Practical Technology

Thanks to a recent column by my friend Andy Patrizio, I found out that there’s “been an ongoing debate among bloggers and industry observers over one simple question: Where are the open source billionaires?” OK, I’ll buy that some people think that’s a real question, but I think it says more about they don’t understand [...]

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO’s recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix’s copyright.
While this case is not about SCO’s claims that IBM [...]

OpenSolaris, Sun’s open-source take on its Solaris operating system, has finally arrived. Some people, like Jason Perlow at ZDNet think that this is great news and that Sun’s latest operating system will give Linux a real challenge.
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m inclined to doubt it simply because OpenSolaris has failed to develop [...]

I don’t know if Hans Reiser, creator of the well-regarded, open-source ReiserFS (Reiser File System), is actually guilty of the murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser. We can’t actually even be sure that Nina Reiser was murdered. Her body was never found and Reiser’s attorney argued that she may have returned to her native [...]

New comers to Linux sometimes think that Ubuntu sprang forth from Linux as a totally new creation, the next generation of Linux. Old-hands at Linux know better. Now, Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, sets the story straight for those to whom Ubuntu 8.04 is the be-all and end-all of Linux.
In his [...]