Salon.com > Ed Frauenheim

Crafting the free-software future

Tue, 06 Mar 2001 17:56:00 +0000

In between his two to three hours of homework every night, 16-year-old Julian Missig plays the part of a software project manager at SourceForge.net, a Web site-cum-watering hole for programmers looking for a place to hack. At SourceForge, in collaboration with hackers from all over the globe -- Germany, France, Russia, the Ukraine -- the New Jersey high school senior works on a program called Gabber.

Gabber is an offshoot of Jabber, an open-source instant messaging system -- specifically designed for Linux-based operating systems that use the GNOME desktop environment. Only about 5,000 people are currently using Gabber, but that's not what makes Missig's work interesting. Instead, it's the place he's chosen for his programming.

Gabber is just one of roughly 16,000 software projects hosted by SourceForge. The only thing the software programs in development at SourceForge have in common is that they are all free, or open-source: The underlying code to the programs is made freely available to the general public.

Free Photoshop for the people

Mon, 04 Dec 2000 20:30:00 +0000

Not long after the infamous Internet Worm nearly crippled the Net in November 1988, a University of California at Berkeley student was called to a U.S. government hearing in Maryland.

Phil Lapsley, co-founder of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computer Facility, had played an important part in the drama by helping to diagnose the worm and come up with a cure. The worm had taken advantage of a weakness in a popular version of the Unix operating system produced at Berkeley. Now officials from the National Computer Security Center and other government agencies were asking him about the episode -- and getting an earful.

The young hacker blasted the federally funded Lawrence Livermore Lab for taking itself offline during the outbreak -- a move that didn't stop the infection but did cut the lab off from remedies sent from elsewhere on the Net. His criticism wasn't entirely welcome, says Lapsley.

"This one woman from the Department of Energy said, 'Forgive me, but we're supposed to believe you? You're some undergraduate from Berkeley.'"

The scourge of Silicon Valley

Thu, 19 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

You might call Norm Matloff a high-tech Don Quixote.

For the past seven years, the University of California at Davis computer science professor has been tilting his lance against Silicon Valley heavyweights and their hunger for more foreign guest workers. Foreign national techies working in the United States on "H-1B" visas not only depress the wages of U.S.-citizen programmers and squeeze out older engineers, argues Matloff, but also are often exploited along the way. Matloff has been tireless in his crusade. He has testified before Congress, written Op-Ed pieces, spoken with numerous reporters and zapped out countless e-mails railing against what he calls industry greed and shortsightedness.

But he's losing the battle.

A bill to nearly double the number of skilled guest workers allowed annually sailed through Congress a few weeks ago. Despite the efforts of Matloff and a handful of other critics, the Senate agreed to raise the limit on H-1B visas to 195,000 by a 96-1 vote. The House passed the measure on a voice vote the same day, and on Tuesday President Clinton signed the bill into law.