– By Grant Gross –

A longtime Linux user hopes a petition will convince British Telecom to back off its claim of having a patent on hyperlinks.

Rick Collette, a Unix system administrator and Webmaster of the Linux community site deepLinux.com organized the petition Friday, after hearing that British Telecom was suing Internet service provider Prodigy on BT’s claims that it should be compensated for the use of hyperlinks.

“Just think of the impact it could have on anybody’s day-to-day life,” Collette says of BT’s claim. “I don’t know if anybody can grasp how big this is. This could affect the way we do business — this could affect everybody.”

Collette says he’s not sure what he hopes the petition will accomplish, short of the unlikely event that BT will back down from its claims. He plans to give the petition to Prodigy, as a show of support, and he plans to distribute it to as many media organizations that will listen — “online, offline, it doesn’t matter, just anybody and everybody.”

BT researchers developing text-based information services, applied for a patent in 1976 . The U.S. Patent Office granted the company a patent in 1989. But Collette says it’d be chaos if all the creators of the many Open Source projects that help run the Internet would sudden decide they want royalties. “I’m puzzled why anybody would want to do this,” he says of BT’s actions.

Collette, a Linux user since 1993 or ’94, says the petition isn’t a publicity stunt for deepLinux.com, a hobby site he launched in mid-November. The petition is hosted away from his site, at i-Charity.com. The petition announcement on his site does include a link to some hypertext history.

As of Tuesday morning, the petition had more than 150 signatures, many including comments. A German resident wrote: “Hypertext is the digital equivalent to footnotes, which are even older than the British Telecom!”

Another comment, from someone in the U.K.: “The only good thing about this whole issue is that it highlights the stupidity of software patents.”

Collette hopes that anyone who uses hyperlinks on the Web will consider signing the petition.

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

“Before you spend any money on an Internet filtering program, beware. A new “antifiltering” software
application could render it useless.

Peacefire, a free-speech group, on Monday announced software that can disable filtering programs
such as SurfWatch, Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, CYBERsitter, X-Stop, PureSight, and Cyber Snoop.” Full story at PCWorld.

“Schools and libraries that receive federal funds will
find new strings attached to the money — they’ll
have to filter Internet content.” Full story at ZDNet News.

Previously, if you wanted 64-bit computing power, you would have had to
choose one of the proprietary 64-bit platforms. Linux does run on several
of these but it is not the first choice for the enterprise on these
platforms. Prakash Advani explains in this
article on FreeOS why the Itanium is expected to
change all that and cement Linux’s position at the top-end of the corporate segment. –Chandrashekhar Bhosle

“This library is technically a wrapper library. This means that you, the developer, use the EasyGTK C API to create your software,
and it translates your calls to the GTK+ library. A typical EasyGTK command will do what 5 to 10 GTK+ functions would do. This
means that creating a program using EasyGTK calls is not only easier, but also much quicker.” More at IBM developerWorks.

ZDNet reports that not everyone in the world of Linux is happy about IBM’s latest Open Source strategy. “”Linux helps IBM sell things, but IBM doesn’t really help
the Linux companies,” says a senior executive at one
Linux firm.”

Slashdot readers discuss WorldNet Daily’s exclusive “report” that Iraq is stockpiling PlayStation2 units in its latest arms race.

From WSJ Interactive on ZDNet News: “When a group of suspected Pakistani hackers broke
into a U.S.-based computer system in June, they
thought they had found a vulnerable network to use
as an anonymous launching pad to attack Web sites
across India.

But what they had done was walk right into a trap known
as a honeypot — a specially equipped system deployed
by security professionals to lure hackers and track their
every move.”

Signal Ground reviews APC’s SmartUPS 700: “With the reputation that Linux systems have for being stable and reliable, it’s no wonder that
you find them in uptime- and mission critical situations. But even the best machines aren’t
worth a thing without a stable power source. Does the APC SmartUPS 700 prove as reliable as
the Linux system it powers? Read our review to find out.”

From LinuxDevices.com: “Over the past several years, Italy has been home to considerable embedded and real-time Linux development.
For example, two well known embedded Linux projects spawned on Italian soil are ETLinux, an open source
small footprint Embedded Linux developed by PROSA, and RTAI, a real-time Linux enhancement created at the
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Milano (DIAPM).”