The Newsletter of UKUUG, the UK’s Unix and Open Systems Users Group
Volume 15, Number 4
December 2006
The minutes from the Annual General Meeting held on 28th September have not
this year been circulated to members in hard copy. All members were emailed
on 30th October and advised that the minutes and associated documents could
be found on the web site at
http://www.ukuug.org/events/agm2006/
As you will see from the minutes we have three new Council members: John
Pinner, Howard Thomson and Phil Hands.
They are all enthusiastic about UKUUG and we are hoping they can bring some
new ideas and assist with work on ongoing items.
Since the AGM, there have been two Council meetings. At the last meeting, Ray
Miller stood down as Chairman, and Alain Williams was chosen as his
replacement. See also Ray’s Chairman’s report below.
Sam Smith has been re-appointed as UKUUG Treasurer.
Sunil Das has agreed to take on some tasks to assist UKUUG on a part time
basis: see his article elsewhere in this issue in which he describes his new role.
Council’s current concerns are the organisation and programme for
the Spring conference being held at the Manchester Conference Centre between the
19th and 21st March 2007. Full event details (information booklet and booking
form) should be in the envelope with this Newsletter.
I am sure this event is going to prove very popular and we have again been
very lucky to achieve sponsorship from Google for the conference dinner.
Preliminary discussions have started for the Linux 2007 event but nothing can
be confirmed at the moment. As soon as dates, venue etc. are known all
members will be emailed.
The annual membership subscription invoices will be sent out in January,
please look out for your invoice and as always prompt payment will be
gratefully received!
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy Christmas
and a Peaceful New Year.
The Secretariat will close from 18th December to January 2nd 2007.
Please note the copy date for the next issue of the Newsletter is
14th March 2007.
We are always looking for interesting submissions from members, so if you
have any news or articles please send them direct
After just over three years in the role, last week I stood down as
Chairman of UKUUG Council to let someone else take the driving seat
for a while. I am pleased to welcome to the chair Alain Williams,
who did not step back with everyone else when I asked for a volunteer
to come forward. Alain has been a member of Council for four years
now, so will already be a familiar face to many of you. I will be
working with Alain until the end of the year to effect a smooth
changeover, then leaving Council to concentrate on some of my other
interests.
One of my objectives when I took over as Chairman was to raise the
profile of UKUUG and build up membership numbers. This has not been
entirely successful, with membership numbers remaining fairly static,
losing about 25% of members each year and gaining about the same
number of new members. We have done some work in putting about the
UKUUG name and brand, with a new logo launched at the beginning of
2006. We have increased our participation in other bodies, with
Leslie Fletcher attending a number of meetings on our behalf and
initiating some campaigning activities. Leslie’s efforts culminated
recently with a Parliamentary Early Day Motion on the use of free
software in schools being tabled by John Pugh MP – you should by now
have read about this elsewhere.
My other focus has been in building up momentum for the winter (now
spring) LISA conference. This has been hard work at times, but I am
pleased with the outcome: delegate numbers are up; we are attracting
significant sponsorship; the programme is very strong, with two
parallel streams last year. Sam Smith has taken the lead in
organizing the forthcoming 2007 conference, and has put together an
excellent programme, again with two streams, with a focus on
virtualisation and systems management. I hope you will take
advantage of this and make your way to Manchester next March.
Some other news from Council is that we have engaged the services of
Sunil Das as UKUUG Liaison Officer. Amongst other things, we have
asked Sunil to help to build links between UKUUG and other
organizations in the Unix and Linux community and in the commercial
world; to solicit speakers for UKUUG events; to raise our profile in
the press; and to help expand the content of the newsletter. His
efforts have already paid off with this last objective, and we are
pleased to welcome Peter Salus as a regular columnist.
I am sure you will join me in wishing Alain and the team all the best
for the future, and thank you for your continued support of UKUUG.
It’s good to be back! Some amongst you may remember that I served as UKUUG
Chairman during the latter years of the 1980s and the very early 1990s. I am
supporting Council now to raise UKUUG profiles and ultimately attract new
members. I came on board at the beginning of October and I will be addressing
the following areas: liaising and building a strong relationship with the Unix
/ Linux community (IBM, Novell, SUN, and HP etc.); actively soliciting speakers
for UKUUG events; organising standalone tutorials; expanding the content of the
Newsletter; raising UKUUG’s profile in the press.
The first month flew by as I updated the UKUUGs membership leaflet. I confess
to researching many websites to help in this, in particular, Usenix, AUUG and
AT&T. Also, I visited Jane in Buntingford learning about UKUUG procedures,
membership numbers over the last six years, etc. A visit to Linux World was
instructive and I made contact with the LONIX and GLUUG who are happy to
forward announcements about UKUUG events (conference, tutorial, free talks) to
their extensive distribution lists. I manned the UKUUG stand during the lunch
break and managed to recruit a new member. Only an individual membership but
it’s a start!
Most of November has been spent on the telephone or writing email (which is an
uphill battle as I struggle to get broadband installed). Peter Salus, author
and former Usenix Executive Director, has agreed to contribute to this
Newsletter and the four editions in 2007. And I am trying to cement contacts
with the Unix / Linux communities.
UKUUG is a membership-driven organisation of like-minded ‘lads and lasses’.
Help me in this liaison activity with suggestions and ideas by email or
telephone. Initially make contact with me using I’d
appreciate making new friends as well as ‘touching base’ with those I haven’t
spoken to for a while.
We enclose the current versions (2.0) of Mozilla Firefox for Linux and
Windows and the current versions (2.0.4) of the OpenOffice.org suite for
various platforms, together with documentation and some useful
Templates and Clip Art.
We are very grateful to the Firefox and OpenOffice.org developers for making
this useful software so freely available.
FreeBSD — NetBSD — OpenBSD — MAC OS X — DragonFlyBSD
Are you doing interesting things with a BSD based operating system?
Come to Copenhagen and talk about it!
