Linux

On Monday, OSRM, a provider of open-source consulting and risk mitigation insurance, announced that the group has found that there are 283 issued, but not yet court-validated, software patents that could conceivablly be used in patent claims against Linux. That's the potential bad news for Linux developers and users. The good news is that the Linux kernel contains no court-validated software patents. For those who are seriously concerned about the risks, OSRM (Open Source Risk Management)will be offering a litigation insurance policy starting in 2005.

Linux potentially infringes 283 patents, including 27 held by Microsoft but none that have been validated by court judgments, according to a group that sells insurance to protect those using or selling Linux against intellectual-property litigation.

Dan Ravicher, founder and executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, conducted the analysis for Open Source Risk Management. OSRM is like an insurance company, selling legal protection against Linux copyright-infringement claims. It plans to expand the program to patent protections.

In the strange world of technology, the biggest threat to the most powerful software company on the planet comes from a product developed by a loose group of students, hackers and assorted volunteers. By all current logic, this should not be true.

Microsoft’s nemesis is Linux, a piece of software which began life as a project for Finnish student Linus Torvalds in 1991.

Since then, it has grown through the shared efforts of thousands of internet users across the globe to the point where it is arguably more powerful, stable and secure than Microsoft Windows.

Ninety two percent of survey respondents indicated that their Linux systems have never been infected with a virus, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2004 Linux Development Survey. Further, 78% of Linux developers say that their Linux systems have never been hacked and less than 7% were hacked three or more times. Of the 22% that have been hacked, 23% of the intrusions were by internal users with valid login ID's. The main ways that Linux machines can be compromised are: Inadequately configured security settings, vulnerability in internet service and Web server flaws.

Last February, Darl McBride received a Federal Express package at his home in Salt Lake City with a sticker proclaiming in big, bold letters: live worms.
Understandably cautious, McBride's wife brought it into the garage. When her husband discovered that there were, in fact, worms wriggling inside the cardboard box, he threw it away.

Linux can learn valuable lessons from its elder cousins in the enterprise, the proprietary Unixes from the likes of IBM, Sun, and HP. Those operating systems, in turn, can learn some lessons from Linux. Comparing the features of the more enterprise-ready Linux distros with AIX, one of the leading proprietary Unixes, helps identify some of those lessons.

Obtaining an external drive is a great way to breathe new life into older hardware, or allow you to use Linux on machines on which you can't (or don't want to) alter the internal hard drives.
Say you want to use Linux in a dual-boot arrangement, but you don't have any free space on your computer's hard drive. One solution would be to use a "live" Linux distribution such as Knoppix, which can be run directly from CD. This is certainly viable for occasional use, but it has a number of serious drawbacks.

The crackers currently have the whip hand over Windows, and Microsoft's assertion that Internet Explorer is now part of the operating system shows its flawed reasoning.

Worried sick about the latest rash of Internet Explorer security problems? I have the perfect solution for you, one that's even better than switching to Mozilla, Firefox or Opera. Switch operating systems: Go to Linux.

A French government department is replacing its legacy Microsoft NT servers with an open-source product from Mandrakesoft. Announcing the deal on Friday, the Linux distributor said that the French Ministry of Equipment was replacing 1,500 office and infrastructure Microsoft Windows NT servers with Mandrakelinux corporate servers.

The loss of critical data can prove devastating. Still, millions of professionals ignore backing up their data. While individual reasons vary, one of the most common explanations is that performing routine backups can be a real chore. Because machines excel at mundane and repetitive tasks, the key to reducing the inherent drudgery and the natural human tendency for procrastination, is to automate the backup process.