The trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization UnifiedPatents, there will be about eight thousand tech related patent disputes this year, with over six thousand of these expected to go to trial.
FOSS Force
For years, even in 2015, web tutorials, college textbooks and lab simulators have all been teaching the traditional networking utilities, such as arp, ifconfig, netstat and route. Whether you know it or not, most of these commands were deprecated years ago. They were replaced with commands from the iproute2 suite of utilities. Most Linux distros have continued to install the traditional tools, but CentOS, Arch and now openSUSE (among others), are moving to put them into deprecated status. That means we’ll need to start getting used to the new tools.
For those not familiar, the 2.2 Linux kernel revision (way back in the olden days) brought about some changes to the way the kernel handled networking. New features were introduced back then that had not been implemented anywhere else. The old tools use the /proc interface, while the newer tools use the newer kernels’ netlink interface. At least some of the older tools are no longer in active development. The bottom line is that the iproute2 suite offers some definite advantages over the old tools.
Anyone who has read FOSS Force for the last couple of months knows that I lost my voice to cancer and that I’ve become personally involved in getting a decent text to speech (TTS) application developed. Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.
None of them even approach usability for the everyday computer user. None. And you would think that of all these choices, one of them has to work…or provides documentation reasonable enough for everyone. You would think.
On Friday, two business journals ran stories on Oracle’s latest tactic for selling its lagging cloud services. The articles should serve as a warning to business readers, as they say in effect, “If you’re using Oracle software to run your businesses, you should consider running an internal audit to ascertain you’re in compliance, because you don’t want to be caught out of compliance if Redwood City’s goon squad pays a visit.”
FOSS Week in Review
Money: Can’t live with it, and can’t live without it. OK, maybe you actually can live with it, but money seems to be the overriding theme this week when it comes to FOSS news. With this being payday for most of you, try not to spend too much mental currency on some of the developments this week, like:
MS Writes a Check: Well, this was probably inevitable. With a generous donation, Microsoft has become a gold contributor to the OpenBSD project — the first gold contributor — in an effort to get OpenBSD’s help in porting OpenSSH to Windows. This comes from a report on ZDNet, where Steven Vaughan-Nichols tells the tale of checkbook participation in open source as “the best option…for our team to adopt an industry proven solution,” says Microsoft’s Angel Calvo. A gold contributor writes a check for anywhere between $25,000 to $50,000, so even at the minimum, the OpenBSD Foundation scores big. In exchange, Microsoft gets to port OpenSSH, which arguably is the gold standard for remote administration. Of course, it isn’t revealed how much, in code, Microsoft is going to contribute going forward, but as long as the money is there…I guess the money is there.
There’s been an interesting development on the patent front, which has been deceptively quiet for some time. Surprisingly, the latest news involves a case that went to trial nearly two years ago. It’s not a surprise, however, that the case was tried in the Eastern District of Texas, infamous for awarding verdicts in favor of patent holders. Also not surprising, the plaintiff is a non-practicing entity (NPE), a fancy term for “troll.”
I was planning to have an easy Tuesday, but then I got wrapped up in Reddit. But not just any Reddit topic — this one was special; as many of them are, of course, but let’s just put that aside for a second.
Reddit had a topic in r/Linux entitled “Should I /make/ my kid use Linux?” And because I have, um, a “history” with this topic (e.g., I have a child and she does use Linux and free/open source software, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News), I am going to go out on a limb and say the following:
Encourage your kid, by all means necessary, to use Linux? Absolutely, because he or she will want to use it from the start.
The Reddit topic is worth a read. If you haven’t done so already, go there now. There are a lot of good posts, but my favorite is from someone with the handle Robsteady, who says, “TL;DR Don’t MAKE them use it, just set them up so they grow accustomed to that being what gets used. Raise them in it instead of trying to change them to it eventually.”
There are pivotal times in our collective and personal histories when we remember exactly where we were. Those moments do not fade through the years, ever. For me, that first memory was President of the United States John Kennedy being assassinated. I wasn’t old enough to understand the weight or importance placed upon the event, but I knew, based on the reactions around me, something terrible and far-reaching had happened. Something terribly profound. Parents were called to come get their children. School would resume in three days.
And then, there I was, standing in my pajamas at 10:30 p.m., staring at the screen of our first color television set. My mom made us stay up late to watch “the most important event in history,” according to her. Neil Armstrong was about to set the first human footprint on the moon. Although later I thought the real important event was David Scott taking the coolest dune buggy ride ever during Apollo 15. Of lesser impact to most might be the Kent State massacre, Woodstock and the death of John Lennon.
We might as well start with the moral of this story: Don’t protect Windows with Windows.
For at least a decade, Microsoft has been chanting the mantra, “at Microsoft security is job one,” over and over and over. During this time, it’s repeated this mantra often enough to convince a lot of people that Windows is much safer than it once was, which I suppose is true since it couldn’t have gotten much worse. However, a new report from AV-Test proves the company isn’t yet ready to move up to the next mantra level and begin chanting, “at Microsoft we do security right,” because clearly it doesn’t.