“If any of you have been with us throughout the years and dozens of staff members, you’ll know that one of our first motherboard reviews was the Soyo SY-5EHM.
Well, we were reviewing it when it wasn’t crashing, that is.” From the DukeOfUrl.org.

Lou Grinzo posted this commentary at LinuxToday: “Is Linux starting to converge on a desktop standard, and if so, is that necessarily a good thing? I’ve been
pondering these issues for quite some time, and some recent market survey information that’s come to my
attention has shed at least a few stray photons in their general direction. At this time in Linux’s lifespan these
are both Big Topics, so I’ll talk about the ‘is it happening’ issue this time around, and leave ‘is it a good thing’
for the next Lou’s Views.”

Newsforge regulars from LinuxNews Team offer this tidbit: “Turn message into spam and back into message? Now you can use ‘spam encryption’ in countries where real encryption is illegal 😉 Pretty smart 🙂
Check out sample spam .”

LinuxToday has the scoop on the latest pre-release version of 2.4.

The Standard reports that, between its antitrust case appeal and a slumping PC market, the year 2001 will be a tough one for Microsoft, which saw its stock tank on an earnings warning – taking down the market with it.

Setting the stage for an even more competitive processor market in 2001, Intel plans to expand its new Pentium 4 chip into wider markets by lowering prices, while also moving the chip’s core technology into its server-class processors, Intel officials said. From PCWorld IDG.

From ZDNET: “Linux and open source: The news here is much more
favorable. We supported a number of important
open-source initiatives this year and continue to be
encouraged by the growing maturation, manageability
and interoperability of open-source software. While the
boosterism surrounding open source often generates
more heat than light, anything that provides more
choices and keeps IT in the driver’s seat will always get
our backing.”

Users said the Hotmail website was running slower than usual, with pages timing out
and the URL returning ‘page not found’ messages.

“It’s running like a hairy dog,” one user said, according to the report at AustralianIT.com.

– By Grant Gross–

Many in the Open Source community have objected loudly to the sad state of patent law during the last couple of years, as technology companies continue to make dubious patent claims. British Telecom has made noise for months that it owns the patent on hyperlinks, but this week, the company acted on that claim by filing a lawsuit against Internet service provider Prodigy in U.S. court.

British Telecom is apparently seeking fees from anyone who uses hyperlinks. Indeed, it has a patent on a hyperlink-like way of jumping from text page to text page. However, the Linux Journal, in an open letter to Prodigy’s CEO does a good job of debunking BT’s claim that it invented the hyperlink. “Don’t give the bastards an inch, and you’ll get all the help you need,” writes Don Marti, the Journal’s technical editor.

On to legal news of a more happy note: The U.S. motion picture industry hit a roadblock in its lawsuit over the DeCSS case. That’s the case in which the industry is suing a bunch of people for distributing the code that allows DVDs to run on Linux. A California court this week told the motion picture lawyers to prove why a defendant who doesn’t live in California should be part of the case. Hey, sometimes you have to celebrate small victories.

Selling Linux, in more ways that one

Enough legal news. In the *much* more fascinating world of the stock market, Linux heavyweight Red Hat announced this week that revenues had jumped 112 percent from the third quarter of 1999 to Q3 2000. The company is still losing money, it’s worth noting, but, hey, it lost less than $1 million during the quarter. Red Hat big-wigs said they’re confident they’ll be making money by 2002.

Corel, the quasi-Linux company that’s now in bed with Microsoft continued to be a victim of rumors that it is selling off its Linux arm. One report this week went so far as to say the sale was “nearly a done deal.” But Corel said, “Not so fast.”

Opposites attract?

The last couple of weeks have produced
their share of stories about whether the big tech companies will co-opt Linux. One of the stranger stories asked, “Can Linux save Microsoft?” The column suggested Microsoft might take over the Open Source movement the way it took over the browser business. Hmmmm, I search for the right analogy. That’d kind of be like Satan setting up shop in heaven, maybe? How do you co-opt something that’s your exact opposite?

While you may laugh at that column, Intel’s announcement that its Pentium 4 chips will at first run only the Red Hat and TurboLinux flavors of Linux caused some consternation among Linux fans this week. But it’s only a temporary problem, and the rest of us can try Transmeta products in the meantime.

New in NewsForge

Freelancer Eric Ries provides a second sneak preview of version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

Business columnist Jack Bryar says telecom companies have the best chance of turning a profit among Open Source companies.

News editor Tina Gasperson surveys Linux users about the reasons they use the operating system. For some users, it’s philosophical. For others, the “free” in free software is forever linked to beer.

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

A pair of Debian packages have been updated. The nano package suffers from a non-Debian specific symlink attack, and the slocate package suffers from a non-Debian specific local root exploit. Instructions on package upgrading are in the advisories. Thanks again to lwn.net for the advisories.