According to an article on CNet, Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, NEC, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, and Toshiba have formed CELF, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum. The group is intended to help steer Linux in a direction compatible with consumer electronics, focussing on issues such as: Extended battery life Real-time responsiveness (for audio …

An article from InfoWorld reports that tests by Reasoning (a software inspection firm) have indicated that recent Apache code (2.x version) has about the same number of bugs per thousand lines of code as commercial equivalents. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I do find it an …

The latest twist in the SCO UNIX case is an allegation (reported in an article from eWeek and made by a source "close to SCO") that SCO used Linux code in its "Linux Kernel Personality" feature without complying with the GPL, the license under which the software was developed). The …

An article from Enterprise IT Planet claims that NCSA (former working home of yours truly) has established the largest known Storage Area Network. The huge filesystem, containing over 110TB of data (that's 110,000,000,000,000 bytes+, or the equivalent of ~500 of the largest disks you can buy …

Looks like it may be time to start looking at deploying FreeBSD 5.x. Slashdot has an article indicating that 5.1 is now available (including a couple of BitTorrent links), and generally once the .1 release is available, I start looking to deploy the major version.

According to an article on Wired, a model rocketry group from Portland State University is putting together a model rocket that is running on Linux. The group is building a sophisticated rocket designed to climb to about 50,000 feet and to carry processors to control flight and send back …

An article in EETimes comments on the evidence that SCO has shown to certain journalists and analysts under non-disclosure. The article details 80 lines of code that are identical, even to the comments. This brings to mind a few questions for me: What is the significance of 80 lines in …

Broker and financial management powerhouse Merrill Lynch states in a story from CNET that they are finding significant savings by making use of Linux as a key operating system in their deployment. Not only have they saved a bunch of money on the server side, but they are going to …

An article on LinuxJournal includes a copy of the NDA required by SCO of anyone who wants to look into their claims about trade secret/patent/copyright infringement vis-a-vis Linux. It's not surprising to me that this NDA is as rock solid as it appears to be. In particular, they …

It looks like there will be a third player in the Macintosh OS X Unix tool installation game soon. Gentoo (open-source creators of Gentoo Linux) is bringing their Portage software configuration and installation platform to OS X. For Gentoo, it will be their first foray off of the Linux platform …

According to an article on CNET, SCO is planning to start showing some if the disputed linux code under NDA to outside analysts. Further, the company has stated that it is turning the issue of disputed ownership of UNIX to its attorneys. It certainly makes me wonder, though, if the …

The project page on SourceForge claims that they have added Layer 7 (Application Layer) priority queuing and filtering to the Linux networking kernel, allowing for the appropriate prioritization of traffic with non- deterministic ports.

SlashDot was the first place I saw to post an article on this important issue. Looks like the folks at SCO have some backpedaling to do. Note in particular, the comments made by Novell CEO Jack Messman in his last paragraph to SCO: " We, like others, are concerned about the …

A CNET report indicates that Novell will (this morning, before the open) issue a statement regarding the ownership of UNIX patents that may have some bearing on the SCO trade secret case against IBM. It appears that Novell thinks they retained the ownership of the patents and thus the right …

An article from Forrester Research, carried on CNET theorizes that Linux is still a safe platform for most folks and that IBM (and HP and Dell) will work to make sure the SCO threat either disappears in court or is taken care of through licensing or an outright purchase of …

If you have been privy to disclosure of actual UNIX source code (System 7 and before don't count) without an NDA, Eric Raymond wants to know about it. The theory is that if there were enough people who had access to the Unix code, it wasn't a secret and therefore …

An interesting article in the Economist about Sun, Microsoft, and Linux and their collective (and separate) futures.

My old school chum, John O'Fallon, and his company Maxum have released iAssist, their software to help you manage your Macintosh servers. It's a bit pricey at $250/user, but if you are managing Macintosh OS X servers and aren't intimately familiar with Unix, you might want to give it …

So, just how do you override DNS for a hosts file under OS X? This was the question I was asked yesterday when trying to debug a problem for some friends, and I had to go do some research, because I wasn't sure of the answer. The root of the …

An article from CNET describes the reactions of Red Hat, HP, Microsoft, and Sun to the claims by SCO that Former-AT&T IP was stolen and infused into Linux. Each company reacted a bit differently: HP claims there are no grounds for the suit and that it is a …