UpFRONT

In my interview with Craig Burton in the August 2000 issue of Linux Journal (“Uncollapsing Open Source Distinctions: Talking with Craig Burton”, p. 16), I said “historically, the Open Source movement has tried to move away from the Free Software movement's anti-commercial rhetoric and policies.”

A few days ago I got an e-mail from Richard Stallman, under the subject “Who's anti-commercial?”. His answer: not him. And not the Free Software movement, either:

Since I was making distinctions between two movements, I decided to share Richard's correspondence with the prime mover of the other one, Eric S. Raymond, hoping to triangulate a bit on the full extent of my error. “Okay,” I wrote, “did I step in it here, or (so far as what he quotes) am I right? Or sort of right?”

ESR wrote back, “It's a tough call. No, the official interpretation of FSF doctrine is not anti-commercial. In that sense, yes, you stepped in it.”

An on-the-other-hand explanation (OTOH) followed, but it's not one that RMS found agreeable. Nor was RMS's disagreement with ESR's OTOH agreeable with ESR. The e-mail volley between the two gentlemen continues to fill my in-box, so I'll leave that one alone for now.

Meanwhile, I invite readers to visit the Free Software Foundation site at http://www.fsf.org/. Here is part of the FSF's explanation of free software:

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, with or without modifications, gratis or charging a fee, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do this means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.

So the statement, and I, stand corrected. For my thoughts about related matters, see this month's “Linux for Suits” on page 20.

—Doc Searls

by Reginald Charney

Over the last 15 months, the languages with the most growth have been those directly related to the Internet. Thus, XML, Perl, HTML, and Java have flourished. However, even these high-flyers have suffered reversals in the last few months (see www.accu-usa.org for more details). It is interesting to note that the highest flyers are also showing the most deceleration in demand.

One of the major changes in the demand deceleration of platforms is that Windows 2000 has now joined the other platforms that are experiencing decreased demand. Interestingly enough, while demand for individual flavors of Windows has decreased, overall demand for Windows is still growing, albeit slowly. This includes all dialects of Windows.

You must have been on an island not to know that LinuxWorld was in San Jose in August. It had so many exhibitors that some of them overflowed the exhibit hall and ended up out in the hallways. Rumor has it that next year's West Coast LinuxWorld will move to San Francisco's Moscone Center to handle the anticipated larger crowds. There also was a lot of big names there: IBM, Dell, Compaq SGI, HP, Sun, as well as the usual Linux crowd, such as VA Linux and all the major Linux distributors. The BSD folks also had an interesting presence.

If anything can be said about future trends, it has to be Linux for embedded systems. In contrast, last fall's theme was Linux in the business world, and this year delivered great growth in that arena. At this show, most of the software exhibitors were providers of B2B solutions. Two products caught my eye: the color PDA, Compaq iPaq, running PocketLinux; and the black and white Helio. At $500 and $200, respectively, they will give Palm a real run for its money (http://www.PocketLinux.com/). eGrail (http://www.eGrail.org/) is an open-source provider of content management software for the Web. It provides server-based access to the central repository and tools through any browser.

“Five years from now the government will measure open-source project starts the way it now measures housing starts.”

—Bill Weinberg, MontaVista

“In any business model you need someone to sue. That's the American way.”

—Bill Weinberg, MontaVista

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.”

—Erica Jong

“The condition of the free man is that he does not live for the benefit of another.”

—Aristotle

“They rely on customers to find uses for minicomputers, rather than burdening the company with huge costs of developing and marketing applications of its own. Digital salesmen, engineers selling to other engineers, nurture strong and lasting relationships with customers...it's surprising how little they've caused their own growth. For years, they've been dragged along by interesting applications their customers came up with.”

—From In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman (1982), on the subject of Digital Equipment Corporation.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

—Douglas Adams

Disease can be cured; fate is incurable.

—Chinese proverb

“Prediction is especially difficult. Especially about the future.”

—Niels Bohr

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

—John McFee

“If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.”

—John McFee (on geology)

“I am the last bastard of free speech.”

—Howard Stern

Takeoffs are optional. Landings are mandatory.

—Sign in small airport

“The average knowledge worker will outlive the average employing organization. This is the first time in history that this has happened.”

—Peter Drucker

“Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.”

—Jeff Raskin

“It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”

—Andrew Jackson

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

—Bertrand Russell

“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”

—George Box.

The original BuzzPhraser was created by the staff in the office of my old company in 1990 or so. It took the form of a spreadsheet that we gradually filled with overused buzzwords. To qualify, they had to work in a phrase the way a blank tile works in Scrabble: you can use it anywhere, but it has no value.

We sorted these words into a series of columns: adverbs, adjectives, adnouns (nouns used as adjectives), nouns, prefixes and suffixes. After the columns began to overflow, I thought “Hmm...BS seems to be programmable. Let's make something here.” So I got together with Ray Miller of Turtlelips Productions and we (mostly Ray) crafted a Hypercard stack that put together random buzzphrases from the table, based on various user-defined combinations of modifiers, nouns, prefixes and suffixes. BuzzPhraser made a bit of news and then quickly became one of the most-downloaded files on both AOL and Compuserve.

Several years ago, Charles Roth (the prime author of Caucus, the primo conferencing software) kindly adapted BuzzPhraser to the Web, where it has served ever since, burping up useful but value-free generica for publicists and their enemies everywhere. Examples:

Now Charles has completely rewritten the entire site in Javascript and open sourced it. To get the source, go to http://www.buzzphraser.com/. And let us know what you do with it.

