The Associated Press: “Walker Digital Corp., the company that developed the Priceline.com concept of buying airline tickets over the Internet, says it has laid off 100 of the 125 employees at its Connecticut headquarters.”

New service takes Open Source portal software to the corporate level with unparalleled deployment speed and quality

AUSTIN, Texas, November 22, 2000-MetaDot Corporation, an Open Source portal application provider offering free, self-service content and community management software for the Internet, announced today the creation of its Open Services Team and sponsorship by Schlumberger Limited, a global leader in technical services.

The open architecture design of MetaDot software enables multi-platform technology integration for a broad range of clients, with a focus on small- and medium-sized corporations. The MetaDot Portal Server provides an environment for layout, design and branding of a site, including personalization of information, publishing and subscription capabilities and data aggregation services in a variety of formats. The Open Services Team adds value to these existing products and services by providing swift and seamless implementations for customers worldwide.

“MetaDot’s Open Services Team will provide us with fast implementation and customization of their flexible and robust product and will enhance our capability to deploy IT solutions within Schlumberger,” commented Jean Chevallier, vice president of information technology of Schlumberger Limited.

According to Daniel Guermeur, president and CEO of MetaDot, “Speed of service is key to a corporation?s success. We take a customer?s request to full portal implementation in a matter of hours, not weeks, delivering a rapid return on investment for our growing client and user community.”

MetaDot Corporation is an Open Source portal application and service provider. The flagship product, MetaDot Portal Server, is a free Open Source, platform-independent software application that supports content management, virtual community and syndication, and processes millions of requests per day on all common operating systems. By encouraging customization, MetaDot provides mechanisms to integrate with most content providers. For rapid deployment, the Open Services Team offers a range of services and managed hosted portals. For more information visit www.metadot.com.

For Additional Information, contact:
MetaDot Corporation
Andy Meadows
andy@metadot.com
(512)-331-3383

###
–MetaDot

–By Jack Bryar –
Open Source business –
One of the biggest of the Linux shows is over with and all the news is
bad?
Well, not all of the news. But Comdex is over. So is the Linux
Business Expo. And instead of puff pieces about a guy as colorful as
Jon “maddog” Hall, or lots of features about the Linux-powered
robot,
the press was full of pessimistic Linux business stories that would
make any rational investor panic.

I track news stories as part of my day job. Over the last couple
of weeks, the Linux news hasn’t been fun to read. Despite a flurry of
press releases generated by Linux vendors and by Comdex promoter

Key3 Media Events, only two Linux stories caught the attention of
anybody in the business press. Those involved the stock price melt down
over at VA Linux (owner of NewsForge), which followed its warning about future revenues,
and the accumulating evidence that Corel’s new management team is
completely adrift.

In part, the bad news was due to the lack of any competing stories
generated at the show.

There should have been news. After all, Comdex and affiliate shows
like
Linux Business Expo usually produce a mother lode of techno-buzz each
year. This year’s Expo was, if not huge, a pretty decent event. Last
year, the show took up a modest 18,000 square feet at the Las
Vegas Hilton. This
year the show bumped up to 40,000 square feet, and it moved to the
Sands. There were lots of new exhibitors, more than 70 companies in all. The
only thing lacking was much excitement. And that lack of excitement
produced a news vacuum, which was filled with negative stories.

Part of the problem was that the news last year was so good.

Last year was a coming out party for Linux. The buzz was hot. Last year
Linus Torvalds
was a star.

So was Red Hat’s Robert Young. He had just bought Cygnus Solutions. His
stock was trading at over $100 a share. Over at VA Linux, the investor
fever was building. We all know what happened there.

This year, Linux was so… last year. The buzz in Las
Vegas had moved on to wireless technology and web tablets. Meanwhile,
over at the Linux Expo, traffic was pretty decent. The big OEMs were
all showing off Linux products. But they were back at Comdex. And so
was most of the
press.

The reporters that stuck around at the Expo were looking for bad news. More than one
scribe observed that Bob Young was invisible, as if to imply he might
not want to be around to answer questions about his stock price. The
fact was that Young had been up in Toronto to address Linux Expo there.
But only National Post’s Bob
Thompson noted that, and Thompson made a point of observing that Young
attracted fewer
than 100 people. Back in Las Vegas, the press picked at Red
Hat’s
booth. They said it was boring, and more appropriate for last year,
when no one knew what Linux was. A reporter I talked to dismissed it
as
“remedial training for the technology challenged.” Carlene Hempel and
Christina Dyrness of
the Raleigh News & Observer said the booth looked like “an
educational exhibit in a museum.” You don’t get comments like that
when you’re hot.

As one commentator said on Wall Street Radio last week, “Linux is not
special anymore.” He said he “saw Linux throughout the main show,”
mostly in the booths of traditional vendors, who had added Linux to
their line cards and had moved on.

