openCOLA is more than a funny name. It’s the company that is emerging as the de facto leader in technology’s hottest new trend, peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. The “open” part of the moniker represents “open source,” and the COLA part is an acronym for Collaborative Object Look-up Architecture.With offices in Toronto and San Francisco, openCOLA is not only developing a buzz as the hottest player in this space, it’s doing it the old fashioned way – with open source.

openCOLA is convinced that transparency is the name of the game, especially when introducing a new technology to the public. And nothing assures transparency more than open-source programming. People like to know what the software on their machines is doing. Does it have any hidden operations? Is it reporting the contents of my hard drive back to a central server? Does it respect my privacy?

Right now peer-to-peer computing is more sizzle than steak. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon coding up a storm. But hardly anyone has thought through the trust issue.

Geeks understand the operations of p2p networking. Big deal. Geeks represent less than one percent of Internet users. For peer-to-peer computing to cross-over into the mainstream, it will have to become totally transparent. The public is quite unlikely to participate in the evolution of a powerful new technology unless it can trust the applications it is running.

openCOLA is quite happy to earn that trust.

openCOLA has been making its code available to the public since January 1, 2000. That tradition will continue. All current code releases are available fromopencola.com. Linux clients for some openCOLA products will be ready before the end of this quarter. And the public beta of openCOLA’s eponymous application will be available at the O’Reilly’s Peer-to-Peer Summit on February 14th.

Information on openCOLA products can be obtained from their Web site at www.opencola.com

Network World Fusion reports “The three-month-old MTX virus appears to be gaining speed, with several antivirus vendors escalating the pesky bug to a midlevel threat in recent weeks. The increased worries stem from a particularly harmful feature in which the virus blocks users from antivirus Web sites, stopping them from downloading virus protection updates and from issuing warnings.”

Perl.com delivers the second part of an article about creating applications for GNOME with Perl. The first series showed the basics of creation; this article demonstrates how to build a more sophisticated application.

IDG reports that Sony will not recall any of its U.S. notebooks that have Transmeta’s Crusoe chip. An error in the processor’s memory cache led NEC to recall about 300 of its notebooks in Japan.

“Transmeta’s not the only chip maker with code-morphing software. IBM Research is developing its own way to ensure VLIW chip compatability.” More from ZDNet News.

The Register reports: “Does IBM ship ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled or not? In the US it certainly seems to, but the position in Europe seems a tad murkier – after hours of research The Reg’s phantom buyer is still no closer to extracting price, spec, availability or even model number out of the loves at the UK branch of Shop IBM.”

With over 40% of the Linux desktop market, Red Hat 7.0 is the most popular Linux distribution in Japan. Read the full press release at Business Wire.

“Red Hat has dropped support for Sun Microsystems’ Sparc chips for its new version 7 of Linux, saying there just wasn’t enough interest in the product. “Due to insufficient demand, we will not be releasing an official Red Hat Linux for Sparc,” spokeswoman Melissa London said in an email interview. The move whittles down Red Hat’s product line to Linux software for Intel and Compaq Computer’s Alpha chips.” Full report at CNET News.com.

eWEEK reports: “As the battle for dominance in the Linux desktop environment heats up, Dell Computer Corp. will announce next week that it has taken a significant stake in Linux software developer Eazel Inc. Dell will also start shipping Eazel’s network user environment with all its Linux-based desktop and notebook products starting early next year.”

PalmPalm technologies announced the completion of development on the IMT-2000, the world’s first cell phone to run an embedded Linux. Running the Tynux embedded Linux distribution (based on the 2.4.0 Linux kernel), the new gadget combines a telephone and personal digital assistant into a single hardware application.