Displaying items by tag: Jeremy Allison

Three software engineers from CIQ, a Linux company, have found that the kernels shipped by commercial firms have more unpatched flaws than the upstream stable kernel which is maintained by Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

After the recent changes in source code availability enforced by the IBM-owned Red Hat, enterprise Linux is likely to take a different path to that which it was following when the standard was being a downstream rebuild of RHEL, the chair of AlmaLinux OS Foundation, one of the distributions that sprang up after Red Hat discontinued CentOS, says.

Red Hat has given an indication of how desperate it is to spread its views, about the latest act of making the source of its RHEL distribution available only to paying customers, that it is paying to have its executives interviewed.

Samba co-founder Jeremy Allison has likened the current move by Red Hat, to restrict access to the source code of its enterprise Linux distribution, to the way Sun Microsystems reacted to the threat from Linux.

The disquiet over Red Hat's recent move to make it extremely difficult for others to gain access to the source code of its enterprise Linux distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL — doesn't appear to be dying down though more than a month has passed since the company said source code would, from now on, be available only to paying customers.

The open source Samba project has lost one of its senior contributors with the death of Lars Muller on 1 October.

A few days after he mused that there had been no reason for him to blow his stack recently, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has directed a blast at the Software Freedom Conservancy and its distinguished technologist Bradley Kuhn over the question of enforcing compliance of the GNU General Public Licence.

With two companies — Microsoft and Red Hat — from opposite ends of the software spectrum linking arms in a deal overnight, the big question that remains is: what happens to the SUSE-Microsoft deal?

For its developers, Samba 4 is the holy grail. When they make that release, they would be able to offer businesses, 80 per cent of whom use Active Directory for authentication, the freedom to choose a non-Windows server environment and yet enjoy all the benefits of Active Directory.