Linux Loses Con Kolivas

There is quite a lot of noise about Con Kolivas, and his recent quiting Linux kernel development. Kolivas made enormous contributions in the way of improving desktop usability and responsiveness, drawing attention to this increasingly coalescing factor when few people were paying attention, presumably something of which Torvalds’ himself was not aware.

Con Kolivas’ quiting explains various issues with Linux these days. First, that Linux is primarily optimized for the uses of those that fund its continued development to the detriment of common desktop users (think IBM, they’ve invested millions of dollars into Linux –last I read– and have a lucrative server business based on Gnu-Linux). Meaning, that the continued development of the Linux kernel has been toward the server end and not the desktop user. That is to say, the Linux kernel does not meet ordinary desktop user needs. This is extraordinary. After all, Linux was initially an end user product, as Torvalds envisioned it to meet his university student needs — AFAIK these were not of the server kind in nature. Thus, Linux has lost it’s original vision of meeting the needs of the ordinary user, graphical in nature –albeit– nowadays.

What does this mean? Well, simply that Linux for the desktop is slow. Kolivas points out that given the processor speed increases, desktop responsiveness should be excellent. I can attest, it’s not, although he seems to allow a lack of hardware innovation to explain some of the discrepancy.

Turn ChatZilla into an Universal Instant Messaging Client

Considering shortcomings of various universal IM clients, be they feature or technical (see below), I opted to use a basic client of my choice with the hopes of increasing its interoperability. I was successful.

As people may know, I really like the SeaMonkey suite. I use its Address Book, web-page creator called Composer, Mail and, of course, Navigator –its browser. I’d be using Calendar (rather than Sunbird) if it hadn’t been removed (re-implementation expected at a later release date with suiterunner¹). Of interest to this article, SeaMonkey incorporates an IRC client called ChatZilla (which is also available as a Firefox extension for Firefox users).

I personally like ChatZilla but it only handles IRC. Its a prototype for an IM client (presumably for more than just IRC), but never made it past the IRC protocol. Bitlbee changes this, taking it from its IRC limitations –extending it to MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, AOL, and Yahoo IM protocol interoperability. Doing so was quite easy, as you’ll see in this HOWTO. Writing this article was much more tedious. (Ignore “” surrounding commands. “” identify commands and GUI buttons).

SCO = Losers, as if Anyone Doubted it

Well, it seems to be the buzz around the tech related blogs is that SCO lost against Novell. Novell retains the rights to UNIX. Apparently what SCO bought (from Novell) was a license to sub-license UNIX. Personally I thought the Open Group owned UNIX but this is part of the debate because Novell, that owned The Open Group (then known as the X/Open Company), sold it to SCO. It now seems apparent the the rights to UNIX source code didn’t transfer over.

For those that don’t know, SCO –can be described nothing short of a “stupid ogre” of a company that– claimed its code had been robbed but (AFAIK) never came up with this code to prove the point. They intimidated other companies into forking over millions of dollars to avoid being sued for (re)distributing GNU-Linux, despite that they themselves made their GNU-Linux based distro publicly available. This is the sort of logic — or lack thereof– for which SCO is known. This threat of litigation was not limited to companies but also consumers, as this is what caused Sun to contribute 10 million dollars into SCO. I can sum SCO up in one word, “idiots”!