Stories by: Nicholas Petreley

The spirit of open-source might once have been summed up as "share and share alike." This philosophy has its roots in the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the license for the Linux kernel (the operating system engine) and most of the core operating system utilities that come with Linux.

Life imitates art, or at least popular entertainment, more often than we'd like to think. Some of the current drama in the IT industry has intriguing parallels to a recent, popular movie sequel. Here's an excerpt of how the screenplay might go in the IT universe version:

It's time for yet another standards rant. This time, I have in my sights a far more subtle villain than programs that refuse to run properly if you're not running the right version of Windows. It's more subtle than the nightmare of reaching yet another Web site that refuses to work unless you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer. I'm talking about the CPU in your computer, where all the real computing action takes place.

When it comes to opera in the traditional sense of the word, I prefer Boris Badenov to Boris Godounov. When it comes to Opera the Web browser, however, I've been avid fan for years. For quite a long stretch, Opera was the fastest browser I could find. I'm not sure it could win that title anymore, but it's still quite fast and it's more feature-rich than ever — it has more features than I could hope to cover in one article.

The SCO Group vs. IBM lawsuit gives off a subtle, unpleasant odor I couldn't quite place. When SCO set its sights on Linux distributors and even Linux itself, the source of the stench became unmistakable -- Redmond. It was too early to make an accusation when the suit was filed since any such claim lacking even circumstantial evidence would be nothing more than a conspiracy rant.

A relatively new distribution called Gentoo Linux is gaining a rapidly increasing, rabidly loyal group of users. The increasing popularity of Gentoo is almost difficult to explain, given that it's clearly a distribution by geeks, for geeks and for nobody but geeks. Obviously a geek can set up a Gentoo system for a non-geek, so you may find novices using Gentoo. You just won't find many novices installing it.

To each his own, but I like eye candy. For all their benefits and power, X11 and X Window System managers have been among the most drab and poorly rendered graphical environments for years. Recent versions of XFree86 began to support anti-aliased fonts, which helped. But that's pure protein. It's good for you, and it helps you get your work done. Only recently has XFree86 begun to add the sugary content that we shallow folks crave.

It is time for a radically new approach to software installation for Linux. Starting with this article, I will examine the problems with existing approaches to software installation, look at the technical issues, look at some of the alternatives, and propose a framework for a solution. Let me be clear that this is not an attempt to evaluate existing package-managers. I most often recommend Red Hat Linux, I like Mandrake and Knoppix, I use Debian, and I'm about to try Gentoo, so I'm not here to push one package-format or distribution-type over another. I may like one more than another, but none of them make it sufficiently easy and error-free to access, install and upgrade software.

Evans Data hired me to help out with a research report focused on Linux developers. They surveyed a broad range of developers, including VARs, consultants, developers working for ISVs and IT-developers for companies of every imaginable size. It turns out there are so many jewels in the survey results that it's difficult to decide which ones to put on display here at LinuxWorld.

I believe I have stumbled upon two of Microsoft's most-startling and best-kept secrets, the ramifications of which for Linux and open source are profound.

When I ran into Slava Pestov, the core developer of Jedit, on IRC, I asked him what he thought of some of the increasingly popular Java-based Integrated Development Environments such as Eclipse and NetBeans. To paraphrase his opinion, IDEs are just bloated editors loaded down with a bunch of wizards. I might agree -- with the possible exception of Eclipse, which isn't editor-centric. Where Slava and I probably differ is that I like both; there are times when I want a lean, mean editor and times when I enjoy a good, bloated editor packed with wizards.