Interview with organizers of the BSD certification exam

Acting Vice President and Treasurer Jim Brown, and Executive Officer Dru Lavigne.

Linux.com: How was the first exam?

Dru Lavigne: Leading up to the exam was a very hectic time, with a million and one details to attend to. The Angoff session, a standard-setting study method [designed] to evaluate the average ratings of potential examinees, allowed technical experts a final review of the exam questions and gave the psychometrician the metrics she needed to determine which questions belonged on the exam and what the passing score would be. Then there was a registration system to set up and the processes for registration to be discussed and implemented. We had very little lead time between confirmation of space and advertising the exam launch. Many people were interested in taking the exam, but wanted to wait in order to have a chance to properly prepare for the exam.

EnterpriseDB Wins $10M in IBM-Led Funding Round

The investment in EnterpriseDB is an indication that IBM sees a need to put more emphasis on the competitive open source database market. "I think it's a sign that the open source database market is healthy and has a lot of promise," said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT.


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IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM has bought into New Jersey-based startup EnterpriseDB, an open source rival of MySQL and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) Latest News about Oracle.

EnterpriseDB closed a US$10 million round of Series C venture capital financing with IBM, as well as Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners, the company said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

The funding will go toward fortifying the firm's continued development of its PostgreSQL-based databases and sales efforts, Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB's chief executive officer, told LinuxInsider.

"MySQL has established itself as the most popular database, and here, we have EnterpriseDB with an investment from the largest technology company in the world," Astor said. "It gives EnterpriseDB the backing and endorsement of a great company and, frankly, changes the market into a two-horse race. I actually think it's been that for some time, but now, that view is shared by more people."
An Open Standards Commitment

The move builds on an already-existing partnership between EnterpriseDB and IBM, which includes the recent release of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server 8.2 for Linux on IBM System z mainframes, as well as the availability of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server for AIX on IBM System p servers.

EnterpriseDB pulls away from Sun's orbit, embraces IBM

By Eric Lai, Computerworld, 03/25/08

EnterpriseDB Corp. on Tuesday announced that it had raised US$10 million from funders including IBM , which took a small but symbolically laden stake in the 4-year-old open-source database maker.

EnterpriseDB's products are based around the open-source PostgreSQL technology, a rival to the more popular MySQL . For several years, Sun Microsystems Inc. had been one of the strongest supporters of PostgreSQL, bundling it with its Solaris 10 operating system, and partnering with EnterpriseDB to provide support.

Sun bought MySQL AB in late January. Though Sun and EnterpriseDB executives both denied at the time that Sun's backing for PostgreSQL would weaken, EnterpriseDB CEO Andy Astor admitted in an interview last week that he no longer "has high expectations for Sun and Postgres."

"We will continue to have a relationship with Sun and we will continue to support Postgres [for Sun], but frankly, if I paid $1 billion for MySQL, I know where I'd be paying attention," Astor said.

IBM, meanwhile, is "very interested" in what EnterpriseDB is doing, Astor said. The company joins Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners in this Series C funding round.

IBM did not return a request for comment. But Raven Zachary, an analyst with The 451 Group, said the investment "is a significant move."

"With MySQL as part of Sun now, IBM sees its open source database future aligned with PostgreSQL through EnterpriseDB," he wrote in an e-mail. "IBM also gains in this move through EnterpriseDB's Oracle database compatibility, as IBM competes with Oracle via DB2. This is a smart move for IBM."

EnterpriseDB has now raised a total of $37.5 million in its four-year history. It claims 225 paying customers today. Asked why IBM did not simply buy EnterpriseDB, Astor answered, "because we're not for sale."

A response to Patrick Durusau: Who Loses If OpenXML Loses?

This is a response to Patrick Durusau's recent letter Who looses if OpenXML looses? (PDF). Before I discuss the various points that you make in your letter there is one thing that I would like to say; I find it shameful that you, Patrick, makes these kind of statements without a proper disclaimer that this is your personal opinion and not the position of the ODF committee (for whom you edit the ODF specifications), the V1 or any other technical body that you represent. In fact you seem quite happy that the media is running with headlines like “The ODF editor says…” else you would have done something about it after your previous publications. To lead by example:

The opinions expressed in this letter are my own. They do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of LXer Linux News, nor the viewpoint of my employer Tribal Internet Marketing. They do represent the viewpoint of The Lone Wolves Foundation though.

Now, back to your letter.

1) National bodies lose an open and international forum for further work on DIS 29500.

