As reported by Slashdot, a European Free Software Foundation has been founded. Their intent is to further the goals of the FSF by helping get information out about things like GNU software.

For a while eBay was getting upset about outside individuals and companies builidng online interfaces that allowed users to directly access specific auction pages. Now they’re helping others do this in an attempt to increase their domination of the Internet auction business. ZDNet story.

A Bloomberg News story in the Seattle Times tells of the many things you might want to buy for a geek-friend if you can’t score a Playstation II before the holiday gift-giving orgy.

“The first ever preview of the GNOME meta-theming system has been released.
Sponsored by Helix Code, metatheme aims to provide users with easy access to
‘theme sets’ which encompass all themeable aspects of the GNOME desktop…” More at news.gnome.org.

“The firm this month began a three-month trial of private auctions to
resellers in a move that it said was intended to create cost efficiencies
and improve supply chain manag ement. At the end of August, Sun
sold about a dozen workstations to UK end-users through the QXL
and eBay auction sites. In the US, Sun sells about $1m of equipment a
week through auctions.” ZDNet.uk story.

“Ralph Krause reviews Konqueror — the web browser from the KDE Project: ‘In a nutshell, Konqueror works pretty well. I successfully used it as my primary browser with a few small problems, but nothing that was a showstopper.'” Read the whole thing at BSDtoday.

CNet reports that German authorities have fined Hewlett-Packard for selling CD-RW drives capable of burning illegal music archives.

The Register tells of discussions between the controllers of various country codes (e.g.: .de, .uk, etc.) on breaking away from ICANN’s dominance over decision making on the internet.

Info World reports that the Java Community Process has elected a new executive, and it looks like Sun is seeking more advice from other companies using Java.

Apache Week has a bug list, among other things. “These bugs have been found in 1.3.14 and will be fixed in the next release. The rotatelogs utility churns if the destination for the logs is out of space; if you make httpd.conf a directory rather than a file, then doing a subsequent ‘make install’ over the existing installation goes wrong, leaving a ‘.apaci.install.tmp’ file in the httpd.conf directory. This is because the check for an existing httpd.conf file doesn’t notice the directory; the recent performance tweak to Configure broke the DSO detection on Linux, causing compilation problems … “