-
Linux patent pool now covers clouds: By deftly expanding the list of packages it considers part of the Linux ecosystem to include OpenStack and Red Hat’s OpenShift Origin, the Open Invention Network in now including the cloud computing platforms as part of its protective cross-licence network. The change is set to take effect in March Companies can join OIN by dint of agreeing not to pursue patent litigation against other companies with respect to that package list. In return, they get a royalty free licence to the OIN’s patent pool. It will be interesting to see how well the OIN’s new safe harbour works for cloud providers.
-
X Security – It ain’t good: At the Chaos Computer Club’s 30th Congress, one presentation took on the issue of the security of X Window System in terms of its implementation in the X.org code. Ilja van Sprundel has been working through the code over the past year and after finding 80 bugs in the client code, he’s gone on to just submit 120 bugs for the server side and he says he’s far from finished.
-
Docker on OS X: Mac OS X doesn’t have containers so running Docker natively is a no-no. The advice has been to setup a Linux VM with Vagrant, ssh into that and run Docker on there. But some people wanted a bit more simplicity and came up with Docker-osx which is a shell script which lets you run docker commands. It uses VirtualBox and Vagrant, automatically configuring the VM if needed. From then on, running “docker docker-command” sees the command automatically passed through to docker in the VM. There’s also two “new” docker commands, “halt” (to stop the VM) and “ssh” (to open a terminal session). A simple enough script but rather handy.
