The Proliferation of Linux

As you might have read a recent post of mine, I’ve recently been getting acquiented with the Arduino platform.  Indeed I got my hands on my very own Arduino Nano this afternoon when it arrived in the mail.

Now, quite handily, Wired has an interesting article on Arduino and Open Source Computing (titled ‘Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?‘).

Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.

The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.

Wired on Arduino [via Creative Commons Weblog]

Donald Townsend. CC BY-NC-SA

A recently released study conducted by the Linux Foundation place the value of the Linux Kernel at around 1.4 billion US dollars (~1.1 billion €) and the value of a the full Fedora 9 distrbution at just above 10 billion US dollars (~7.85 billion €).

The companies and individuals who work on Linux-related projects and build this value proft by sharing the development burden with their peers (and sometimes competitors.) Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering this research and development burden individually, as Microsoft has done, is an expensive approach to building software. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.

O’Reilly Radar

Gentoo has apparently cancelled it’s 2008.1 release, making this the second time in 12 months that a release has been cancelled.  Instead of using the usual twice yearly release cycle that most other distributions have, Gentoo developers are opting for a continuous approach.

In place of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting a live, continuously updating distribution.  In practice this emphasises the use of minimal installation images which are then supplemented with updated packages straight from Gentoo servers and mirrors.

“We need to work harder to communicate the relative irrelevance of releases in a live distribution like Gentoo,” Gentoo developer Donnie Berkholz explained to InternetNews.com. Releases “have an overly large impact on what non-Gentoo users think of the health of the distribution, so problems with a small team within Gentoo are magnified in their effect on public opinion.”

Having recently converted my laptop to Gentoo, I can attest that this system seems to work quite nicely.  Portage, Gentoo’s package management system, really does the job.  Dependencies are resolved correctly at least 99% of the time and updating the entire system is a breeze.

While installing large applications such as OpenOffice or Gnome might take some time (i.e. hours and hours as everything is compiled locally), things do largely work quite nicely once installed.

InternetNews [via Tectonic]

Initial impressions:

• The browser really does seem to be very fast
  • Even JavaScript heavy sites like Facebook load very quickly, even on first use when the browser hasn’t built up a cache.
• The address seems to have been lifted straight from Firefox 3
• Obviously still in development, though
  • Closing your last tab closes the entire browser
• Could be a winner if Google can build a community around it in the same way that Mozilla has done with Firefox

Hit the read link to see a gallery of screenshots.

(more…)

In honour of GNU’s 25th birthday, Stephen Fry has posted a video on the gnu.org explaining Free Software in layman’s terms. Have a look above, or get the original (high-quality) OGG file from http://www.gnu.org/fry.