Weekly News

Wall Street's Secret Affair With Linux [1]

"There's been a marked change in attitude towards Linux in the last six to nine months," says Mark Hunt, Global Director, Enterprise Product Marketing at Reuters. Reuters has ported its Reuters Market Data Systems (RMDS), which provides real-time market data and financial news, to Linux. Merrill Lynch & Co. is running RMDS on Linux.

"Every major Wall Street firm has at least a pilot going on with Linux," says Vern Brownell, the former CTO of Goldman Sachs. "And more than half of them are probably in production with mission critical applications."

This article is of interest because it hints at the increased acceptance of Linux in mainstream businesses. Because Linux does not have a unified public relations department there is no central source for Linux news. However businesses are much more willing to admit to using Linux which is a major cultural change.

• Toronto Conference On Open Source Announced

  Simon Bates writes "The University of Toronto's KMDI [2,3] is hosting a conference to debate the future of open source models of development in software and beyond, addressing how this movement will affect the way we work, learn and stay healthy. Among the 30 speakers will be Eben Moglen, Columbia law school professor and legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation, who has recently described free software as: 'a social movement with specific political goals which will characterize not only the production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production and distribution of culture generally'. The conference will be held from May 9th to 11th and will be webcast."

  There are several things of interest about this announcement.

  First is that the essence of the conference is to ``debate the future of open source models of development'' rather than present accomplished work.

  Second is that free software is characterized beyond the software realm as: 'a social movement with specific political goals which will characterize not only the production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production and distribution of culture generally'. This recognizes the effect of the gift culture on the Zeitgist.

  Third is that the conference will be webcast. Generally you have to pay big bucks to attend conferences. They are giving the conference away for free.

• Improvements in kernel development from 2.4 to 2.6 [4]
  This is a discussion of source code management as it applies to the Linux kernel. The recent kernel development process was changed to encourage, but not require, the use of BitKeeper which is a commercial product.

  There was and is much controversy surrounding the use of a commercial product to develop GPL code. Fights break out about once a month over BitKeeper. Linus Torvolds has stated that he sees no problem with using a commercial product if there is no equivalent free product and the commercial product has needed technology.

  It is certainly true that kernel development needs the technology of changesets provided by BitKeeper.

  The more religiously correct GPL people have started developing equivalent free technology (such as Gnu-Arch or Subversions). The CEO of BitMover [5] has created a license that allows free software to use BitKeeper for free provided that (a) the project keeps changesets on bkbits.net and (b) users of BitKeeper do not work on a project to develop a free replacement for BitKeeper.

• What We Learned In The New Economy [6]
  This is a discussion of the Internet boom and bust and the lessons learned. In particular they compare the old ideas with the new: Then: The Internet changes absolutely everything.
  • Now: Absolutist statements are absolutely a bad idea
  Then: Free Agent Nation is a utopia. The Brand Called You makes
  you more marketable than ever.
  • Now: Free Agent Nation is a jungle. The Brand Called You is the
    only way to survive.
  Then: IT spending has fueled an unstoppable productivity boom
  that has ended the business cycle.
  • Now: Productivity is still strong - and so is the business cycle.
  Then: Move first - or die
  • Now: Move first without a real business - and die
  Then: The Internet gives the customer new, limitless power.
  • Now: New power, yes. Limitless, no.
  Then: Destroy your business, or someone else will.
  • Now: Incumbent businesses aren't so easily destroyed.
  Interest in this article goes back to the first lecture where the third point ``The Brand Called You'' was discussed. It used to be the case that opportunity was unlimited and you expected people to hire you because you were a computer person. Now the game becomes one of collecting ``Whuffie'' [9] in order to qualify for a job and the competition is tough. But as the article say, ``The Brand Called You'' is the only way to survive.

• Subversion 1.0 Released [10,11]

  Phil John writes "Subversion 1.0 has finally been released. The people who maintain CVS have given us a viable replacement for our de-facto (and aged) versioning system. If you're new to Subversion its feature list looks like fixes for everything that is wrong in CVS, renaming, directory structure and metadata version tracking, file deletion, proper management of binary files and it's pretty portable to boot." According to the download page, binaries may take a few days to appear.

  Subversion is the follow-on project for CVS. There are a number of flaws in CVS which we will mention. Subversion corrects many of those flaws.