Free Republic

Largo love Linux more than ever by Robin Miller, NewsForge We're back in Largo, Florida, checking on advances in the Linux-based network they use to run the city's computers that we wrote about last year. True to Largo's "City of Progress" motto, these guys have not been standing still. Now they're talking about Linux-based terminals in all the city's police cars. Microsoft has tried -- and failed -- to bring them into the proprietary fold. And, possibly most important, we have an amazing cost figure that ought to make you ask your local politicians why their IT operations aren't as...

We're back in Largo, Florida, checking on advances in the Linux-based network they use to run the city's computers that we wrote about last year. True to Largo's "City of Progress" motto, these guys have not been standing still. Now they're talking about Linux-based terminals in all the city's police cars. Microsoft has tried -- and failed -- to bring them into the proprietary fold. And, possibly most important, we have an amazing cost figure that ought to make you ask your local politicians why their IT operations aren't as efficient as Largo's. Last time we visited, we spoke mostly...

BILL GATES' recent mission to India seems to have backfired.At the time, His Billness was rightly nailed for cynically exploiting a largely manufactured AIDS "crises" on the subcontinent -- coincidental with his flying counterstrike against the Indian government's earlier declaration to employ Linux throughout its offices and in education.Now Reuters reports that the Vole's announced $400 Million in investments and *cough* gifts to India's schools seems to have had the opposite of its intended effect of stifling Indian interest in Linux.In its coverage of a three-day Linux conference attended by 2,000 users in Bangalore last week, the wire service wrote:...

IBM will announce a new low-end server Wednesday, its first Power processor-based system that can run the Linux operating system without needing IBM's AIX as well. IBM's pSeries machines already are available with Linux but have also required AIX, IBM's version of Unix. Now, as expected, Big Blue has modified Linux sufficiently that its p630 servers will start up without AIX. The p630 is the lowest-end product to use IBM's 64-bit Power4 processor, and Big Blue is positioning the product as a lower-cost Linux alternative to Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based offerings. Itanium, like Power4 and Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, is a 64-bit processor...

Windows 2000 servers are cheaper to run than Linux ones, sometimes, says an IDC study which was by strange coincidence sponsored by Microsoft. The study will come as welcome relief to Microsoft salespeople who have been parroting the 'cheaper than Linux' line to general disbelief, but whether anyone else will believe it is another matter. Nor indeed should we take the study at anything like face value. IDC set itself the task of measuring total cost of ownership of the two server operating systems over a five year period, segmenting this into five areas of server operation. Over a...

Does Free Linux Have Hidden Costs? IDC study says Windows is cheaper than Linux for common business tasks. Matt Berger, IDG News Service Monday, December 02, 2002 Organizations running Windows 2000 spend less in the long run for some tasks, such as print and file serving, than organizations running Linux, according to a new survey from research company IDC. IDC's findings, published Monday in a study commissioned by Microsoft, suggest that the Windows 2000 Server operating system has a lower total cost of ownership than Linux, mainly due to savings associated with staffing. The findings contradict some claims that Linux...

One of Microsoft's special strengths is the speed and intensity with which the sales team (right the way up to Bill, for government and really big accounts) goes in whenever a defection is threatened. As we noted last week Open Source is currently in the counter-insurgency SWAT team's crosshairs, with who knows what discounts and pressures being deployed to nip rebellion in the bud. Who knows? Well, the would-be defectors, of course. What? How does free server licences grab you? One defector who declined to hock his soul to Microstopheles in exchange for absolute temporal power in the IS department,...

An anonymous reader writes"Everything I have read concering MS's future plans: Palladium, Client/Server tie in, Office 11 breaking backward compatability, 3 year licensing plans, product activation - all leave me with a foreboding sense of the potential synergy for furthering Microsoft's goals of complete domination. Now this article tells about Longhorn's new filesystem being based on the the future Yukon server. And surprise it will only work with new hardware, which they want to be Palladium enabled. And all pitched to you under the rubric of Security & Efficency. For years MS has been accused of only wanting people to...

The Initiative for Software Choice, which counts Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel among its backers, said in comments filed Tuesday that the department should "avoid crafting needless and potentially detrimental IT policy to promote the use" of open-source software. "Open source" means every software developer can view the source code for software, modify it, and use it for free. The initiative, which launched in May and is chaired by a group called CompTIA, an organization that has close ties to Microsoft, is worried about a recent report that concluded the Defense Department relies on open-source software and recommended its further...

From a slashdot.org posting of a BBC News article:"Citing security flaws that lead to ads and spys on Microsoft infested computers the BBC in this article recomends avoiding Internet Explorer."Ain't it the truth? Mostly its about adware & spyware and other wretched bits of software that make the internet suck a little more each day.