We are looking for papers about all aspects of BSD based operating
systems, and would particularly like to hear from people who can
tell our audience something about:
Send us a couple of paragraphs with an outline of your proposed
talk and a bit about yourself before
February 1st 2007.
EuroBSDCon 2007 is organised by the the usual gang from the BSD-DK
user group and our aim is to make it affordable and high quality.
Speakers attend the conference for free and we will reimburse
speakers travel and lodging if nobody else will pay for it.
We will aim to finalise the programme and notify the selected
speakers by April 1st 2007.
We will not waste money and trees on printed proceedings but will
distribute the conference material electronically and expect to
receive your final slides no later than 4 weeks before the conference.
Please let us know if you want to include other materials (articles,
HOWTOs etc).
There will also be a “Works In Progress” session during the conference
for short talks about recent developments etc.
If we can arrange it, all talks will be videotaped (unless the
speaker objects).
For further information please see:
http://2007.euroBSDCon.org/
The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) announce a presentation on 20th
December 2006 by Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer of Sun Microsystems,
on the Open Sourcing of Java under the GPL.
The meeting is provisionally timed to start at 6pm (to be confirmed) at BCS
Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton
Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
A free buffet and refreshments will be provided.
For further information, please see:
http://ossg.bcs.org/2006/12/20/open-source-java-simon-phipps/
The Bacula Project has became the first signatory of the Fiduciary
licence Agreement (FLA), a copyright assignment that allows FSFE
to become the legal guardian of projects.
Kern Sibbald, the founder and lead developer of the Bacula network
backup solution, assigned his copyright to FSFE. “I wanted to
underline the commitment of the Bacula Project to Free Software”, said
Kern. “Bacula has always been a community project and we’re just
solidifying that for the long-term. I am very thankful that the FSFE
is providing this service because it removes an important administrative
burden from the project, which allows us to focus on the task of
programming.”
The Bacula Project will be protected by FSFEs Freedom Task Force
(FTF). Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, explains “The FTF is
committed to making projects more secure. The Fiduciary licence
Agreement is one part of this. We want to allow developers to focus
on their core work. That’s why we are taking care of the legal side
of things while Kern continues making a fantastic network backup
system.”
“We are delighted to help Bacula accomplish its full potential. The
Free Software ecosystem is maturing rapidly these days and the Freedom
Task Force with its Fiduciary Licence Agreement, licensing education,
licensing advice and enforcement services is an important part in
this”, explains FSFE president Georg Greve. He adds: “We very much
thank Stichting NLnet for doing their part in making this possible,
and hope that others will step up to likewise support this effort.”
Shane Coughlan summarises “our mission is to help individuals,
projects and businesses who develop and use Free Software. The Bacula
assignment is the first step in our larger fiduciary programme. We
are looking forward to welcoming other projects on board.”
The Freedom Task Force can be found at http://www.fsfeurope.org/ftf
Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit people to manage backup,
recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers
of different kinds. The Bacula Project is managed and coordinated by Kern
Sibbald.
http://bacula.org
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced today the launch of the
Freedom Task Force, thanks to a grant of EUR 30,000 from Stichting NLnet.
The organisation, working closely with Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org,
seeks to help programmers properly set up and organise projects legally, as
well as educate companies to understand how the GPL works. As needed, the
purpose of the group will also include enforcement in the case of licence
violations. FTF is located in FSFE’s offices in Zurich, Switzerland.
“Free Software itself has become commercial mainstream, but knowledge about
Free Software and in particular its licences is often lagging behind”, explains
Georg Greve, FSFE’s president. “With large companies like SUN embracing Free
Software at the heart of their business, the software ecosystem is transforming
in ways that underline the requirement for services like the FTF.”
FTF will include experts with technical and legal backgrounds as well as
volunteers, working together to provide organised and co-ordinated responses to
individual cases where there may be misunderstandings about what a licence
requires or a violation of its terms. FSFE has hired Mr. Shane Coughlan to
serve as FTF Co-ordinator.
Shane Coughlan on the other tasks of the FTF: “We seek to give commercial and
non-commercial Free Software developers the maximum support possible with our
fiduciary activities. By helping them bundle their legal interests, we are able
to safeguard the legal status of a project while it can focus on technological
and managerial issues. For projects that FSFE has accepted into its fiduciary
program, FSFE will also be in a position to defend their interests in the
eventuality of licence violation.”
Harald Welte, the first person who enforced the GNU GPL in court, will be
working closely with the FTF: “My gpl-violations.org work has shown how much
the community needs a more focused approach to deal with these violations.
While there was good contact with FSFE in the past, we will now be working
closely together, sharing our information and resources to best protect the
rights of Free Software developers.”
“We have as a primary goal to help corporations to adhere to the licences from
the onset, rather than to have to enforce violations later,” explains Mr.
Coughlan. “We encourage those responsible for compliance for their company to
contact us, so we can work together to avoid licence compliance problems,
rather than having to later solve problems that could have been avoided in the
first place.”
Stichting NLnet Chairman Teus Hagen expressed pleasure at the launch of
FTF: “We are very happy to support the launch of the FTF because in our view
this is a timely and necessary step to consolidate Free Software. We ourselves
at times felt the need for a reliable partner to handle these issues, and in
our experience the FSFE is such a partner. We hope that many others will
contribute to and support this effort, and see the FTF as an important step in
the maturing of Free Software.”
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a non-profit non-governmental
organisation active in many European countries and involved in many global
activities. Access to software determines participation in a digital society.
To secure equal participation in the information age, as well as freedom of
competition, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) pursues and is
dedicated to the furthering of Free Software, defined by the freedoms to use,
study, modify and copy. Founded in 2001, creating awareness for these issues,
securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by
supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE.
http://fsfeurope.org
In the past 30 months, gpl-violations.org has helped uncover and negotiate more
than 100 GPL violations and has obtained numerous out-of-court settlement
agreements. The gpl-violations.org project is a not-for-profit effort to bring
commercial users and vendors of Free Software into compliance with the licence
conditions as set forth by the original authors. The project was founded and
is managed by Mr Harald Welte, a Linux Kernel developer and Free Software
enthusiast.
http://gpl-violations.org
A key report produced by a European
Commission task force was written almost entirely by the patent industry
and large firms, including SAP’s patent lawyers, US firms, and the
European Patent Office, says the FFII.
