[wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 32
Vance Kochenderfer
vkochend at nyx.net
Thu Mar 1 04:29:28 EST 2007
PDF version: <http://www.wplug.org/top/wplug-top032.pdf>
THE OPEN PITT
What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania
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Issue 32 February 2007 www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
From the Editor: Lawyers, GNUs, and Money
January Roundup
Spring Forward, Fall Back
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Coming Events
Mar. 10: General User Meeting, Topic: How Do I Do That?--Linux Counterparts
of Popular Windows Applications. (Time and location TBA, see web
site for details)
Apr. 14: General User Meeting. (Time and location TBA, see web site for
details)
The public is welcome at all events
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From the Editor: Lawyers, GNUs, and Money
Technical types often seem to harbor a mistrust of lawyers, particularly in
the arena of Free and Open Source software. The irony is that perhaps we
have fewer legal issues to worry about than we may think.
The SCO lawsuit against IBM continues to grind on. There is thorough
coverage of the relevant details at <http://groklaw.net/>, but the short
version is that each time SCO has been asked to show specific evidence of
their code being improperly copied into Linux, they have come up empty-
handed. Despite making public statements about clear evidence of
misappropriation and being given mountains of code by IBM for inspection
and comparison, SCO's case keeps getting narrower and narrower. It appears
unlikely to succeed on any of its grounds, much less reveal any legal
danger to Linux.
In another case, Daniel Wallace's attempt to sue IBM, Red Hat, and Novell
was thrown out of court. He made the somewhat creative argument that the
GNU General Public License was illegal price-fixing under antitrust law,
since anyone writing a competing piece of proprietary software would be
working against a program that can be obtained at zero cost. The appellate
court's ruling bluntly concludes with the sentence "The GPL and open-source
software have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws."
Well even if the GPL isn't illegal, is it enforceable? Linux kernel
developer Harald Welte, who exposes misuses of code under the GPL at
<http://gpl-violations.org/>, won a judgment in Frankfurt district court.
D-Link used the Linux kernel incorporating his netfilter code in a
network-attached storage device but failed to fulfill the conditions of the
GPL. Although he and D-Link reached a partial settlement, the company
subsequently refused to pay damages, claiming that the GPL was invalid.
The court awarded damages to Welte, firmly establishing the legal validity
of the GPL, at least in Germany.
To date, there seem to be no successful legal claims of copyright or patent
infringement against Free and Open Source software projects. A major
reason for this is likely that such projects don't _want_ to misuse someone
else's code. And even if they did, the open nature of the software would
make it quite simple to obtain evidence of wrongdoing. By contrast, the
opaque nature of most proprietary software makes discovering infringement
much more difficult.
But it can't all be good news. The patent agreement between Microsoft and
Novell has generated considerable excitement in the community. While
Novell claims the deal isn't a statement that Linux infringes on Microsoft
patents, Microsoft executives continue to make dark hints, without actually
giving any specifics about violations (sound familiar?).
After the Novell-Microsoft end run around the strong anti-patent provisions
of version 2 of the GPL, the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom
Law Center are looking to reinforce these in version 3. At this point,
however, it's not entirely certain whether they will be able to do so
neatly.
Outside events may end up having a greater influence on the situation.
Alcatel has just prevailed in a patent lawsuit with Microsoft, to the tune
of $1.52 billion (yes, with a "b"). The patent, which Alcatel picked up
when it acquired Lucent Technologies, relates to the MP3 audio format.
Microsoft maintains that it licensed the necessary rights from the
Fraunhofer Institute, the original developer of the format, but Alcatel
successfully argued that their patent claims weren't covered by that
license.
So it's clear that no one is truly safe from software patent claims. Giant
Microsoft, with its massive resources and army of lawyers, made the
determination that its software did not infringe--and was wrong (at least
for now; there's always the possibility of an appeal).
Of course, the Free and Open Source software community has recognized the
danger of software patents for quite a long time now
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-patents.html>, and has
made considerable efforts to work around the problem. For example, the
patent-free PNG image format was developed in response to Unisys' claims
relating to GIF, and the <http://www.xiph.org/> project's Ogg Vorbis is an
unencumbered alternative to MP3.
It will be instructive to observe how the industry reacts to the Alcatel-
Microsoft decision. Many technology companies--including some regarded as
being Open Source-friendly--still back the current software patent system.
Instead of keeping themselves at the mercy of rights holders with formats
like MP3, will we start to see broader adoption of Ogg Vorbis and other
patent-free technologies? If so, perhaps they will come to enjoy the
friendlier (and less expensive) legal climate on this side of the fence and
decide to become part of the solution.
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January Roundup
Jan. 13 General User Meeting: The lowly text editor is one of the most
basic tools in computing (especially programming), and this meeting was
dedicated to showing off three of them.
Patrick Wagstrom was first up to demonstrate Emacs, an editor whose major
claim to fame is the lengths to which it can be (and has been) extended.
He spoke about Emacs modes, which cause the editor to highlight text and
behave appropriately depending on the type of file being edited.
Particularly useful for programmers is Emacs' ability to show and navigate
through the functional structure of code. Also on display was its powerful
search mechanism. And what Emacs presentation would be complete without
playing a game of Tetris within the editor?
Next on display was Vi, the traditional rival to Emacs. Brian Seklecki
described its origins in ed, the prehistoric editor used in the earliest
versions of UNIX. He demonstrated Vim, a modern descendant common on Linux
systems. Brian first explained some basic survival skills such as moving
around within a file, saving it to disk, and exiting the editor. He then
covered commands for editing and inserting text, finishing with a reference
to Vimtutor for those seeking to learn more.
Unlike the previous two, jEdit was designed from the ground up as an editor
with a graphical user interface. Logan Stack demonstrated its powerful yet
user-friendly features such as intelligent syntax highlighting, code
folding, bracket matching, and navigation aids. He showed off some of the
plugins which have been created to extend jEdit's basic functionality.
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Spring Forward, Fall Back
It may not be as large of a problem as the Y2K transition, but there is an
important date-related change happening this year. The effective dates for
daylight saving time have been changed in the United States and some other
locations. If the Linux distribution you're running is a few years old, it
might not have the right dates. You can check whether your system is
correct using the following command (results are for the U.S. Eastern time
zone):
$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v -c 2008 /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime Sun Apr 1 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 01:59:59 2007 EST
isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Apr 1 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 03:00:00 2007 EDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Oct 28 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:59:59 2007 EDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Oct 28 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:00:00 2007 EST
isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
If you see April 1 and October 28 as in the above example, your time zone
files need to be fixed. This is usually done by installing a package named
tzdata or timezone using your distribution's update mechanism. It is
likely that you'll need to run an additional command to copy the
appropriate file from the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory to /etc/localtime.
Check your distribution's web site for full details on this, although
running its administrative tool for choosing the local time zone ought to
do the trick. Since many daemons only check the time zone on startup, you
should either stop and restart them or simply reboot your machine. The
right changeover dates for the U.S. are March 11 and November 4; if you see
the following, your system is OK:
$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v -c 2008 /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST
isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 EDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 EST
isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
Failing to update your timezone files will cause programs that use or
display local time, such as cron, to be off by an hour for three weeks in
the spring and one week in the fall. Using the network time protocol to
synchronize your clock will not solve the problem as it uses universal time
(UTC) and has no concept of daylight saving time. Also note that some
programs like Evolution and Java have their own time zone files that must
be updated separately.
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The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>
Editor: Vance Kochenderfer
Copyright 2007 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group. Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.
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