Japan to study Linux operating system for government REUTERS ?[ WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2002 11:41:31 AM ] TOKYO: Eager to catch up with nations that are switching to computer systems other than Microsoft Windows, Japan will study the possibility of using open-source software such as Linux at the government level. The public management ministry is earmarking 50 million yen ($410,000) for a panel of scholars and computer experts, including Microsoft officials, to finish the study by March 2004, Tatsuya Kawachi, a ministry deputy director, said Wednesday. Japan lags behind Germany, the United States, China and other nations looking into or...

Nuclear Winter? More Like Global Warming Contributed by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier Send this Article Print this Article Talkback Related Stories osOpinion.com November 19, 2002 The goal of a proprietary software company is to increase profit margins. An IT department strives to deliver needed services as inexpensively as possible. Those two goals are diametrically opposed to one another. Is mainstream acceptance for Open Source a "nuclear winter" for the software industry? I certainly hope so. Some argue that Open Source and Free Software are best left as a niche market, and that widespread acceptance of software without license fees will harm...

MP opens windows to Linux ANIL SHARMA TIMES NEWS NETWORK ?[ TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2002 01:42:20 AM ] BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh has shut the door on Bill Gates. The state government schemes will use Linux software. Chief minister Digvijay Singh personally conveyed this to Microsoft boss Bill Gates during an interaction last week in New Delhi. “For us it is not a question of Microsoft versus Linux. It is just a matter of choosing between a free software and a monopoly. We feel that when we are putting public information out in the open, then it should not be through...

| Understanding the Windows EAL4 Evaluation | | Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph.D.Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute By now, you may have heard that Microsoft has received a Common Criteria certification for Windows 2000 (with service pack 3) at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4. Since a bunch of people know that I work on operating system security and on security assurance, I've received lots of notes asking "What does this mean?" On this page I will try to answer the question. For the impatient the answer is: Security experts have been saying for years that the the security of...

The Japanese government is contemplating to replace Microsoft Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security. According to the local newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the planned move came in the wake of recent event of leakage of secure data from Japan's military network. Instead the government is looking the possibility of adopting open source programs like Linux. Reuters TOKYO: The Japanese government will consider replacing Microsoft Corp's Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security, a newspaper said on Saturday. The safety of computer networks is under...

According to a report published November 12 by Aberdeen Group^, "Security advisories for open source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories - about one of every two advisories - published for the first 10 months of 2002 by Cert (www.cert.org^, Computer Emergency Response Team)." Aberdeen says Microsoft products have had no new virus or trojan horse advisories in the first 10 months of 2002, while Unix, Linux, and Open Source software went from one in 2001 to two in the first 10 months of 2002, that in the same 2002 time period "networking...

<p>Hackers like Jeremy Allison would rather pore over source code than legal documents, but the recent Microsoft antitrust settlement decision has the Samba leader thinking about lawsuits. Patent lawsuits.</p> <p>The open-source developer fears that, having settled its long-running antitrust suit, Microsoft will now become more aggressive in competing with open-source software. And for Samba -- software that allows Windows machines to read files on Linux servers -- as well as other open-source projects that compete with Microsoft's products, that may mean dealing with patent lawsuits.</p>

Microsoft's New Privacy RowIt's not the EFF that's worried about privacy this time.  It's bankers like Lester Warby, CIO of Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union, who feel that the latest license terms might well put the him in violation of new federal privacy laws.   by Dan Orzechof internetnews.com [October 23, 2002] Lester Warby is the kind of guy who reads the fine print. And the fine print for the latest updates to Microsoft Windows has him worried. Warby—who is the chief information officer at Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union—believes that the terms for the end user license agreement (EULA) for Microsoft's...

Memo to Bill Gates: What a mess. Less than a week after a court-approved deal ends the antitrust case, Microsoft's back in the spotlight. The latest Halloween memo portrays your company as utterly obsessed with the open-source software movement but utterly confused about how best to proceed. I can only imagine the state of confusion. Microsoft has tried to persuade developers and users for the last four years that there's no there there--and to no avail. Your minions better get a handle soon. The question is whether that's at all possible, but in the meantime, here are a few items...

Apple, IBM, and Sun have opened up their software code to the public in their battle against Redmond. It just might work. While the appeals court ruling last week upholding Microsoft's (MSFT) settlement with the Justice Department was a molar or two away from being toothless, Microsoft faces a bigger potential check to its dominance today than it did at the height of the browser wars five years ago. This comes not from an ever-vigilant judiciary but (more fittingly) from an ever-adapting market. And it is taking the form of Linux and other types of open-source software being developed by...