The report titled “IPR for competitiveness and innovation” claims that
studies prove that SMEs need patent protection, that SMEs benefit from
patents, and that increased software patents in the US have not hampered
innovation in the US ICT sector. These claims are forcibly contested by
SME organisations, who point out that software patents punish the IT SME
sector, while giving large firms a key grip on the market.
The report is particularly insulting to small IT firms, claiming that
they “generally reveal an anxious attitude towards the patent system as
a whole. Any reform or initiative […] is viewed as a potential
backdoor for introducing software patents, a concept opposed by a large
majority among this Group.” The report also accuses small IT firms of
having “a relatively inadequate understanding and general knowledge of
the patent system”.
The FFII, an observer at the task force, saw strong censorship during
the drafting of the report. FFII president Pieter Hintjens says, “the
chairman, SAP, exploited their position to make sure that
reform-oriented comments were excluded and debate was silenced. Overall
the report reflects the opinion of a very small but controlling minority
— and certainly no SMEs — while claiming to be representative”.
Hintjens continues: “I am astounded that the EPO, a patent
administration body who blatantly lobby for the patent industry, can be
allowed to participate in a so-called SME task force. It was a farce.
This report is a mockery and an insult to all those who participated in
good faith.”
The FFII is a not-for-profit association registered in twenty European
countries, dedicated to the development of information goods for the
public benefit, based on copyright, free competition, open standards.
More than 850 members, 3,500 companies and 100,000 supporters have
entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy questions
concerning exclusion rights (intellectual property) in data processing.
This press release and associated links and documents can be found through the FFII
Press page:
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/
Dear Jane & UKUUG Council Members,
Greetings from a UKUUG member. In the last newsletter, you wanted some feedback
on the attendance of the last Linux summer conference in Brighton (quote,
“delegate numbers were slightly down from previous years”). I was not in
attendance at this conference but thought I could offer a more general
suggestion.
One conference idea for one year could be to try and have the LISA/BSD
conference in the summer and have the Linux conference in the spring. Last
year I could not attend the Spring conference as it clashed with my teaching
schedule. It might be interesting to swap the conferences around one year
and see what happens to the numbers of attendees.
Cheers.
James Pearson-Kirk
The Early Day Motion “Software in Schools” tabled by John Pugh MP on 21
November has, at the time of writing, been signed by 49 MPs, several of whom
appear to have done so after being contacted by UKUUG members. It is at about
120 out of 350 current EDMs in terms of number of signatures, which is good
start for one with a somewhat subtle and technical content. The signature list
will remain open throughout this session of parliament so contacting MPs asking
them to add their names is still worthwhile; reaching 100 signatures would be a
significant achievement.
The perception that BECTA and DfES give an equivocal message to schools about
free and open source software has been picked up in the computing press —
Media Watch has posted some of the coverage. This has been managed through
the Open Schools Alliance, a newly-formed umbrella group, which is itself
beginning to attract support from.
Lobbying MPs about really took off when UKUUG and the Open Source
Consortium got together to highlight the contrast between the government’s warm
words about fair dealing in procurement and the reality of day-to-day decision
making in school IT. Looked at across the public sector, the government’s
annual spend on IT is huge — about £250 for every man, woman and child
in the UK — and of questionable effectiveness so the campaign is certainly
“following the sound of gunfire”.
But where next? It has proved possible to create momentum among MPs on what is
a relatively small issue in IT. It has appeal because the impact on SMEs in
their constituency is something MPs can relate to and they are keen to be seen
promoting the well being of schools in their constituency. A much bigger
issue, though harder to grasp due to the byzantine mechanisms being used, is
Building Schools for the Future. What is wrong with the “aim … to rebuild
or renew every secondary school in England over a 10-15 year period”? I
cannot do better than quote, in full, a letter in The Guardian, 29 August 2006
The same strategy that is responsible for the NHS computer disaster is also
undermining secondary schools IT. Under the name of Building Schools for the
Future IT (BSF IT), secondary schools are being offered £1,450 per pupil
(£1.5m for an average secondary school) if they will outsource their IT
operations to a government-nominated corporation for 10 years.
If schools opt to continue to directly employ technicians and buy their own
hardware, software and content, then they do not get the £1,450 per
pupil. The contracts are so all encompassing and complex that only global
corporations need apply. This is not introducing the market mechanism, this is
imposing the corporate state. Surprise, surprise, Microsoft is the preferred
operating-system supplier to the corporate bidders.
The aim is to build a bigger campaign around this grotesque manipulation of
public funds to serve sectional private interests. Where is the angle in
this? SMEs seeking to develop a business providing solutions to schools
are being discriminated against, many UK schools with innovative and
well-functioning IT systems use, more than 1,000 schools in Extremadura
use , and to quote from ZDNet:
The true beauty of open-source software is that it is philosophically
compatible with educational principles in a way that proprietary software can
never match.
Are more reasons needed?
Hello from Toronto!
For nearly four years — since 6 March 2003, to be exact — there has been
ongoing litigation involving The SCO Group and a variety of other parties:
IBM, Red Hat, Novell, DaimlerChrysler, and AutoZone. This has all been
conducted in the US, you might remark. Why should I care? Read on.
But first, note that “The SCO Group” is what was once Caldera (in fact the
early documents in 2003 read Caldera). SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was a Unix
company which sold Xenix and a number of home-grown applications (UnixWare and
OpenServer) from 1979 to 2001. In 2001, SCO sold its Server Software and
Services divisions to Caldera. SCO then changed its name to Tarantella and
Caldera began doing business as The SCO Group (2002).
Meanwhile, in another part of the universe, Novell purchased the rights to Unix
from AT&T/USL in 1993 and in 1995 sold the SVR4 code and licensing rights to
SCO.
If you aren’t confused yet, continue.
