedia client for the open source Linux platform. Adobe claims to have more than 700 million Flash users on Internet-connected PCs and mobile devices throughout the world. Flash Player 9 for Linux runs scripts up to 10 times as fast as the previous version and provides advanced features for graphics, video and text.
Installing a new application on Linux can be challenging, even for experts. Now, the LSB (Linux Standard Base) project and its parent organization, the FSG (Free Standards Group), have a plan for how to make it easier for both users and developers.
Last month, key people in the Linux software packaging world and ISVs got together in Berlin to discuss the future of Linux application packaging.
The group decided to create a bridge between the various software package installment programs that the Linux distributions support and what the ISVs need to support Linux.
The issue of whether binary-only kernel modules violate the GPL cropped up again this month on the Linux kernel mailing list, where Linus Torvalds thwarted an effort to ban them. Torvalds called banning binary modules "stupid," and told kernel hackers they should base decisions on technical merit, not political agendas. The flap shows Torvalds has not abandoned his pragmatism or frankness, nor his viewpoint that not all drivers are "derived works" based on the Linux kernel or other drivers.
Linux has been mentioned as a potentially leading platform for mobile devices for as long as there have been mobile devices. However, mobile Linux is still largely missing in action. The new crop of high-visibility smart phones such as the Samsung BlackJack, the Nokia E62 and the Treo 680 are based on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile, the Symbian and the aging Palm OS platforms.
As we've seen in the last several days, there's a lot going on in the Linux community with regards to security. In this series of articles we've covered SELinux, AppArmor, Bastille, how vendors' secure distributions deal with security, and looked at the progress the US Department of Homeland Security is making in its "vulnerability discovery and remediation open source hardening project" -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Before we enter the discussion, please accept the following: in this article I'm not giving any opinion on topic of software freedom or openness. Neither I discuss the pros and cons of UNIX way and WYSIWYG. All the words concerning these issues are just describing the situation, but never expressing any attitude.
Linux's success
Novell Inc. on Monday distanced itself from comments last week by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft patents, although the two companies said that their recently-unveiled alliance remains intact.
