Monthly Archive:: August 2007

SCO has published a statement after the court ruling in their case against Novell: "The company is obviously disappointed with the ruling issued last Friday. However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after Novell transferred the assets to SCO in 1995." And at the end: "Although the district judge ruled in Novell's favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here."

Christen Krogh is responsible for all software development at Opera. Krogh received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Glasgow University and his Ph.D from the University of Oslo. On market share: "We have between 10 and 15 million users of the desktop browser, more than 10 million cumulative Opera Mini users, come pre-installed on more than 40 million mobile phones and are available to anyone using Nintendo Wii or Nintendo DS."

"A few months ago, the GNOME Mobile Platform was announced to the public. One of the main forces behind the launch of this initiative was Nokia, which uses a lot of GNOME-components in its Linux-based Internet Tablets Nokia 770 and N800. During this years GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to sit down with Carlos Guerreiro, Nokias Manager for Open Source Software, to talk - amidst other things - about the not so different needs of personal computers and mobile devices, about the necessity for GTK+ 3.0 and the impact of the iPhone launch."

KernelTrap offers an informative look back in time at the November 1991 release of the 0.10 Linux kernel, continuing their historical series of articles about the early beginnings of Linux. Quite entertaining is a quote from Linus Torvalds talking about when he accidentally deleted the Minix partition that he was developing Linux from, causing him to make Linux usable for more than just reading and posting to newsgroups. The article also discusses the creation of the linux-activists mailing list, offering browsable archives of that first Linux discussion forum, full of interesting gems. And finally it describes the first Linux distribution, MCC Interim, which was created and used by the University of Manchester to teach C programming and UNIX.

In the view of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware, today's modern operating system is destined for the dustbin, a scenario unlikely to please Microsoft or any of the Linux vendors. Rosenblum's keynote on Thursday wrapped up the LinuxWorld conference, preaching the virtues of virtualization, which he believes will eventually make today's complex, some would say bloated, operating systems obsolete. "It's just going to go away", Rosenblum said.

"There is a sub-genre of historical fiction one could loosely call 'what-ifs'. The computer industry also has a number of such obvious what if scenarios. What if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn't lucked into the IBM contract for DOS, which was the basis for Microsoft's eventual hegemony? What if the UNIX operating system hadn't split into several minor variants, but gone on to become what Linux later became, only a decade or two before? What if BeOS had gone on to succeed on the desktop...?"