The SCO Group was the renamed Caldera, a company founded in 1994 by Ransom Love
with funding from Ray Noorda. Caldera purchased DR-DOS from Novell in 1996 and
proceeded to sue Microsoft for a variety of unsavoury business practices.
Caldera’s main product was the Caldera Network Desktop until it purchased the
LST Linux distribution from Linux Support Team Software GmbH (with funds
obtained from its settlement with Microsoft) and became a true Linux company.
In 2002, more investment came into Caldera and Ransom Love left, to be replaced
by Darl McBride. McBride had worked for Novell and then IKON Business
Solutions, which fired him in 1998. McBride sued for $10 million for wrongful
termination and settled for $1.14 million. His arrival at Caldera heralded a
change in business plan. The newly-dubbed SCO Group apparently believes that
it can profit from its “intellectual property,” rather than from vending or
servicing a product.
McBride made several statements after arriving at Caldera. My favourite is:
“…And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out
multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It
was interesting to see the depth of Caldera’s intellectual capital.” — Darl
McBride, 2002-08-15
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2877578,00.html
I’m sure this was intended to mean something. Over four years later I’m
certain that this was intended to convey content. But, still four years later,
I’m at a loss as to what McBride might have meant, nor do I understand what
moron might pay “royalties” on an ISO-standardised language.
No ISO standard is proprietary. None. The C++ Standard Library and the C++
Standard Library Extensions are non-proprietary.
What McBride said was flatly untrue.
Six months later (2003-01-22) he stated: “If you pull down (Mac) OS X you’ll
see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories,
which is what we hold.” Which, as we will see, is just wrong.
Over a year later, in an “Open Letter” of 2003-12-04, McBride wrote: “SCO
asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United
States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws.”
http://www.caldera.com/copyright/
If you’ve cleaned up the tea or coffee you just spilt, I’ll proceed.
Between those two statements, Red Hat filed suit against SCOG “in response to
the unfair, untrue, and deceptive campaign now being waged” by SCOG “against
Linux in general and Red Hat in particular.” (2003-08-04)
Subsequently, on January 20, 2004, SCOG filed suit against Novell for “making
false statements” and “slandering SCO’s title” where Unix SVR5 was concerned.
(Novell had stated that they had never sold the title to the Unix copyrights to
[old]SCO.)
On March 2, 2004, SCOG filed suit against AutoZone (a chain of auto parts
retail stores) for infringing upon
“SCO’s copyrights in and relating to Copyrighted Materials by using, copying,
modifying, and/or distributing parts of the Copyrighted Materials, or
derivative works based on the Copyrighted Materials in connection with its
implementations of one or more versions of the Linux operating system,
inconsistent with SCO’s exclusive rights under the Copyright Act.”
In other words, by having employed OpenServer in the past and switched to Linux
(version unspecified), AutoZone was violating SCOG’s copyrights in SVR5.
The next day (March 3), SCOG filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for not
complying with the provisions of a licensing agreement between AT&T (“SCO is
the successor to AT&T”) and “Chrysler Motors Corporation.”
So, we have The SCO Group suing IBM, Novell, DaimlerChrysler, and AutoZone and
Red Hat suing SCOG. The IBM and Novell cases are in the federal court in Utah;
DaimlerChrysler in Michigan; AutoZone in Nevada; and Red Hat filed suit in
Delaware.
I’ll go to the DaimlerChrysler case first. Judge Sue L. Robinsor of Oakland
County, Michigan, threw out most of SCOG’s case, “with prejudice” — which
means that it cannot be refiled. Apparently, SCOG’s correspondence had been
mailed to an address where DaimlerChrysler no longer had an office and
DaimlerChrysler had never used any [old]SCO software, though pre-2000 Chrysler
may have.
After the DaimlerChrysler suit was tossed, McBride downplayed the whole thing:
“McBride also today shrugged off an Oakland County Circuit Court decision to
grant most of a DaimlerChrysler motion to dismiss a case brought by SCO over
certification and compliance issues associated with its use of Unix as the
‘equivalent of losing a pre-season football game”‘.— Darl McBride, 2004-08-05
Oakland County Court closed the docket on March 2, 2005.
We can set aside both AutoZone and Red Hat for a while: in each case, the
judge has placed everything on hold, pending resolution of the two Utah cases.
SCOG, Red Hat, and AutoZone must make quarterly reports to the judges.
And now for something completely different: another digression.
Though derived from a common source, US and UK courts and their legal systems
are quite different from one another. The immediate result is that some of the
procedures and antics may appear quite bizarre. They frequently are bizarre,
but they follow a set of rules. There are also a large number of courts in the
US hierarchy. In fact there are several hierarchies: county, municipality,
state, and federal. The SCOG v IBM and SCOG v Novell cases are both being
heard in the Federal District Court in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dale A. Kimball
is the presiding judge and Brooke C. Wells is the magistrate judge assisting
him in both the IBM and the Novell cases.
I have made no secret elsewhere that I have strong feelings where SCOG is
concerned. But I have tried to be relatively dispassionate in relating all the
preceding: All the names and dates are correct, etc.
However, before ending this introductory essay, I’d like to look at the initial
complaints by SCOG in the IBM and Novell suits.
The first document is quite long, running well over 125 numbered sections.
However, when I read the initial assertions in 2003, I laughed at times.
“2. …SCO is now the present owner of UNIX and SCO/UNIX software…”
“17. All commercial UNIX “flavors” in use today are based on UNIX
System V Technology…”
“18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing
rights to System V Technology.”
There is much more. But, and it is a very big but, Novell contests that
[old] SCO ever purchased the Unix “software code.” And it is very difficult to
believe that Apple’s OS X is based “on UNIX System V Technology” (it is based
on the Mach kernel and BSD layers) or that it’s not “commercial.”
Many of SCOG’s other claims are of questionable historicity. I may cite
examples of these in the next article. However, SCOG’s claims have changed
dramatically over the three years. They no longer claim any patent violations;
they have dropped several copyright claims; etc. And they have dropped many
Linux allegations.
