Contrary to popular perception, many open source vendors are making money, even growing in size, revenue, installed base, and influence. Their secret? The dual license, a business model that allows software makers to provide commercial software licenses for a fee, while simultaneously providing free software to a broader community. Industry analyst and longtime Linux watcher Stacey Quandt explains how it works.
From caller ID to long distance, anything your phone can do, Asterisk can do better - and cheaper. Asterisk, an open source telephony project, greatly reduces the cost of traditional telecommunication technology and operation, and moves Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into the mainstream. If you own a telephone, heed the call to Asterisk.
Six years ago, Oracle announced support for Linux, perhaps singlehandedly sparking the widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Today, Oracle's Linux market share is growing by leaps and bounds, backed by the elegance, scalability, and low cost of Linux application clusters.
Every so often, something truly magical appears and changes the universe forever. Recent marvels like wireless and digital content are just two examples that come to mind. Each changed our expectations of what's possible.
Software patents -- more than copyright laws, commercial software companies, and uninformed legislators -- are the biggest threat to the future of free software. While software patents have only been issued regularly in the United States since about 1982 (after Diamond v. Diehr), and guidelines for granting software patents weren't established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) until 1996, software patents are now granted by the USPTO at the rate of nearly 30,000 per year, or over 15 percent of all patents issued.
When using Linux in a business environment, it's important to monitor resource utilization. System monitoring helps with capacity planning, alerts you to performance problems, and generally makes managers happy.
Why would you want to give a program more than one name? How can you move quickly through the filesystem like Star Trek's Enterprise jumping through a "worm hole"? What good are multiple views of the files in a directory? You'll see these things and more, as we look into Linux filesystem links.
When MySQL 4.0 was released, it included a host of new features. We've already discussed MySQL 4.0 several times in Linux Magazine, but the query cache only received a brief mention in the September 2002 "LAMP Post" column (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-09/lamp_01.html). And since the query cache is disabled by default, there's a good chance you've not stumbled across it yet.
Is there any multimedia software that Linux users love to hate more than RealPlayer? RealPlayer's bad interface, proprietary and poor-sounding codecs, and overall poor support for Linux have irked many a Penguinista.
Last month's column looked at the basics of generating RPMs, including the format of the all-important .spec file. In theory, those principles should be enough to let you create .spec files and RPMs for a number of purposes. In practice, however, RPM generation is complex enough that some examples are sure to help. So, this month's column presents two examples: creating a non-program RPM and creating a program RPM.
Last month's "Extreme Linux" introduced MPI-2, the latest Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the preferred programming interface for data exchange -- called message passing -- for parallel, scientific programs. MPI has evolved since the MPI-1.0 standard was released in May 1994. The MPI-1.1 standard, produced in 1995, was a significant advance, and the MPI-2 standard clarifies and corrects the MPI-1.1 standard while preserving forward compatibility with MPI-1.1. A valid MPI-1.1 program is a valid MPI-2 program.
In the previous three articles, I introduced my templating system of choice, the Template Toolkit (TT). Since those articles were intended as overviews, I didn't have much space to go into meaty examples. So, in this article, I'll look at how I'm using TT every day to help me manage the Stonehenge Consulting web site (http://www.stonehenge.com).