Which open and international forum? DIS 29500 is scheduled to be maintained by Ecma (PDF). Office Open XML is already an Ecma standard: Ecma 376. So the community can already work with Ecma on future revisions of that standard. Approving DIS 29500 does not change the venue in any way. It only changes the name of the standard.

The only circumstances under which this statement can be true is if Microsoft has announced to stop supporting Ecma 376 all together unless it is approved as DIS 29500, but promises to work on the standard if it does get the ISO stamp. This is obviously not true because Microsoft has already stated that it cannot commit to whatever comes out of Ecma, regardless if it's DIS 29500 or Ecma 376 they are working on. From the mouth of Brian Jones:

it's hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma in the coming years, because we don't know what direction they will take the formats. We'll of course stay active and propose changes based on where we want to go with Office 14. At the end of the day though, the other Ecma members could decide to take the spec in a completely different direction.

Will Seagate go to War Over Flash Drives?

It could be dismissed as mere saber rattling by the old guard protecting its turf. Still, when the CEO of a major vendor starts talking litigation, the threat has to be taken seriously.

In an interview with Fortune magazine last week, Seagate (NYSE: STX) CEO Bill Watkins first dismissed solid state drives (SSDs) as being too expensive to ever catch on, but then said if they become popular Seagate would consider filing patent infringement law suits.

Watkins argued that SSDs, hard drives built from flash memory, are just too expensive, and will be for a long time. He cited the ultra-thin MacBook Air as an example. The one with an 80GB standard hard drive is $1,800 while the same notebook with a 64 GB SSD runs for $3,100.

"Realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell," Watkins told Fortune. "We just don’t see the proposition."

Watkins has been around long enough to know that no technology ever stays expensive, and that's especially true with flash. The price of flash memory has plummeted so much that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) was forced to warn that first quarter margins would suffer as a result. Intel CEO Paul Otellini made a promise to make the flash memory unit profitable one way or another, and Otellini's track record suggests he will keep his word.

So if and when SSD drives become cheap enough to go mainstream, Watkins said he'd consider suing SSD makers like Samsung and Intel for patent infringement. Not for disk storage; SSD is memory cells instead of the magnetic platters used in standard hard drives. The case would be for the interface that connects the drive to the computer.

Linux: A Tempting Target for Malware?

Sophos has recently warned Linux users of potential virus infections targeting servers. Though security hygiene is important under any operating system, how vulnerable is Linux really? "There always have been some viruses for the Linux platform. But there is nothing new out there," Paul Piccard, director of threat research for phishing scams and Linux viruses at Webroot, told LinuxInsider.


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The Linux operating system is not immune to virus Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. infections, although Linux-specific viruses are extremely rare. Linux servers face more risk of virus attack than Linux desktops.

That said, IT security and control firm Sophos Latest News about Sophos recently issued a warning about potential virus infections targeting Linux servers that could pose risks to the Linux operating system. Sophos researchers warned Linux users of the importance of properly securing their Linux systems following findings from SophosLabs that a 6-year-old threat known as "Linux/Rst-B" is still infecting computers and servers.

Survey: Devs Dip Into Both Open, Closed Apps

If you thought that most open source developers work for open source companies, you might well be wrong. According to a survey from open source services vendor OpenLogic, 50 percent of its respondents actually work for a proprietary vendor.

The OpenLogic study aims to put into focus why people contribute to open source in the first place and though money is an issue it's not the only issue.

The OpenLogic study was carried out by polling members of the OpenLogic expert community, which is a group of individuals that provides support and commercial assistance on open source technologies to OpenLogic customers.

Only 6 percent of study respondents identified themselves as working for an open source company. The rest of the survey's participants were consultants or working in businesses outside of software.

Stormy Peters, director of community and partner programs at OpenLogic, explained that many open source developers keep their open source work separate from their paid work. She had initially thought that every open source developer's dream was to get paid for working on open source software, but that's not necessarily reality, she said.

"I think there are a lot of myths about how open source developers feel about working for proprietary software vendors and how people can make money from working on open source software," Peters told InternetNews.com. "I hope that by putting the numbers out there we can get the conversation started, and people will realize there are more opportunities."

In addition, the study revealed that 50 percent of the open source projects developers were working on did not have commercial vendors behind them. To go a step further, OpenLogic asked the question, "Do you think every open source software will have a commercial company associated with it as it becomes more widely used?" 84 percent of respondents said no.

OOXML's (Out of) Control Characters

Let's start with the concepts of “lexical” and “value” spaces in XML, as well as the mechanism of “derivation by restriction” in XML Schema. Any engineer can understand the basics here, even if you don't eat and drink XML for breakfast.