So that those of you who haven’t been following the case diligently can see
that I’m not being trivial here, Brian Kernighan has signed a statement that he
can find no Unix code in the Linux kernel. And that should take care of it.
The Novell suit can be seen to be a follow-on to this: Novell had the audacity
to assert that not SCOG, but Novell owned the copyright to System V code. This
impugned SCOG.
Let me end this installment with “why?”
I think that Caldera bought most of [old]SCO for its sales and distribution
chain, not for its software. When Ransom Love left and McBride was brought in,
the combined businesses were waning. McBride thought that money could be made
through corporate blackmail. And IBM has the deepest pockets among the
Unix/Linux licensees. He guessed wrong. And, so far, none of the “evidence”
exposed to the public has passed scrutiny.
As to why the suits have kept on as the bank balance waned … you’ll just have
to wait.
For all the available documents, see
http://www.groklaw.net
For a Pythonesque
(Monty) view, see
http://blogs.linux.ie/frankly/2003/12/05/not-quite-a-cheese-shop/
This article is the first of a series of original articles which Peter Salus
has agreed to write for the UKUUG Newsletter
Steven Pritchard, Bruno Gomes Pessanha and Nicolai Langfeldt
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-00528-8
978 pages
£ 42.50
Published: 4th August 2006
reviewed by Greg Matthews
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) is a non profit organisation set up in
1999 to advocate and assist in the professional use of Linux, Open Source and
Free Software. It develops certification for the GNU/Linux operating system,
independent of software vendors or training providers. The Institute is
sponsored by IBM, Novell, SGI, Turbolinux, Linux Magazine and Linux Journal
among others.
This book is a weighty tome consisting of almost 1000 pages. There was much
criticism of the last edition for being out of date and out of step with the
exams so it is a relief to find that the second edition has been extensively
updated and reworked.
It is of course impossible to give you a full flavour of all 43 chapters but
most of you will be familiar with the Nutshell series; they are designed as a
desktop reference books. This one is divided into 4 parts: General Linux Exam
101, General Linux Exam 102, General Linux Exam 201 and unsurprisingly General
Linux Exam 202. The first part starts off with a very brief introduction to the
LPI exams and a study guide, the rest of part 1 and 2 are devoted to fairly
basic topics on x86 hardware and GNU/Linux installations such as file systems
and the FHS, booting and run levels, printing, networking etc. Each chapter is
split up into clear Objectives and the information is delivered in a clear and
direct manner. There are what look like cut down man pages for summarising
commands and their frequently used options. I found this quite refreshing as it
provides the tersely accurate information of a man page without having to wade
through pages of obscure options. There are plenty of examples in many areas of
the book but some might complain that they are not provided for everything.
Parts 2 and 3 start to explore more interesting topics such as patching and
compiling the kernel, LVM, setting up network services such as Email, Web and
DNS.
At the end of each part of the book are a review chapter and a practice test.
The first two parts also include a Highlighters Index which is a bit like
ready-made revision notes.
Obviously, the primary audience for this book is those intending to take the
LPI exams. I found a news article from February this year that claims more than
27000 LPIC-1 and almost 5000 LPIC-2 certifications had been awarded. In
November last year, the total number of exams delivered was over 100,000. This
pass rate suggests that the exams are not a doddle.
The main problem with books of this kind is keeping the information accurate
and up to date. For instance, whilst the objective on Sendmail covers most of
the bases, it is centred on an already outdated version and contains at least
one technical error (errata submitted). Unfortunately, the LPIC exam topics
have changed as of mid 2006. For instance there is more emphasis on MTAs other
than Sendmail. Chapter 28 deals with configuring RAID but makes no mention of
mdadm which will now be required on the exam. Unfortunately, these problems
occur throughout the book, anyone seriously considering taking the exams is
strongly advised to visit the LPI website for an up to date version of the exam
objectives.
These criticisms aside, this book is a creditable attempt to provide a
reference guide to the LPI exam objectives and in itself, is a useful desktop
reference. Haven’t set up DNS for a while? turn to chapter 37 for a refresh,
for example. However, it is difficult to recommend this book as a generic
system administration reference as it spreads itself too thinly. It provides
enough rope to hang an inexperienced sysadmin but not enough to act as a
lifeline for an experienced one. Buy this book if you are studying for the LPI
exams, it covers many of the objectives in enough detail and has good review
sections and practice questions. But remember to check the LPI web site to
make sure you are covering the current curriculum. Note that my criticisms of
the book are not shared by the editor of Linux Journal (one of the LPI
sponsors) who awarded it Editor’s Choice 2006.
Yochai Benkler
Published by Yale University Press
ISBN:0-300-11056-1
512 pages
£ 25.00
Published: 26th May 2006
reviewed by Paul Miller
Through boom, bust and boom again, books about the internet tend to fall into
two traps. They either fly into hyperbole about how a new online gizmo or
company is the next big thing or they tell us to be afraid, very afraid, and
lock up our children’s keyboards, lest innocents be sucked into an evil vortex
of sex and gaming.
Yochai Benkler, a Yale law professor, doesn’t fall into either trap with his
ambitious attempt to understand how the internet is changing society. What
Benkler sees is an emerging pattern in the way we use network technologies
which he thinks is positive for democracy and innovation, but not without its
downsides. He argues that the internet is making obvious an existing form of
exchange — social sharing — and taking it from the periphery to the mainstream
of the economy. Conventional economics can’t explain why volunteer-generated
projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software, which are given away for
free, have been so successful. He proposes his own theory of “social
production” — “commons-based peer production” — to fill the gap.
It’s a counterpoint to the received wisdom that creating and exploiting
intellectual property (patents and copyright) is the only way to do business in
the 21st century. He points out that in 2003 IBM made twice as much money from
providing open-source services as it did from intellectual property — despite
the fact that between 1999 and 2004 it created more patents than any other US
company. Benkler proposes that this is a pattern we will see repeated. The
thesis is unsettling for those businesses, particularly entertainment ones,
that have relied on controlling distribution of copyrighted material. He says
not that they will disappear overnight but that social production is more than
a fad. It is no surprise to Benkler that: “We find ourselves in the midst of a
battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment.”
