I know, I think we’re all really bored of hearing this story now, but unless something major happens this is probably the last I’ll say of it.

Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation has publicly said that the Microsoft-Novell deal doesn’t violate the GPLv2, but will be addressing the issue of patent licences for the third version of the GPL.

“What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell’s customers alone.”
…
“It turns out that perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals. We were already concerned about possibilities like this, namely, the possibility that a distributor might receive a patent license which did not explicitly impose limits on downstream recipients but simply failed to protect them.”

The GPLv3 is already a hotly debated topic within the FOSS community, with Linus Torvalds saying that he will not move the Linux kernel over to GPLv3, but the FSF will be moving all of the GNU tools over to the third revision of the licence. What this could mean for Novell is they might be unable to use newer versions of the GNU tools in their versions of SUSE Linux.

However, the licence is a way off yet (check the progress of it here), so we’ll have to see exactly what happens.

[via LinuxWatch]

SSH is an awesome piece of software. What it does is it allows you to set up a secure login server on your computer, and have people safely and securely log in and use the computer remotely.

In this quick tutorial, we’ll look at how to set up SSH so that you can securely log in to your system from another location. We won’t look at advanced ways to configure SSH (like password-less authentication) for now, but we might cover that later.

Note, that this tutorial requires a bit of Linux knowledge, as we’ll be jumping in and out of the command line frequently and you’ll need to know certain things about your distribution of choice. For this and many future server tutorials, I’ll be using CentOS 4.4 (but you can easily adapt this for any distribution).

Read the rest of Quick tutorial - secure remote login to your system with SSH

Welcome to a new tutorial series where I’ll be taking you for a spin around the command line so you can go from newbie to proficient very very quickly. The command line often scares a lot of people, and in the past it was virtually required to use a lot of things in Unix-based operating systems (like Linux).

This tutorial will be aimed at Linux users. However, much of the command line is the same throughout many Unix-based operating systems, including Solaris, all the BSDs and even Mac OS X (however, this does not cover Windows’ command line as that is not based on Unix). All you need to do is load up your OS’s terminal program (or just type away if your machine is text-based) to get started.

Read the rest of Introducing the command line - Part 1