Status-Q

Jambo OpenOffice.org is a new version of OpenOffice translated into Swahili. Mzuri sana!. From Living Without Microsoft:

“A Microsoft spokeswoman said that Windows and Office are not available in Swahili at present.”

And they probably wouldn’t be affordable for most people if they were! More info at Kilinux. A sort of Tyndale for technology…?

[Original Link] Doc Searls, the editor of Linux Journal, writes an email column called Suitwatch, “Views on Linux in Business”. From the December edition:

At PC Forum in March 2003, I asked Intel COO Paul Otellini why Intel didn’t release Linux device drivers along with ones for Windows. He pleaded absence of demand. I replied:

“There are two ways that markets happen. One is you wait for the demand to materialize and satisfy the demand. The other is you invent something that’s killer, and the demand follows. By one, necessity mothers your invention; by the other, your invention mothers the necessity. ”

If you use the vi editor, and you sometimes find that your cursor keys don’t work, then you should read on. Anyone else should go and do something more fun. And we vi users should probably give up on it and use another editor. It is the 21st century, after all.

I often have this problem, and it’s generally when I’m ssh-ed into a remote Linux box, which is the main time I use vi. The problem is that the machine at the far end has the wrong idea of what type of terminal you have. In my case, it tends to think that I’m on an ‘xterm’ or an ‘xterm-color’, which I’m not, but that’s what the Terminal app on my Mac is configured to look like, and the value gets carried through to the other end.

The best thing seems to be to set the terminal type to ‘linux’ on the remote machine. There are several ways to do this:

• You can set it at the local end for the ssh process:
  TERM=linux ssh me@remotemachine
  and the value should be carried across.
• You can set it in the environment at the remote end, eg.:
  export TERM=linux
  vi filename
• You can set it in vi, once you discover things aren’t working:
  :set term=linux
• You can put set term=linux in your .vimrc file at the far end. This seems to me to be the most useful if you hit the problem regularly.

[Original Link] “We are predominantly using [Linux] as a platform to deliver the Mozilla browser,” says Michael Bowler, the bank’s IT architecture manager. “The client operating system doesn’t really matter from the perspective of delivering line-of-business functionality.”

[Original Link] Chris Cummer extols the virtues of Chris Pederick’s handy extension. He’s right. If you do any amount of web development, this is well worth having.

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Some of this article is just amazing:

When asked why his company had decided to sue end users rather than Linux distribution vendors, Stowell says: “If we did that, in some cases it could really hurt Linux, which is not necessarily something we want to do as a company. … If you go and sue a Linux distributor, that could potentially hurt the Linux marketplace.”

It would be funny if weren’t so dangerous.

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I’ve just discovered the Mac version of this rather fun Linux game. I realise I’m a bit slow – it’s been around for some time and has won lots of awards. My excuse is that I’m not really a games-player, but I do appreciate it when a simple idea can provide so much entertainment.

Finding the rules is not too easy. Basically, you use the cursor keys to shoot a coloured bubble at groups of two or more bubbles of the same colour, which will then fall down. Oh, and you can bounce off the side walls. Easy…

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Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO, recently managed to turn his company into one of the most disliked in the high-tech world by saying to Linux users, in essence,
“You’ve infringed our copyright. We’re not going to show you how, but you have to pay us anyway”.

This would be completely idiotic if it weren’t the last struggles of a dying company sufficiently desperate to try anything. And the really tragic thing is what has happened to the SCO share price as a result of this tactic:

Perhaps realising that public relations disasters can still be be profitable, and that corporate image and customer satisfaction are much harder work than having a dodgy patent infringement claim, he has gone on in this open letter to spread evil rumours about how free software is anti-American:

“The 1976 Act grew out of Congressional recognition that the United States was rapidly lagging behind Japan and other countries in technology innovation….
Congress adopted the DMCA in recognition of the risk to the American economy that digital technology could easily be pirated and that without protection, American companies would unfairly lose technology advantages to companies in other countries through piracy, as had happened in the 1970’s…
However, there are a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress. In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents….
…do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support “free” … intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. It is no understatement to say that the future of the global economy is in the balance.

Well, Mr McBride – there is a middle ground. We’re not going to show you how, but you’ll have to believe it anyway.

Update: Larry Lessig responds

[Original Link] One day SCO is going to annoy too many people. Well, they’ve already annoyed a very large number, but they made the mistake of accusing SGI, who started to do some serious analysis of their claims.

Moral: if you don’t have much of a leg to stand on, be careful whom you kick.

[Original Link] “OpenOffice.org Writer isn’t a replacement for anything; it’s simply a better piece of software.”

I agree with Bruce Byfield on this – many of the OpenOffice components are superior to their Microsoft counterparts. The only real thing they lack is familiarity. Looking forward to when it runs natively on my Mac (ie. without needing X-windows).

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Robert Cringely asks why Macs aren’t more popular in business, and in particular why people adopt Linux machines in place of Apple’s lovely XServe boxes. He thinks it’s a conspiracy – that sysadmins are concerned that Macs are so easy to use that they’ll be out of a job. I doubt it. I don’t think people deliberately make their lives harder to keep themselves employed; not often, anyway.

I suspect it’s just that Macs, for most, are an unknown quantity. You can try out Linux almost for free while to try out a Mac server costs a bit more. Apple should offer some ‘sale or return’ scheme.

And secondly, I think the traditional divide between Mac and Windows has been big enough that people don’t think of buying a Mac as a file/web/mail server for PCs, a task it ought to be able to perform just as well as a Linux box. I’m thinking of trying this soon…

This will be of little interest to most people, but somebody may find it on Google and be grateful! I have seen a few queries about this out there, and I’ve hit the problem twice recently, so I thought it worth posting.

If you a have a WET11 wirless ethernet bridge or similar product, and you’re having problems getting DHCP to work across it, it may be that your DHCP client is not setting the ‘broadcast bit’ in its DHCP query. I fixed this on my Linux DHCP server by adding:

always-broadcast on;

at the appropriate point in /etc/dhcpd.conf. See the dhcpd.conf man page for more info.