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A colleague recently showed me a purchase he made for his office—a French press. Now, I love coffee to “Gilmore Girls” proportions, but it wasnt the thought of scoffing a nice cup of joe that had me paying attention; it was the name on the bag the French press came in—Marshalls.
I have always loved poking around Marshalls and its cousin, T.J. Maxx, but I havent set foot in either store since it became public knowledge that millions of customers personally identifying data had been exposed during what we now know was a cunning—and long-lived—security breach.
I know Im being unreasonable —there are probably no safer places to shop right now than the TJX Companies-owned stores. But as TJX is likely finding, a bad reputation is tough to overcome. And, for the record, my colleague told me he paid for the French press in cash. eWeek has been on top of this story from the get-go, and our coverage continues with updates and commentary from Evan Schuman, Eric Lundquist and Lisa Vaas at eweek.com.
This weeks cover story focuses on another topic eWeek has been covering from the beginning: Xen. As Advanced Technologies Analyst Jason Brooks testing and analysis show, Xen has moved from interesting but immature open-source project to technology poised to take on virtualization giant VMware. Jasons package starts on Page 29.
Speaking of open source, the Free Software Foundation released the third discussion draft of the GNU General Public License on March 28. On Page 9, Senior Editor Peter Galli reports that GPL 3 will contain a provision that blocks patent-protecting deals such as the one between Novell and Microsoft going forward. (The Novell-Microsoft deal is grandfathered in.)
I spoke with Jason, eWeek Labs resident open-source expert, about the GPL update. He said the original GPL was written when software patents werent as big of a deal as they are right now. GPL 3, he said, addresses patents in a more rigorous way.
This, Jason added, will help keep open source true to its original spirit: “If youre going to write code and release it as open source, you dont want software patents to get in the way of it,” he said. “When you are distributing the code to everybody but adding restrictions on some people, its not really free software anymore.”