ShadowRAM: May 30, 2005
One Linux contributor was in a snit last week after a patch he wrote was made public without all of his identifying information provided to the Linux kernel developer's group.
In a post to Linux caretaker Linus Torvalds, the offended party wrote: "Linus, please do not apply patches from me which have my personal information mangled or removed. I object to having my contributions anonymised [sic] in this way, just as I object to the contributions of others being anonymised." It seems some other developer got the patch and decided to put it in the public domain without due credit for fear of violating Britain's Data Protection Act. Torvalds found himself defending the developer's action, blaming the British privacy law: "He's worried about legal issues, and while I've also tried to resolve those [by having the Open Source Development Labs lawyers try to contact some lawyers in Britain], that hasn't been clarified yet," Torvalds wrote.
There were mixed reports about the success of the planned "Day of Action" by IBM unionsan effort to pressure the computer giant to go slow when slicing some 10,000 to 13,000 jobs from its payroll. Though a few stories held that the protests and slowdowns were pretty sparse to non-existent in some geographies, the AllianceIBM Web site posted photos of protests around the world that did seem well-attended.
Protesters were told to wear black and blue to signify the pain of job cuts, take 10-minute "silent" breaks and call CEO Sam Palmisano to convince him to change his mind. We're willing to bet he wasn't swayed.
And we're also willing to bet that Palmisano's not going to be moved much by some recent remarks from Sun President Jonathan Schwartz. In his blog last week, Schwartz reported on some recent customer meetings overseas, in which he heard some customers talk about conversations they've had with IBM lately. "IBM told several that they couldn't port their apps to Solaris 10 because Sun is withholding information. Which even the customers knew was ridiculous," he wrote. "It's tough to withhold information when the product's free and code's open."
Meanwhile, Bill Gates seems to get testier and testier in public. Especially when the subject is Google.
At a conference last week, he sniped: "Google is still perfect, the bubble is floating, and they can do everything." He reminisced about the days when Microsoft had a streak like that.
Of course, Google doesn't have a de facto monopoly to fall back on. It has to be creative to survive.