October Letters to the Editor

I read Jason Perlow’s May 2005 “Shutdown” column titled “How ‘Geeko’ Lost His Mojo”[ available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-04/extreme_01.html] and would like to comment about this paragraph:

Second, “Geeko” would bring key SuSE/Ximian/Novell technologies such as Mono, Evolution, Red Carpet, NDS, Zenworks, and Hula (the latter at http://www.hula-project.org)to the fore, allowing even more extensive field testing within the community. Ever since Ximian was acquired, Novell has held those technologies close to the vest for use with its commercial software products”.

In the case of Evolution, it was never “held close to the vest” even with Ximian at the helm, and is even far less[ restricted] now that Novell owns the code.[ Indeed,] any proprietary bits previously held by Ximian are no longer proprietary. Furthermore, all of the Evolution code is in the publicly-available GNOME CVS repository (the entire application always was publicly-available — and not a “cut down demo version” either). The development team has always had tight control over the code, but only because we wanted to try to keep the quality of the code high.

Also, Hula is an entirely new project from Novell’s stable, so your comment doesn’t apply. Hula is also fully open. Additionally, NDS/Zenworks doesn’t belong in your list because those products were and still are proprietary.

Linux distributions might be moving away from Evolution because Thunderbird is beating it in some areas, but there are also political issues. Evolution is GNOME and not KDE, for example.

Oh ye who aspires to Yoda-like consciousness, the way for you most difficult it seems. Of building empires you speak, forgetting the Jedi way is a democratic one. Long, long ago and far, far away, someone once said, “The King is dead! Long live the King! ” So let it be with Apple.

Study you must, the history of Apple, for here too the Clone Wars were fought. Discount not the complexity of hardware outside the microprocessor. Legion are the programmers who toil to interface devices external to the busses of systems, and their challenges are many. Proprietary vendors, as well are many, have used this to defend their empires. And many standards are yet to be, before coders of drivers or kernels can to a hardware abstraction layer code, and thereby those drivers of devices, hope to share.

Expect you must, Apple to behave like Apple, and Apple hardware for Apple a differentiator is. These things impede the force, do not. Strong, temptation will be, for Apple to leverage open source hardware drivers and so doing shall much benefit available make in both Bazaar and Cathedral. Only short your time-line is.

I’m finishing my degree in Computer Science at the University of Puerto Rico in Bayamon. To meet the requirements for my degree, I have to complete a special project and am interested in building a low cost cluster.

I read your March 2005 “Extreme Linux” article, “Building a (Very) Low Cost Cluster” (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-03/extreme_01.html), and would like to get more information on the cluster software needed to connect both machines.

”Extreme Linux” columnist Forrest Hoffman replies: You can find information about cluster software in the columns that immediately followed the column you read. The April 2005 article on Clustermatic (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-04/extreme_01.html),the May 2005 story about Rocks (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-05/extreme_01.html),and the July 2005 column about OSCAR (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-07/extreme_01.html)should help you make an informed choice.