ErrorBase writes "In this Infoworld article, Logan G. Harbaugh makes a great deal about an ancient (2.44) version of SpamAssassin comparing it with newer comercial variants. Quote : You get what you pay for. [...] However, it took more than 10 times as long to install and configure SpamAssassin as it did any of the other products. " Why did he not ask Kevin Railsback who had the whole thing working some while ago?)"

Ridgelift writes "The Open Source Development Labs have released a paper entitled SCO: Without Fear and Without Research [PDF, HTML version at the FSF] where Eben Moglen debunks SCO's claims to copyright infringement, and also discusses how they contradict themselves by citing that the GPL is both invalid and provides them legal protection. More information at the OSDL site and via an Internet.com article."

antrix angler writes "Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.0-test10 Linux kernel today, tentatively calling it the "stoned beaver" release. Linus plans to hand the kernel over to Andrew Morton in a few weeks, and then it will be up to Andrew to decide when we see the final 2.6.0 stable kernel. Download it from a mirror."

FrankoBoy writes "As announced on DistroWatch, Debian 3.0r2 has been released this weekend, with some security issues fixed... and Rock 'n Diamonds dropped because of license problems. Here's the official announcement. This release had been slowed by an attack on Debian boxes discussed Friday."

An anonymous reader writes "John Terpstra and Eric S. Raymond have started the ball rolling on LinuxWorld's poll of the community for what they think will happen in the world of Linux in 2004. Terpstra says 'I predict that during 2004 at least one significant USA government body will adopt Linux on the desktop.'" Depending on how you define "significant", this has already occurred.

null-und-eins writes "A new webservice offers automatic debugging of Linux binaries. It takes a (with "-g" compiled) binary and two invocations where one fails and the other doesn't. The service repeatedly runs the two programs and tries to find the smallest difference between the two that causes the failure. Nice google-like interface with statistics about its own performance."

securitas writes "CNet has published an interview with Caldera (now SCO Group) co-founder Ransom Love, in which he talks about the Novell acquisition of SuSE, Novell's Linux history, the early history of Caldera, the SCO-IBM lawsuit, his new role at Progeny and open standards. It's a good read that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space."

The "Call for Questions" post for Mr. Szulik generated over 650 questions and comments, 32 of which were moderated +5 at the time we selected questions to send him. And unlike many CEO responses, Szulik's answers to the selected questions are his own, not PR-generated. (One clue is that they are not in perfect English, as interview responses or articles that are 'laundered' by PR or media relations departments almost always are.)

Sean was one of many to pass along the bad news from the debian-announce mailing list: "Some Debian Project machines have been compromised. This is a very unfortunate incident to report about. Some Debian servers were found to have been compromised in the last 24 hours. The archive is not affected by this compromise! In particular the following machines have been affected: 'master' (Bug Tracking System), 'murphy' (mailing lists), 'gluck' (web, cvs), 'klecker' (security, non-us, web search, www-master). Some of these services are currently not available as the machines undergo close inspection. Some services have been moved to other machines (www.debian.org for example). The security archive will be verified from trusted sources before it will become available again." They were going to announce 3.0r2 this morning; they've checked it and it's unaffected but obviously they're still postponing that release.

gnewton writes "One angle of Open Source software that perhaps has not been emphasised enough is how the lower cost of software and operating systems as compared to proprietary/commercial solutions can allow for greater creativity and actually open up markets and solutions that were previously unavailable, in the area of Recycling. This article talks about a new startup which recycles old LCDs into cool and fun digital picture frames."

Carl Lagoze points out that a pre-existing software project is already using the Fedora name, dating back to 1998. They're unhappy with Red Hat's claim to the name, and have objected.

unassimilatible writes: "Federal Computer Week reports that NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer -- an SGI AltixT 3000 single-system image supercomputer -- has been installed at the space agency's Ames Research Center in California."

prostoalex writes: "New TPC-H world record for performance and scalability of database software on Linux platform has been set. The winner - Oracle 10g running on a four-node Lenovo Cluster Server DeepComp 6800, each with four Intel Itanium 2 1.3 GHz processors. Oracle also emphasizes that it's 3.5 times more performance than similar IBM DB2 benchmark. TPC-H benchmarks are available at TPC Web site."

Daniel Dvorkin writes "This BusinessWeek article argues convincingly that Linus Torvalds has more resources at his disposal than Bill Gates. Not only is it a nice overview of Why Open Source Really Matters pitched to a non-technical audience, but it makes a solid argument in favor of OSS in general and Linux in particular, from a solidly capitalist perspective."

An anonymous reader writes " Shortly after Linuxant has released their commercial DriverLoader, Pontus Fuchs has made an NDIS wrapper available under the GPL. Since some vendors refuse to release specifications or even a binary Linux-driver for their Wireless LAN cards he has decided to solve it himself by making a kernel module that can load Microsoft-Windows NDIS drivers. ndiswrapper has been tested with some BroadCom miniPCI cards and it seems to work on some laptops . With some more work it should be possible to support more cards. Hopefully this will be the case for the many owners of Linux laptops based on Intel's Centrino technology. Please contact Pontus if you are interested in helping out!"

Beolach writes "Transgaming today released WineX 3.2, their subscription-download tool which 'brings the hottest Windows titles to devoted Linux gamers', now including support for Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne and Homeworld 2, among others. The release announcement also quotes Markus Maki, Development Director of Remedy Entertainment as saying: "TransGaming's unique ability to enable Max Payne 2 to run on Linux without any access to the source code is quite impressive. We're extremely pleased that TransGaming is broadening our reach to new audiences and that the Linux community continues to enjoy our products thanks to TransGaming's outstanding work." In other words, this is all Linux gets for Max Payne 2."

Lucky writes "This story at Linuxworld talks about some of the potential features of UserLinux, as well as Bruce Peren's proposed community desktop project and its potential features. There's some exclusive commentary by Perens there, too."

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

Bootsy Collins managed to combine all of today's SCO stories. He writes "The firm of David Boies, SCO's attorney in charge of their Linux IP cases, has announced their compensation (so far) from SCO: $1 million USD in cash, and $8 million in SCO stock. Keeping that stock price high until they can sell is clearly of some importance to Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. Given the cost of selling a $50 million convertible note to fund their legal actions, the actual cost to SCO is more like $17 million USD. Meanwhile, SCO CEO Darl McBride is saying that Novell's purchase of SuSE violates a non-competition agreement reached when SCO bought the Unix source, and thus is legally actionable by SCO. Over at the Register, they've noticed that SCO's latest SEC filings indicate how firmly they're putting all their eggs in the legal basket: the filings effectively say that 'SCO has already lost business from its loyal customer base, and it expects to lose more.' And finally, in response to a poor response to SCO's attempts to get Fortune 1000 companies to pay $699/server for 'Linux licenses' before the fee jumped to $1399, SCO has announced that the $699 discount rate will apply to the end of 2003. Hurry before time runs out again."

Infonaut writes "Scott McNealy announced today at Comdex that Sun Microsystems has made a deal with China for a million desktop Linux deployments under the new $50/seat licensing plan for Sun's desktop software, which includes its Star Office 7.0 productivity program. Whether this will translate into renewed profits for Sun remains to be seen, but according to McNealy, it represents 'the No. 1 Linux desktop play on the planet'."