—Doc Searls

In the August 1999 issue of Linux Journal, Bruce Fryer wrote a piece called “Thinkful Wishing” that envisioned “a Linux-based iMac”. Here was his design: “Use nothing but end-of-life components with no fan and no floppy so it can be built dirt cheap. Boot from the CD-ROM drive. Solder everything onto the boards including memory, with the possible exception of a communications slot. We're talking about a black and white box here: simple and reliable as an old phone. Shoot for a $500+ price point, complete with all network connections, OS and software, including management agents. Put the money in memory and display, which ought to be active matrix, if there's any way.” It goes on, but you get the drift.

Pretty soon you will be able to get one, pretty much to that spec, from New Internet Computer, or NIC, http://www.thinknic.com/. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps its because yes, indeed, this is the latest incarnation of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's thin client. While the original “NC”, or Network Computer, was conceived as a kind of terminal, the NIC is a Linux workstation. It boots Linux 2.2 off the CD-ROM, along with Netscape Navigator 4.7 and a catalog of plug-ins. The hardware is a roster of generics: 266MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 24x CD-ROM, 2 USB ports, 10/100 base T MB Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, speakers. Applications and storage will reportedly be handled by a remote server (though it can save to “a capable third-party Internet storage system”. It will run Windows applications too, through the Citrix MetaFrame client. Price: $199.99 (US). Bundled with a 15'' (800 X 600) monitor, $329.98. The company offers a free ISP, or you can use your own.

The CEO of The New Internet Computer Company is Gina Smith, the high- profile veteran technology columnist, radio and TV personality. Smith's most recent gig was cohosting CNET News.com. The scope of the company's ambitions is apparent in two facts that appear to guarantee a market for the boxes. One is Larry Ellison's stated commitment to spend $100 million to computerize schools. The other is Oracle's recent donation of 500 NICs to the Chicago Public School System, with a promise to match another 500 donated by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), which is chaired by General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret). In May, Oracle also donated 1200 NICs to the Dallas Independent School District.

—Doc Searls

Theory: If you tell your name server it is in charge of the domain “doubleclick.net” then it will happily answer all requests for “Where's doubleclick.net” with the smug reply, “I know everything there is to know about doubleclick.net, and I can tell you with complete confidence that there is no such place.” If browsers can't find doubleclick.net, then doubleclick.net can't track those users.

Because many users typically use each name server, this is not only one of the fastest ad blocking techniques known to freedom-loving humanity, it's also the technique that protects the most users.

find / -name named.conf

zone "localhost" {<\n>
 type master;
 file "/etc/bind/db.local";
};

It doesn't matter if the file name on the line beginning with “file” is different.

Make a copy of the localhost zone elsewhere in the file. Change the copy to read “doubleclick.net” instead of “localhost”.

zone "doubleclick.net" {<\n>
 type master;
 file "/etc/bind/db.local";
};

Save the file and exit the text editor. If you mess up the file, exit without saving and do step 3 again.

Step 4. Find out the process id of named with this command:

ps ax | grep named

Let's say you get something like this:

7907 ?        S      0:03 /usr/sbin/named

kill -HUP 7907

—Don Marti

It was six years ago this month that Phil Hughes wrote an article titled “Selecting Hardware for a Linux System”. Dust off the copy from your archives, or read it at the LJ web site (http://www.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue7/2850.html).

While Linux has quickly emerged as a winning embedded operating system, the main reason has never been speed. In fact, some forms of embedded Linux, such as Lineo's popular Embedix, make Linux a “hard” RTOS (Real Time Operating System) by combining it with a second kernel built for real-time work. MontaVista Software, Inc., however, has been implementing Linux itself as an RTOS since the company was formed early last year, and has worked to improve the performance of the Linux kernel to the point where it qualifies—all by itself—as a “hard” real-time OS. At press time (September 9) for this issue, MontaVista has delivered what it claims is a hard real-time Linux kernel, based on the current 2.4 code version. The company claims that this new kernel is fully preemptable, and provides a 30-fold improvement in performance over the 2.4 base. Claimed worst case application responsiveness will be in the hundreds of microseconds. In an interview for Embedded Linux Journal (this month's supplement to LJ), James Ready, Montavista's president & CEO, said, “This isn't just a better embedded Linux. It's a better Linux.”

As for the new kernel itself, Ready explains that the real issue is not just responsiveness to interrupts, but preemptability. Also that making Linux preemptable involved leveraging the same engineering work that yields Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP).

Hard Hat Linux is MontaVista's embedded Linux brand. The new version, which is expected to come out of peer review by January, will offer a real-time scheduler that features deterministic real-time application selection and dispatching, without altering standard Linux scheduling. There will also be an optional interrupt accelerator, based on technology from RTLinux, which is a product of FSMLabs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This has a 5x claimed interrupt responsiveness improvement. The first prototype is for IA32 platforms and was available immediately at press time from ftp://ftp.mvista.com/ A technical paper explaining MontaVista's real-time developments is available at ftp.mvista.com/pub/Real-Time/2.4.0-test6/preempt.txt. Read the interviews with both Jim Ready and Lineo's Bryan Sparks in the current Embedded Linux Journal also see responses to MontaVista's announcement by TimeSys and Lineo on page 22.

—Doc Searls