Benkler considers the emerging detail of these battles for the legal framework
of the internet that could skew the governance of creativity. He finds it
contemptible that, if current trends continue, the works of Elvis and Disney
will never enter the public domain in the same way as Mozart or Shakespeare.
The book draws on a staggering array of disciplines: from graph theory to
economics, law to political science. But Benkler’s breadth is not at the
expense of depth. The book is all the more convincing because of the legal
precision with which he treats examples, from the “Barbie” entry on Wikipedia
to the scandal over Diebold voting machines in the US. He never falls for easy,
superficial conclusions.
His writing is clear and readable, although occasionally the technical subject
matter makes it hard work. Keeping it as light as he does is a remarkable feat
for a heavyweight piece of work.
There is, of course, something perverse about the fact that perhaps the best
work yet about the fast-moving, enthusiast-driven internet has taken an
academic 10 years to write and is printed on 528 pages of dead tree. But
perhaps the interesting social production happens post-publication. The book is
released under a Creative Commons licence so you can download it free from his
website (www.benkler.org) and Benkler has given readers all manner of
collaborative tools to discuss the book and take the ideas forward. You’ll want
a hard copy to thumb through, though. This is an important book.
This review was first published in the Financial Times. We are very grateful
to Paul Miller for granting us permission to reprint it here.
Bruce A. Tate and Curt Hibbs
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-10132-5
182 pages
£ 20.99
Published: 5th September 2006
reviewed by Paul Waring
As a programmer with several years of experience in various languages
(primarily using C-style syntax), a book which describes itself as “for
experienced developers who are new to Rails and possibly to Ruby” is just what
I’m looking for. I’m already familiar with the general concepts of programming
but would like to find out more about this ‘Ruby on Rails’ thing that everyone
seems to be raving about, and this new book from O’Reilly promises to bring me
up to speed without being too patronising.
The first chapter of the book, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, provides the
reader with a very brief introduction to Ruby on Rails, followed by an
explanation of the Model View Controller design pattern, which is a paradigm
shift for many programmers. The coverage of how to set up a Ruby on Rails
environment is somewhat sparse (though there is an appendix that covers this
topic in more detail), but this is acceptable given that the goal of the book
is to get experienced developers up and running quickly rather than holding
their hands every step of the way. The first chapter also lacks a discussion of
Ruby’s weaknesses for the reader to weigh up against the list of its strengths,
but it could be argued that readers of this book have already decided that Ruby
is the right choice for them and just want to get to grips with it as quickly
as possible.
After the introduction, the book wastes no time in getting stuck in with
practical examples of what can be done with Ruby on Rails. The authors jump
straight in with database access and manipulation and within just a few
chapters they have already explained all the basics, including templates and
scaffolding, and created a functional photo gallery. This mini-project is
expanded on throughout the book with the introduction of advanced features such
as drag and drop which, despite being complicated to implement from scratch,
requires less than 100 lines of code when using Ruby on Rails.
The most pleasing part of the book for me though was the dedication of the
final chapter to testing. Usually this is a topic which is either dragged out
to form entire books (and therefore is so tedious that no one bothers to do it)
or is skipped over as being something trivial which you can do at the end of a
project if you finish before the deadline. This book manages to get the balance
right between emphasing the importance of testing, whilst making it simple
enough that there is the possibility of developers actually bothering to do it.
Overall, this is a good book to read if you match the target audience exactly,
i.e. you are an experienced developer who can pick up new languages fairly
easily and could find out for yourself how to setup a Rails environment on your
development platform of choice. However, if this description doesn’t sound like
you at all I’d strongly recommend a more basic introduction to Ruby on Rails,
because this book won’t throw you a lifeline should you start to sink part way
through reading it.
Jeffrey E F Friedl
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-52812-4
542 pages
£ 31.99
Published: 18th August 2006
reviewed by John Collins
Regular expressions are a well-established part of the currency of the
computer world, especially the UNIX and Linux sub-worlds. From their
humble beginnings in grep and ed, then sed, awk and lex, they
really expanded in facilities with Perl and software which adopted the
Perl style, such as Python, Java and even .NET.
I sometimes get the impression that programmers have used the regular
expression (which I abbreviate to “RE” but the author of this book to
“regex”) as a test of their virility and have written their own parser
with slightly different features (I plead guilty to doing this myself at
one time). Most UNIX systems have “regex” and “regexp” libraries which
have different syntax and features (that’s my excuse for writing my own
version!). There are two basic styles “grep” and “ed” style, in which
()s stand for themselves and have to be escaped for grouping and the
“egrep” and “perl” style which is the other way around, but you often
have to remember whether the version you are dealing with support things
like b (word boundary) or [:alpha:].
This book introduces regular expressions and takes the reader through all the
obscure extensions introduced by Perl such as non-greedy matching (which I find
quite useful as (.*?): looks a lot neater to me than
([^:]*): and similar), atomic and possessive matching, look-ahead
and look-behind expressions etc.
The author is clearly a serious Perl programmer and most of the examples are
taken from Perl. Some of the material, for example interpolating Perl variables
and executing expressions, are entirely Perl dependent. Other languages, such
as Python, get mentions in passing, in the style “this is how you do the Perl
thing we’ve just described in the following list of languages”. Java does
rather better, as does VB.NET and PHP but I get the feeling that the author’s
first love is Perl.
I think the book describes the world of Regular Expressions well as far as it
goes. Python and other language enthusiasts will miss proper sections on their
languages. Major omissions to me are descriptions and use of the various C
libraries, in particular the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) library
which is worth using for all new software. I’d also like a nice appendix or two
or a pull-out card listing the syntax of some of the more obscure constructs
and what is available in what version of regular expressions.
I think this book will probably be of most use to Perl programmers trying to
dream up constructs to achieve particular tasks but it may well disappoint
other people.
