The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com. The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on).

Pity poor Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. He gave a talk at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, where according to ZDnet, he lectured Open Source Developers that they needed to learn why DRM and other closed technologies were necessary, because of business issues such as subsidized (device) business models. I suspect he wasn’t prepared for the reaction, which took the form of a major fuss on Slashdot, as well as some declarations from a few people on the maemo-users mailing lists that they would never buy another Nokia device.

I was recently checking to see what, if any follow-up there had been from Sun’s ham-handed handling of the Open Solaris Trademark, and I ran across this very interesting comment from John Plocher’s Candidate Statement for the Open Solaris Governing Board: “I also think there was a misunderstanding about what Sun desired when it launched the community (in part) to encourage developers to adopt and use Solaris. My take is that, while there *is* value in getting more kernel, driver and utility developers contributing to and porting the (open) Solaris operating system, there is significantly *more* value in having a whole undivided ecosystem based on a compatible set of distributions, where application developers, university students, custom distro builders and users are all able to take advantage of each other’s work.

Although I lot of people have been lauding the Kindle, I recently decided to go with the Sony PRS-505 instead. Yes, the Kindle has built-in EVDO access, and the ability to buy books without a computer, or even browse the web; and yes, the Sony has once again demonstrated it can’t create a compelling 21st century computer application to save its life. However, it had a few things that at least for me, made a better choice for me than the Kindle:

Bryan Cantrill recently wrote a blog entry, where among other things, he philosophized on the concept of “perfect code”. He compares software to math, arguing that Euclid’s greatest common denominator algorithm shows no sign of wearing out, and that when code achieves perfection (or gets close to perfection), “it sediments into the information infrastructure” and the abstractions defined by that code becomes “the bedrock that future generations may build upon”. Later, in the comments of his blogs, when pressed to give some examples of such perfection, he cites a clever algorithm coded by his mentor to divide a high resolution timestamp by a billion extremely efficiently, and Solaris’s “cyclic subsystem”, a timer dispatch function.

I am currently in the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower hotel, and since I fly entirely too much, I got upgraded into a room which contains a printer. Thinking that I would try using it, I hooked it up to my laptop (running Ubuntu Gutsy), selected System->Administration->Printing on the desktop, and then clicked on New Printer. To my astonishment, when the dialog box came up, the system had already autodetected the fact that I had an HP OfficeJet KX60xi printer connected to the parallel port, had recommended which driver I should use, and a few “next” and “continue” clicks later, the printer was installed, and 15 seconds later I was able to print to it.

It’s interesting to see how far, and yet how much more work we need to do on power management for Linux. I recently got a new laptop — a Lenovo Thinkpad X61s — and using the powertop tool, I was able to configure my system to the point where in what I can “airplane mail reading mode” (mailbox preloaded into memory, USB disabled, wireless and ethernet disabled, backlight down to 30% brightness, sloppily written power hogs like Firefox and Notes — every single application writer should be forced to run powertap and explain why their program feels it necessary to constantly wake up the CPU), I can get my usage down to about 9.

Recently, Josh Berkus blogged about The Myth of the Benevolent Dictator. In it he complained about people who try to posit that a benevolent dictator was “an unalloyed asset” to their project, and that there were many successful and valid forms project governance other than the singleton project leader. Furthermore, he argues that the best way is to form a community, and then ends by suggesting that people who say “dictatorship good” is really saying “democracy bad”, and perhaps the motives of the person using that argument should be questioned.

I looked at the Foleo and played with one while I was at Linux World a few weeks ago, but it is so restrictive in what it can do that I was completely unimpressed. First of all, according to one of the people at the booth, it will only work with a select set of Treo’s; mostly the newer ones. A colleague I was with had just gotten a Treo 650, and the person at the booth said that it wouldn’t work with that model of Treo.

So more information emerges… According to this FAQ, the trick which Novell/Microsoft used to sidestep the section 7 of the GPLv2 was that covenant not to sue was not given to Novell, but rather directly to Novell’s customers. Very clever…. of course, that means that if you are a Novell customer, and you rely on this pledge (which hasn’t triggered yet since Microsoft hasn’t sued anyone over any patents which MS might (or might not) have covering Linux), then you won’t be able to share Linux with any of your friends; once it happened, you would be violating the GPL if you did so.