Kevin Bedell

I'm writing from a pod of Compaq computers on the show floor all running Red Hat. The pod is sponsored by HP and provides everyone with net access. Thanks! I can't tell you how exciting this show has been. I haven't been to a show in a long time that's had this kind of buzz. We've had some interesting announcements from Red Hat this week -- they announced here at the show a "Open Source Now Fund." The purpose of the fund is to, in their words, "cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license and non-profit organizations". In case you're interested, you can find out more at the Red Hat site. The launch of LinuxWorld Magazine has really been big news as well. Over 4,000 copies of the Premier Issue were originally available on this show floor, to mid- and high-level managers wanting to subscrib... (more)

Who Owns Unix?

In response to the SCO lawsuit, Eric (with consultant Rob Landley) wrote the "OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint." This position paper addresses in detail SCO's claims of intellectual property ownership over Linux. The paper has been widely read and is considered by many to be the best analysis of the topic available. In short, the paper addresses the question, "Who owns Unix?". LWM was able to catch up with Eric on the day of the Novell announcement that SCO did not own the patents or copyrights to Unix. LWM: In a nutshell, what exactly is SCO trying to do? esr: What... (more)

SYS-CON Radio interviews Dan Powers

SYS-CON Radio interviews Dan Powers, Vice President, Grid Computing Strategy of IBM. Dan discusses the possibilities of Linux, clusters, and GRID, live at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2003 in San Francisco. Click here to listen  [interview in MP3 format] ... (more)

SYS-CON Radio interviews Mike Moser

SYS-CON Radio interviews Mike Moser about BMC Software, live at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2003 in San Francisco. Click here to listen  [interview in MP3 format] ... (more)

The Art of UNIX Programming

"Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer, Usenet signature, November 1987 So begins the first chapter of Eric Raymond's newest book, The Art of UNIX Programming. In the pages that follow Eric does his best to make sure readers do understand UNIX by bringing them along on a journey beginning in the earliest days of "timesharing" systems in the 1960s and continuing right up to today. Along the way, readers meet (via their review comments inserted into the book) such UNIX luminaries as Ken Thompson (original inventor of UNIX while at AT&T... (more)