LINUX WORLD NEWS WORLD NEWS OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS FOR GERMAN COURT BACKS GPL THE DEVELOPING WORLD Netfilter developer has Although Linux and open source “will initiated the “Global Desktop Project”, gained a victory in his struggle against find their biggest markets in developing consisting of a research and engineering GPL violations. On September 6, 2006, nations, particularly in China, East Asia, program, a partner program for institu- the district court in Frankfurt/ Main ruled Brazil and South America”, these coun- tions of higher education in these regions that the German sales branch of Taiwan- tries are missing out “on what essentially and a community outreach program ese hardware and network appliance is the power of open source: technologi- mainly aimed at western open source manufacturer D-Link had lost the right cal self-determination” and on the contributorscontributors such as companies and to use msdosfs, the initrd and the mtd opportunity to foster new universities, as well as at the kernel driver when it decided to not local businesses due to westernwestern dominated open comply with the obligations the license the low number of source communities. The imposed on the use of this software. If native open source program is focusing on parts of the GPL were indeed incompati- developers. As a increasing the numbers ble with anti-cartell regulations (as D- consequence, the of open source develop- Link claimed), the company would not United Nations Uni- ers in developing coun- have had the right to use the software at versity’s Interna- tries and on improving all. The court ruling granted Harald fi- tional Institute for the Linux desktop. nancial compensation for the costs he Software Technology http:// www. iist. unu. edu/ incurred in tracing this GPL violation (UNU-IIST) in Macau has globaldesktop/ and for formally demanding the com- pany stop it (which D-Link complied with). According to the German IT magazine KERNEL PROGRAMMER SUSPECTED OF c’t, D-Link does not intend to fight the The Linux community now has its first ing to Nina Reiser, along with other evi- ruling. big criminal scandal: A month after his dence. Her body, however, is still missing http:// www. jbb. de/ urteil_lg_frankfurt_ estranged wife and the mother of two, at this point. gpl. pdf (German) Nina, disappeared, ReiserFS developer When Nina Reiser filed for divorce in http:// gnumonks. org/ ~laforge/ weblog/ Hans Reiser was arrested on October 11 2004, she put on record that their chil- linux/ gpl-violations/ without bail and accused of murder. The dren “hardly knew their father” since charge was filed on October 12 at the Al- Hans Reiser traveled abroad most of the ameda County Superior Court in Oak- time, e.g., attending open source confer- land/ San Francisco Bay Area after police ences. According to the , LIMUX DEPLOYED found blood stains in his home and car Hans Reiser “had physically assaulted On September 19, 2006, the offial de- that “could not be excluded” in belong- Nina Reiser and has made verbal threats ployment phase of the “Linux base cli- of causing her bodily harm ‘for the rest ent” started in the city of Munich. By the of her life’” in the process of separation. end of this year, most of the computers In this light, Suse’s ReiserFS main- used by the board of directors will have tainer Jeff Mahoney’s decision to no migrated to a Linux desktop based on longer use ReiserFS3 as Suse’s default Debian, KDE 3.5 and OpenOffice 2. filesystem due to continuing perfor- Along with FAI and the web-based LDAP mance and scalability problems, as pub- administration tool GOSa, GPLed soft- lished on September 27, seems sort of ware will be used to maintain this pro- prophetical. cess. Mayor Christian Ude has been http:// www. insidebayarea. com/ serving as a pilot user for quite a while oaklandtribune/ ci_4486527 and is very satisfied with Linux. http:// www. ninareiser. com/ http:// www. muenchen. de/ Rathaus/ dir/ http:// linux. wordpress. com/ 2006/ 09/ 27/ limux/ ueberblick/ 175149/ suse-102-ditching-- windowsabloesung. html (German) Hans Reiser, the developer of ReiserFS. as-it-default-fs/ http:// gosa. gonicus. de/

12 ISSUE 73 DECEMBER 2006 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM