Wired reports: “Jave Savin was crushed after losing a website he’d spent three years building. His hard drive died, and then his server bit the dust. Gone were 400 Web pages, each more interesting than the other. Then one glorious day he found a copy, just sitting in Google’s cache register. Ain’t life grand?”

FOR the eighth consecutive year, IBM has topped the list as the world’s most prolific patent recipient,
the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said last week.

In a preliminary audit by the USPTO, Big Blue pumped out 2886 patents last year – nearly a third more
than its closest rival, Japan’s NEC Corporation with 2020 – 130 more than it registered the previous
year. From Fairfax IT.

LinuxPR: “Gelecek Linux is based on the popular Red Hat distribution. Many additional
packages are compiled to add more functionality, and some are just deleted.”

The inventor who
has been the subject of a frenzy of
speculation over a new gadget said to be
more important than the Internet has
stepped forward to deny that he has any
such “Earth-shattering” project in the
works, reports The Standard.

From LinuxPR.com: “Donovan Systems, the premier developer of 64-bit
Linux systems, has set up its first 64-bit Linux computing laboratory in
China, in the Beijing Technology and Business University (BTBU) School of
Information Engineering. This marks the start of the company’s efforts to
promote advanced 64-bit Linux computing in the teaching curricula for
Chinese tertiary students.”

From 32bitsonline: “Open Source: The Unauthorized White Papers, written by Donald K. Rosenberg, is a well-written and
comprehensive businessperson’s perspective of the Open Source movement and its future. I would recommend
this book as a comprehensive guide for business students and Corporate IT managers alike. Within its pages
are the futures of IT businesses and all businesses impacted by the computer hardware and software industries.
Strong words, but this book contains business models and information that cannot be ignored in the coming
millenium.”

– By Grant Gross –

Expecting a news slowdown the week following the Linux 2.4 kernel release? Well, the people at Turbolinux and Linuxcare don’t want you to be bored. Late this week, the two veteran Linux companies told the world they’re talking about a merger.

It may be too early to tell, but watch for how a merger between the distributor and the Linux service company might affect competitors like Red Hat. Turbolinux was busy inking deals this week — the company also announced a global distribution and support agreement with IBM.

We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention that VA Linux, otherwise known as our owner, was named in a lawsuit connected with VA’s IPO. The lawsuit alleges that IPO underwriter Credit Suisse First Boston Corp. had “solicited and received excessive and undisclosed commissions from certain investors in exchange for which Credit Suisse allocated to those investors material portions of the restricted number of Linux shares issued in connection with the Linux IPO.”

Blinding flash of the obvious

Steve Ballmer, otherwise known as president and CEO of that big Microsoft software maker thingie, admitted that Linux is the company’s biggest problem going into 2001. And we thought all along it was Microsoft’s crappy software. NewsForge editor in Chief Robin Miller responded to Ballmer by giving advice on how to become a total Linux user. Leave behind that closed-source software!

In other business news, it wasn’t a good week for Open Source pioneer Zelerate, previously known as Open Sales, which announced it was cutting 40 percent of its staff.

Where will they put Linux next?

File this under, “ain’t it cool?” DaimlerChrysler’s newest concept car has Linux embedded to “satisfy the never-ending thirst of tomorrow’s automobile drivers and passengers for Internet-based data and information.” And the car’s pretty cool looking, too.

New at NewsForge this week

News editor Tina Gasperson digs into the practice of
copying other people’s work. In Open Source, when is it fair game to copy, and when is it a breach of etiquette?

Columnist Julie Besnick converses with “Wook,” vice president of engineering at Metapa, where he’s worked with eLinux, MySQL and gcc. His idea of a perfect Sunday: sleep, sex, and food in a slow, continuous rotation.

We review “AntiTrust,” the movie pitting a group of good-looking Open Source kids against a big, evil software company. It’s about as believable as a typical James Bond flick, but fairly entertaining.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments
posted on our discussion
page.

In a bid to overcome previously reported losses, Gateway is going to slash prices greatly to increase sales.

BSDToday details process accounting on the BSD family of Unix operating systems. “One of the tools I used was lastcomm — the command for showing last commands executed. This article covers the basics of enabling process accounting and shows a few examples of using lastcomm and sa to read and use the accounting data. These tools can help monitor user activity and system usage.“

ZDNET reports: A group of teens and young adults allegedly planned an
international conspiracy in which they hoped to
“take down the Internet” on New Year’s Eve,
federal agents in Los Angeles said on Friday.