David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-10101-5
810 pages
£ 31.99
Published: 8th September 2006
reviewed by Alain Williams
I come at this from the point of view of having used the 1st edition of this
book by the same authors, published in 2003. Obvious differences are that the
new book is 784 pages in 26 chapters (up from 608 and 21) and covers PHP5, but
the iguana on the front cover does not appear to have aged.
Some of the recipes are simple things easily found from the on-line PHP manual,
eg the discussions of date() and file_exists(); far
more useful are the ones where different pieces are drawn together, for
example: storing md5 hashes of a password in a database and the corresponding
check at login; or reading mail with IMAP or POP3. Something that can be easily
found in the manual index has no place in a book like this, especially when
they are common to many programming languages. Fortunately there is much in
this book that avoids that trap, just skip over much of the chapter on arrays.
Some of the recipe titles are obscure. For instance “Introspecting Objects”
could be much better understood in an index as “Inspecting Objects’ properties
and methods”.
As expected the chapter on objects is expanded, there are lots of recipes that
illustrate new magic such as __sleep() and __set().
If you are new to PHP5 it would be worth reading this chapter all through
rather than dipping in from the index.
There are two new chapters on Web Services from the point of view of Clients
and Servers. This has become trendy and there are a lot of new PHP5 features
for SOAP, and XML; most of the discussion here is about SOAP.
There is a new chapter on security, this is welcome given the unfortunate
frequency that PHP scripts seem to appear in the bugs lists. Although useful I
feel that more good practise could have been said; but I suppose that O’Reilly
have Chris Shiflett’s book on PHP security.
The chapter on Error Handling, Debugging and Testing is also new. This covers
PHP5’s exceptions (try, catch), stack traces, control
of error logging, testing and debugging.
Regular expressions is a new chapter. The other chapters have been updated with
new recipes alongside the old ones.
As is common in a book like this there are long chunks of (downloadable) code
sometimes, unfortunately, without internal comments — come on guys, you are
trying to be helpful to your readers here!
There are a few tit-bits for system administrators as well such as a new
discussion on compiled code-caching accelerators and ab for Apache
benchmarking in a chapter on performance tuning and load testing — although it
leaves a lot unsaid.
Summary: overall it is useful, if you are into PHP — buy it.
Alex Martelli
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-00188-6
654 pages
£ 28.50
Published: 14 Mar 2003
reviewed by Graham Lee
It has long been the case that when I need a reference book for a
programming topic, I’ll check to see if there’s a Nutshell first.
Python in the Nutshell, like the rest of the series, is really easy
to search; not through the index, but because the book is divided
into a hierarchy of parts and chapters so that it’s obvious where a
particular topic will be covered.
The style in this book alternates between discussion and summary,
with language feature descriptions mainly being wordier and the
module references much more concise. This can make finding a
particular piece of information harder in the language reference, but
still works well because the discussion goes into amazing detail
about how particular features are implemented, referring to the PEPs
— online documents relating to the Python development process — where
applicable. Because Python is a moving target, the book has to refer
to three different versions of the language (2.3 to 2.5) which makes
more sense than would treating any one of the versions in vacuo, but
can complicate some descriptions.
The coverage of the “standard” library of modules is organised
thematically, and alongside tables of function references includes
some very useful examples of use. The book then closes with a
section on both the classic C Python and Java-based Jython runtimes,
and how to use Python alongside the native language in each case.
Some small mention of IronPython (a .NET implementation of Python) is
made, but as that project was not complete at the time of
publication the coverage is little more than an indication to take a
look at their website. Both it and PyPy (a Python implementation in
Python) seem mentioned just for sake of compelteness.
This book is one that will find its regular place to be not in my
bookshelf but on the desk next to the computer. Because it’s so
readily searchable, it can frequently be quicker to find that
function I’ve forgotten the name of in the Nutshell than to use
pydoc. My review copy is already showing signs of thumb attacks.
Mark Lutz
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-00925-9
1596 pages
£ 42.50
Published: 5th September 2006
reviewed by Roger Whittaker
This book has grown over the years, from a large book (First Edition) to a tome
(Second Edition) to a doorstep (this time round).
It has gained weight to the extent of 300 pages since the second edition, and
has three more chapters than previously. The structure of the book has
changed significantly, and though much of the new edition consists of the same text as
before, parts have been rewritten and some parts of the older book have been
left out or incorporated into new chapters. It does of course also reflect the
changes in the language as it has reached version 2.4 and now 2.5 (which appeared just
after the book’s publishing date).
The book itself stresses that it is to be regarded as a tutorial (or perhaps
a set of tutorials) rather than a reference book — for that see “Python in a
Nutshell” reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Graham Lee. For information in
smaller sized chunks about how to do useful stuff with Python, there is also
the “Python Cookbook”.
This book’s approach is to explain by doing. Some of the sections are fairly
small self-contained descriptions of how particular modules can be used in
practice. Other examples develop solid projects in which the author leads
you through (among others) creating a Python GUI mail client, a Python webmail
server and several fully functional GUI programs. This approach necessarily
means building on top of a lot of preparatory work in which the author creates the
infrastructure for his project first in the form of various classes and
modules. As a result you cannot expect to just quickly grab something useful
from any part of the book: you have to follow the author’s way of achieving his
results.
Unlike the second edition, this book does not come with a CD, but all the code
examples are available from the O’Reilly web site. The examples come with a
launcher which at the same time runs a simple editor written in Python (as one
of the book’s projects) allowing you to view and edit the code.
David Flanagan
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-10199-6
1018 pages
£ 35.50
Published: 25th August 2006
reviewed by Lindsay Marshall
The fifth edition. I must have reviewed this at least three times already.
Edition 4 had 916 pages and this one has 994. Probably they will crack the
thousand with the inevitable edition 6. First off let me say what I have said
before: this is the O’Reilly book I use most. It sits on my desk next to me
and I consult it regularly. It is an indispensable companion if you write
JavaScript, no matter how expert you may be. If you don’t already own a copy,
buy it, if you already have bought it then you have to think a bit more about
it: full price this is a 35 quid book. Do you need the new edition? Probably
not if you are just writing, what we might call Web 1.0 JavaScript, but if you
are messing around with all the Web 2.0 stuff like Ajax and SVG then there is a
lot of good new stuff in here (though much of it is browser specific so
beware).
