Open Source news doesn’t only revolve around falling stock prices, the technology media decided this week. Indeed, there were stories that could be considered good news, like a TechWeb story about Open Source software creeping into large corporations, often from the bottom up.

NewsForge’s business columnist Jack Bryar wrote that large corporations seem to have an all-or-nothing attitude about Open Source products, with IBM investing billions of dollars, and Corel ready to dump its Linux products. Who’s right?

The mainstream tech media can turn good stories into bad ones, as evidenced by Sm@rt Partner’s followup story on IBM’s decision to invest more than $1 billion in Linux. The story caught one Linux company executive griping that “Linux helps IBM sell things, but IBM doesn’t really help Linux companies.” The executive didn’t explain what he expected IBM to do for its potential competitors.

NewsForge’s editor in chief Robin Miller responds by saying IBM’s investment will be good for smaller hardware manufacturers. “A rising Linux tide lifts all boats, and large ships make waves big enough to swamp small boats, but skillfully-handled small boats can catch and surf the waves created by the big ships,” he writes.

Score one (finally) for Linux

Sick of Microsoft getting all the games and hardware support first? Score one for Linux, as Intel’s upcoming high-end Itanium chip will be available for Linux first.

Linux overwhelming to users?

Linux must “become less overwhelming in order to capture the desktop,” so says a column from ZD Net, which wonders if Linux is ready for widespread desktop use. “Linux is too bountiful for most computer users,” says the article. Gee, too many applications is a bad thing? It’s like having 157 TV channels — just ignore the ones you don’t care about.

The writer of one story published this week thinks Linux is overwhelming in a different way, installing the darned thing. The writer, who says he or she has user experience with DOS, MSDOS, Unix, and Windows, puts it this way: “As of this morning, I have not been able to *ever* successfully install a USEABLE Linux system.”

Nearly everyone covered the story this week that Sun plans to adopt Eazel’s Nautilus desktop environment for Solaris. If it’s good enough for Linux, it’s good enough for Sun.

New in NewsForge

• Taking place at CSUN’s Sixteenth
  Annual International Conference, which averages 4000 attendees.
• Free admission to the Linux
  Accessibility Conference (not including the price of attending to CSUN,
  consult link for admission costs).

Join us for two days of:

• Speeches by prominent figures
  in the free software and accessibility community. Individuals who have
  tentatively agreed to speak include Judy Brewer (Director of WAI), Alan
  Black (Creator of Festival Speech Synthesizer), Peter Korn (Sun Microsystems’
  GNOME Accessibility Lab), and Aaron Leventhal (Mozilla accessibility).
  Other noteworthy people who have said they plan to attend include T.V.
  Raman (Creator of Emacspeak).
• Demonstrations of free software
  such as Emacspeak, Festival, BRLTTY, and Speechd.
• Workgroups on GNOME (run by
  Sun Microsystems’ GNOME Accessibility Lab), KDE, X Windows, Console, Braille,
  Speech, Internationalization and Localization (i18n and l10n), Internet
  Applications (Mozilla), and a Universal Accessibility Standard.
• Planning and organizing for
  the future of Linux accessibility.

If you are interested
in attending, join the ocularis-announce mailing list by visiting link

The 2001 Free Telephony Summit will be held January 22nd from 5PM to 7PM at the offices of Via.net, in Palo Alto, California. This summit is open to the public and all are welcome. (However, we ask that you please R.S.V.P. If the number of attendees’s exceeds via.net capacity (likely) we will head next door to a larger space.)

This gathering will include those involved in the Bayonne project, as well as people from other free telephony projects, including pre-Viking. At the summit we will cover numerous issues related to development and inter-operability among free telephony software projects, as well as covering current and future plans for some of these projects:

1. Current state of free telephony

2. Applications and architecture

3. VOIP integration and interoperability

4. Introduction of free telephony billing services

5. Driver design and abstraction layers

6. Future directions for Bayonne and other projects

This will be a good opportunity to meet various people working on free telephony projects, to provide your input to the Bayonne developers, and learn about the present and future for free telephony software in general.

Please R.S.V.P. to Rich Bodo rsb@ostel.com 650-964-4678

Further information and directions can be found at Bayonne News

This announcement submitted by David Sugar