The question I heard over and over again was, “Is there a market for
Linux specialists?” Most marketing types warn that it is terribly
hard for niche specialists to compete with vendors providing a full
array of products and services. Given that VA Linux is almost alone
among vendors in providing
a pure, Linux-only solution, that concern may account for the
over-reaction when the company cautioned the investment community.
Compared to Sun, Dell, HP, Compaq and IBM, VA Linux may rank higher in
terms of value add. It may have a far better reputation among the
Linux community — but will that help the company wean system integrators away from the traditional
box vendors? Can VA continue to score big wins among networking
specialists, especially if that market goes flat? The stock price
tells you how the investor community is betting.

Actually they are betting hard against the entire sector. Think I’m
being pessimistic? Check out ePredict.com’s Web site. ePredict
is a stock analysis system that uses knowledge management principles
roughly similar to those used by Google, only ePredict uses them to
determine likely market directions. It’s a fairly primitive system, but
it works. Over the last several months it has out-performed any other
indicator that I follow. And it is indicating nothing but bad news
for
Linux investors. Currently Red Hat and VA Linux show “sell,” and Corel
shows strong sell.

After last week, I decided they certainly got Corel right. CEO Derek
Burney sure found out how to pickle press coverage of the entire
sector
and blow any positive Linux news off the business pages when he
decided
to pick this moment to suggest that he was re-thinking his company’s
commitment to Linux.

Even investment pros who have noticed that the company is doing less
than a third of the Linux business the firm had earlier projected
were shocked. Duncan Stewart, who tracks the company for Tera Capital
Corp. in Toronto, said, “If you get rid of Linux, you have a company
that is absolutely, unequivocally not interesting.” Although the
corporate spin-meisters insisted that re-focusing meant re-positioning
Linux rather than abandoning it, the overall effect was to make
industry
wise guys wonder if the new management team at Corel has a clue as to
where to focus its priorities. Despite the protestations by Corel
execs, the news from the Ottawa valley is that the company wants to focus back
on its graphics products.

And that has been just one more signal to fuel speculation about the
larger Linux marketplace that is just as out of control this year as it
was last year.

Only this year, instead of irrational exuberance, we’re dealing with
irrational pessimism.

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

From The Register: “The Serial ATA working group, charged with replacing clumsy parallel ribbons as
the mass storage interface inside PCs, says it has completed version 1.0 of the
specification. Publication had been mooted for 10 October, but the public version
now ought to be available for comment by the end of the year.

The only OS with representation on the group is Linux, and Redmond is a notable
absentee – although sources say that it’s now very keen to join. When it does, it
won’t have input to the first specification.”

Wired.com follows up on earlier reports that most European countries have voted not to extend the continent’s patent system to cover most software. “The results of Tuesday’s vote was cheered by free and open source software advocates as a victory,
since the discussion over whether the European union will allow software patents will now be moved to
the European Commission, the European Parliament, national governments and the general public.”

The Register reports on study backed by an MP3 player maker, saying the CD is nearly dead by 2005.Young adults in particular are “planning to abandon
CDs in favour of MP3, music downloads, digital audio players and portable
collections.”

eWeek Labs reviews the Open Source AllCommerce e-commerce starter kit. It’s OK for small storefronts, eWeek says, but lacks personalization features and pricing rules .

Info World reports that Ericsson has spun off a separate business for its Bluetooth wireless products. Bluetooth has been part of Ericsson’s consumer division, which is being restructured because of snagging sales.

From Business Wire: Interwoven, the leading provider of enterprise-class content
management solutions announced today that it has made TclPro, the premier development tool for the Tcl language, open source. It will be available
for download at http://dev.scriptics.com/software/tclpro/.

Boise, ID – November 21, 2000 – RidgeRun, Inc., today announced that they have successfully made a portable Bluetooth Stack for Linux. RidgeRun has extended the Axis Bluetooth stack for Linux to the ARM and MIPS platforms. “The original Open Source code was targeted for x86 processors,” said Phil Verghese, Vice-President of Engineering.
RidgeRun has added Bluetooth support to its DSPLinux product, so the company decided to modify the Bluetooth stack to be portable. The company has released the new portable code back to the Open Source community.

Bluetooth wireless technology is a new low-cost radio technology that is designed to eliminate the need for physical cables to connect a wide range of products, including cellular phones, PCs, headphones, audio equipment, and many more. It has unprecedented industry support, with over 1,800 companies in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, including all of the leading players in the telecommunications and computing industries. According to Cahners In-Stat group, the Bluetooth market will grow from 11.5 million units shipped in 2000 to 671.8 million in 2005.

About RidgeRun, Inc.
RidgeRun, Inc. is totally focused on bringing the reliability and
flexibility of Linux to embedded Internet appliances based on DSPs (digital signal processors). RidgeRun’s DSPLinuxTM is an operating system that leverages the power of Texas Instruments’ OMAP and DSP architectures to deliver the performance leading platform for wireless, broadband and multimedia appliances using DSPs. These include mobile phones; digital cameras, audio and video players, automotive systems, set-top boxes, home networking gateways, and PDAs. The RidgeRun team has extensive experience in developing world-class embedded systems, fault-tolerant software and high performance Linux solutions. RidgeRun can be reached at www.ridgerun.com link or by e-mail to info@ridgerun.com.

–Daniel Meyers