Small Business: Opinions

I've loved Firefox since version 0.93. It was so much better than Internet Explorer and the other alternatives that I couldn't imagine using anything else. But, then Firefox's memory leaks went from annoying me to ticking me off; I started having real stability problems with it on both Windows and Linux; and security holes started appearing far more often. I was about to switch to Safari on Windows and MacOS and Konqueror on Linux, when Mozilla got serious about not just fixing, but rebuilding Firefox. Now, Firefox 3 release candidate 1 was released early. Based on my quick look at it, I may end up sticking with Firefox after all.

On the response sheets I get from those who attend the speeches I make at the ITEC conferences, "Reducing hardware and software costs" always ranks in the top third of important issues. One of my goals is to help SMBs maximize the value of technology in their business. Sometimes that means spending less, sometimes it means spending more. Let's talk about spending less today.

The ever-contentious Linux Security Modules (LSM) API is being debated once again on linux-kernel, not its removal, which Linus Torvalds came down firmly against, but whether it should allow security modules to be loaded dynamically. As part of 2.6.24, Torvalds merged a patch to convert LSM into a static interface, but has indicated a willingness to revert it. The key sticking point is whether there are real security modules that require the ability to be runtime-loaded.

For a company whose motto is "Do no evil," it's interesting how often Google's customers suspect them of it.

The wealth of open source software development goodies is heaven for the developer community, but it's hell on an awards committee. Considering IDEs, debuggers, defect trackers, code coverage tools, unit testers, load testers, and so on, we could have come up with more awards here than the rest of the Bossies combined. Then there were paths that could only lead to trouble. Could we really choose a best language? Or a best development platform? Could we pick Python over Perl, or Rails over Mono?

Let me start by asking if any of you have experience with Plesk? Plesk from SWsoft is a Web-based control panel for Windows and Linux servers that has been adopted by a number of hosting providers.

Deploying Google Apps could be a "career-limiting move for enterprise architects" if they expect too much from the software-as-a-service collaboration suite and its "rudimentary" feature set, the Burton Group research and consulting firm says in a new report.

Last week, a judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns the rights to Unix code and that SCO can't sue IBM for violating rights it doesn't own, signaling that the endless, US$5 billion legal battle over Linux may soon be at an end.

Talk to anyone who attends Black Hat USA conferences and you'll hear about how boring the talks are, how nobody learned anything new, how the hacks were known last year -- not to mention the ridiculous posers. Ask those same attendees if they plan to attend next year, and they say "yeah" as fast as a poker player pushing all in with pocket aces.

There are scores of IT industry executives who wouldn't dare speak to me, or any other journalist, without a public relations person in the room. Most of the time these people take notes quietly alongside their client, but an irritating few can't resist piping in. "What I think so-and-so meant to say was that we think sales are going to be really strong," they might add, for example, after a VP of operations has given a more ambiguous answer to my question. These kinds of people are going to love Google's latest content strategy.

Long-time LWN readers will know that the Linux security module (LSM) API is controversial at best. To many, it has failed in its purpose, which is enabling the development of competing approaches to hardened Linux system; the only significant in-tree security module remains SELinux.