The value space for an XML data item comprises the set of all allowed values. So the value space for the “float” data type would be all floating point numbers, such as 12.34 or 43.21. The lexical space comprises all ways of expressing these values in the character stream of an XML document. So lexical representations of the value 12.34 include “12.34”, “12.340” and '1.234E1”. For ease of illustration I will indicate value space items in bold, and lexical space items in quotes. In general there are multiple lexical representations that may represent the same value.

Character data in XML also permits more than one lexical representation of the same value. For example, “A” and “A” both represent the value A. The “numerical character reference” approach allows an XML author to easily encode the occasional Unicode character which is not part of the author's native editing environment, e.g., adding the copyright character or occasional foreign character. The value space allowed by XML includes most of Unicode, including all of the major writing systems of the world, current and historical.

The concern I have with DIS 29500 concerns Ecma's introduction of a ST_XString (Escaped String) datatype. This new type is defined via the following XML Schema definition:

All About Linux 2008: Aren’t UNIX and Linux the same thing? Yes and no.

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test;

UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows.

That’s a grossly oversimplified answer to a complex question and I’ll no doubt get flamed by some of the more advanced UNIX and/or Linux users out there but in the interest of keeping things simple, let’s go with the above italicized sentence.

If you’re no more interested in the differences between UNIX and Linux, then the simple UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows phrase should be enough to keep you from getting knifed at a LAN party. It saved my ass back in ‘99 but that’s another story for another time. Let’s just say that BSD, Bawls, and 21-inch CRT monitors don’t mix.

A Little History

Which came first? UNIX came first. UNIX came way first. It was developed back in 1969 by AT&T employees working at Bell Labs. Linux came about in either 1983 or 1984 or 1991, depending upon who’s holding the knife. The GNU operating system was announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman and started in 1984, while the Linux kernel came about in 1991 courtesy of Linus Torvalds. Torvalds lent his first name to Linux by swiftly and deftly replacing the S with an X, so it could be argued that Linux, proper, was officially born in the early nineties.

Developers wanted, or: the state of accelerated video on Linux

A friend of mine (actually, he is also the CEO of a partner company of ZaReason EU) got very interested lately in HTPCs, the so-called home theater PCs. Since he’s also a big fan of Linux and free software and also likes high definition, he asked my opinion and help about the topic, so I started to investigate a little for him.

First thing which came to my mind, and which I pointed out to him without much thinking and/or reading is the fact that under free software and operating systems, we won’t be able to play DRM‘ed stuff like Blu-Ray discs with Hollywood movies. That leaves the question of HDTV being able to be received and played.

At the moment, the situation in Germany and/or Europe isn’t very good. The Pro7/SAT.1 group stopped transmissions of HDTV lately, so at the moment all you can get is pay TV (like Premiere, who also have some content of Discovery Channel as far as I understand it). The German/French co-operation and free-to-air broadcasting station Arte has announced that they will start with HD transmissions in this years’ summer, and the big public stations like ARD and ZDF will only do so from 2009 or so.

The next question after “is there any content?” is of course hardware. For a HTPC, you probably don’t want a monster machine with quad-core processors and the fastest video cards you can find - would be too noisy for the living room, hard to cool all that power down, and it also would cost lots of energy if you let those run 24/7. So we’re talking integrated chip sets here.

Due in June, Mozilla says ‘Firefox 3’ is ready to rock!

Although Mozilla says Firefox 3 beta 4 still isn’t intended for the general public, its performance so far has given them the confidence to announce the final version is nearly ready to be unleashed on the world.

In an interview with Reuters, Mozilla’s Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview that Firefox 3 is ‘ready for prime time’.

Schroepfer told Reuters that: “In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there", with Firefox 3 beta 5 set to finalise "tuning the visual look and feel of the program" and further improving its stability."

As Reuters have noted, Firefox is in a battle with competitors such as Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer 8 browser just reached beta 1 status, although the final version of IE8 isn’t due to arrive until next year.

Despite this announcement, the Mozilla website (where Firefox 3 beta 4 can be downloaded) still advises that the latest beta 4 is still for testing purposes only, although I’ve personally been using Firefox 3 since beta 3 (and now 4, of course) and have found it to be a stellar browser: Firefox 2 has long been uninstalled from my computer.

That said, Reuters reported that Mozilla may well be changing that warning, and while Reuters didn’t specifically note it, I’d say when Firefox 3 beta 5 lands in a few weeks time, that will be the version that Mozilla will bless as being a more general beta that anyone can try, especially given the very stable nature the developers already attribute to the existing beta.