There are even a few nods to the school of unobtrusive JavaScript in here, and
I am glad to say that the section on Ajax is short, informs and does not gush.
Interestingly there is no discussion of the increasingly prevalent use of
library packages such as prototype. It may be that they are waiting to see if
the fad for downloading 60K chunks of script fades away or turns into the norm
(and then comes the 6th edition with a lot more pages).
Thinking about it, if you are still writing Web 1.0 JavaScript you
probably ought to buy this to upgrade your skills. So all of you, buy
it.
Jukka K Korpela
Published by O’Reilly Media
ISBN:0-596-10121-X
704 pages
£ 42.50
Published: 28th June 2006
reviewed by Roger Whittaker
I don’t claim any specific expertise which would qualify me as a reviewer of
this book: unicode has always been something that I’ve found confusing. At
times my lack of understanding has become an irritation when (for instance) I’m
attempting to write code to process XML which contains “illegal characters”.
So this review is more about whether unicode really is “explained” by this
book.
What this book does very well, I think, is explaining and clarifying the
concepts: explaining what a character is, what a glyph is, what an encoding is,
and so on. Clear definitions are essential, and it’s confusion about these
definitions and the logical differences between them which makes the subject
tricky.
Moving to the more practical parts of the book, there is a lot of useful
material. A lot of it is reference material that’s only useful if you want
(for instance) to know about the special form of the letter ‘e’ that appears
on food packets near the quantity in grammes. There is much more information of
that general type, explaining for instance why a ‘K’ representing the symbol
for degrees Kelvin can and should be regarded as different from the standard
letter K. This can all get a bit metaphysical: is the symbol for electrical
resistance the same as the capital Greek letter Omega, or is it not?
There is of course some discussion of Far Eastern and Middle Eastern
alphabets as well as mathematical and other symbols, but the detailed tables at
the back of the book mostly cover what might be regarded as extensions and
additions to Western character sets.
Unfortunately the book is rather Windows-centric, particularly in terms of
describing input methods and the like. That’s perhaps a reflection of the fact
that in our world these things are less standardised and more complex.
The author is Finnish, and some of the screenshots have been taken on a
Finnish-language version of Windows. This doesn’t really matter, but came as
a slight surprise when I first encountered it.
I’d like to have seen more about the handling of unicode in Perl, Python and
other such languages, as in my experience that’s been where the problems of the
fact that one is dealing with unicode hits one.
But in general, this is a very good introduction to unicode and I shall
certainly be revisiting it.
UKUUG offers a wide variety of membership benefits. As well as
the direct benefits provided by UKUUG itself, our aim is to continue to
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The benefits available include: O’Reilly book discounts, GNU Press book
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For some of the benefits an UKUUG email address
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To take advantage of the O’Reilly online ordering with the UKUUG discount,
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UKUUG continues to accept cheques and BACS/purchase orders for books.
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John Collins is a UKUUG Council member and runs Xi Software
Ltd which specialises in System Management tools for UNIX and Linux systems. Xi
Software is based in Welwyn Garden City and has been in existence for nearly 21
years.
Sunil Das is a freelance consultant providing Unix and Linux training via various computing companies.
Leslie Fletcher works part-time as UKUUG Campaigns
Manager, with the brief of improving the visibility and credibility
of UKUUG and its mission in key arenas — business, politics, public
service, education. His main first-hand involvement with Open Source
is as chair of governors at Parrs Wood Technology College in South
Manchester. He also has some experience in IT management, having
been head of the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences
at Salford University for five years.
Graham Lee is a Software Testing Manager, in which he ensures
his popularity with his colleagues by telling them their code is broken.
Lindsay Marshall developed the Newcastle Connection
distributed UNIX software and created the first Internet cemetery.
He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He also runs the RISKS digest
website and the Bifurcated Rivets weblog.
Greg Matthews is a senior systems administrator and manages
the Unix and Linux support team for the Natural Environment Research Council.
Jane Morrison is Company Secretary and Administrator for
UKUUG, and manages the UKUUG office at the Manor House in Buntingford. She has
been involved with UKUUG administration since 1987. In addition to UKUUG, Jane
is Company Secretary for a trade association (Fibreoptic Industry Association)
that she also runs from the Manor House office.
Paul Miller is a Demos associate working on innovation,
organisational change and democratic renewal. Paul’s current Demos projects
are: Atlas of Ideas — A major study of the implications of the rise of India,
China and South Korea as new centres for scientific and technological research
and development. He is co-author of a number of Demos reports. Paul has
worked with a wide range of partners from business, the public sector and the
not-for-profit sectors. Paul has a degree in Physics from the University of
Nottingham and an MProf in Leadership for Sustainable Development from
Middlesex University.
Ray Miller works as a Unix Systems Programmer at the
University of Oxford, where he manages the Systems Development and Support team
in the University’s Computing Services. This small team manages more than 60
Debian GNU/Linux servers providing email, web, and other network services to
more than 30,000 users across the University. He was Chairman of UKUUG Council
from April 2004 until December 2006. His interests outside of computing
include cycle touring, cooking and real ales.
Peter H Salus has been (inter alia) the Executive Director of
the USENIX Association and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation. He
is the author of “A Quarter Century of Unix” (1994) and other books.
Paul Waring is a postgraduate student at the University of
Manchester and is currently part way through a masters course in Classics and
Ancient History. When not lost in the fields of Athenian Democracy or learning
Latin, he works as a freelance IT consultant to help pay for an ever expanding
library of historical texts.
Roger Whittaker was a member of UKUUG Council between 2000 and
2006 and looks after the newsletter. He works for Novell Technical Services at
Bracknell.
Alain Williams is Chairman of UKUUG and works as an
independent Unix and Linux consultant, running Parliament Hill
Computers Ltd.