Developer Week in Review: Linux turns the big 3.0

The Linux kernel gets to 3.0, Oracle is bitten by the Internet's long memory, and more lawsuit fever.

I have been informed by the contractors, currently starting in on bathroom renovation No. 3 at our house, that my official designation is “Houston.” This is because, pretty much every day, they call me at work and say “We have a problem.” If you think patching bugs in legacy code written by someone who has left your company is bad, try getting work done on a 215-year-old house.

While the rest of the O’Reilly family is out cavorting in the wilds of Portland at OSCON, a few of us must tend the fires back East, and keep the rest of the world informed on what’s going on. Such as …

The new Linux is out, the new Linux is out!

LinuxIt used to be, when COBOL developers roamed the Earth, that a new release of the Linux kernel was a cause for much excitement, especially something as momentous as a new major version. Can anyone every remember when Linux 1.x became Linux 2.0? Here’s a hint, it was 15 years ago.

But times have changed. Very few people install a Linux kernel directly anymore. Most get them through the distribution they have chosen. And for people who have embedded versions of Linux, they may not have the slightest idea what version of the kernel they’re running. Ask a random sampling of HTC Android users what kernel is installed, and you’ll probably get a blank stare (here’s a cheat sheet, if you’re interested.)

Adding to the ho-hum nature of the 3.0 release is that fact that there’s really nothing special in it, by Linus’ own admission. He just figured it was time to stop endlessly adding to the 2.0 version tree, and get a clean start on the 3’s. With the 20th anniversary of the famous Linux Letter coming up in late August, now is probably as a good a time as ever to put the terrible twos to bed for good.

Here’s a fun question to ponder, though: How many build scripts that assume “2.6.X” or “2.X.X” as a Linux version number are about to break?

Hoist with their own petard

It behooves people to remember, in this day and age, that the things they say and write may come back to haunt them. Thus, when trying to make the case that the Android operating system is an unholy misuse of Java, it would have been good for Oracle to remember that there was a letter floating around from 2007 in which Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz offers Google a warm greeting, and pledged to work aggressively to cooperate with Google on Android.

There’s a certain sweet symmetry in Oracle’s battle against the search engine giant being potentially derailed by material from deep in the web’s archives. It was legal eagles at Groklaw who uncovered the letter, but I’m sure there was much Googling involved in finding it.

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You have to admire Lodsys’ ambition

Not content with suing the smaller fry of the iOS and Android ecosystem, patent “leveragers” (I’d use a less kind word there, but my editor would just change it …) Lodsys has taken their patent fight to some truly big fish. In new legal action, Rovio (the makers of “Angry Birds”), EA, Take Two Interactive (“Grand Theft Auto”) and Atari have found themselves in the defendant box.

The continuing suits, which revolve around in-app purchases, could prove an interesting line in the sand. Apple has licensed rather than litigated in the past, but the signs so far are that Apple (which already paid Lodsys once for the use of the patents) has decided that enough is enough. By dragging big players such as EA into the fray, Lodsys may be making the same mistake that SCO did when they dragged IBM and other large corporations into their Linux litigation. Big companies have large legal teams, and at some point, Lodsys may find themselves worse off than if they had just taken their money and run.

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