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

European governments wait for a Democratic debate

Bruxelles, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris. 2000-11-22.
With
the exception of Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland, all European
countries voted in Munich yesterday against an extension of the
patent
system to software. The exception on computer programs will be
maintained in the European Patent Convention after its revision.
This
move is a clear victory for democracy, since it allows the European
Commission to proceed with its public consultation on software
patents, together with the European Parliament. National governments
in Europe which are currently reviewing in detail the pros and the
cons of an extension of the patent system to software, will also be
able to participate in the debate.
Nicolas Pettiaux, belgian representative for the EuroLinux Alliance
of
software publishers and non profit organisations, warns however that
“yesterday’s vote should not be interpreted as a vote against
software
patents, but rather as a vote to postpone any decision on this
matter
until the consultation launched by the European Commission is
closed”.

But, according to Stéfane Fermigier of AFUL, member of EuroLinux:
“the
General Directorate for Internal Market at the European Commission,
which is in charge of the consultation, has approached the software
patent issue with an ideological point of view. Both their
interpretation of the Law and their call for the consultation are
obviously biased in favour of software patents. Furthermore, until
very recently, they paid no attention to the economic effects and to
other side effects of software patents, as they should have
according
to the Rome and Amsterdam Treaties. We are still very far from a
decision to ban software patents in Europe.”

Future EuroLinux actions will be targeted at convincing the European
Commission to take a balanced approach on software patents. As the
FFII/EuroLinux Software Patent Horror Gallery shows, the European
Patent Office is already abusively granting many patents on pure
software methods. Such kind of patents are then cancelled by
national
courts in case of dispute. A clarification is still needed in
Europe,
either in favour or against software patents. EuroLinux considers
that
software patents should clearly be banned in Europe because they
harm
innovation and that software should be protected through copyright.

References
European Patent Office –
http://www.european-patent-office.org
Software Patent Horror Gallery –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/examples
Statements for a Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/statements
The EuroLinux Public Consultation –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation
The EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe –
http://petition.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents –
http://petition.eurolinux.org/reference

About EuroLinux – www.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations
united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture
based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source
Software. Companies members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or
sell
software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating
systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows.

The EuroLinux Alliance launched on 2000-06-15 an electronic petition
to protect software innovation in Europe. The EuroLinux petition has
received so far massive support from more than 50.000 European
citizens, 2000 corporate managers and 200 companies.

The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organised in 1999, together with the
French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux
and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of
the
www.freepatents.org Web site to promote and protect innovation and
competition in the European IT industry.

LinuxWorld reports that IBM announced CSK Network Systems
Corp., or CSK-Net, will use an IBM S/390 server running
TurboLinux for its data centre’s Web server platform. CSK-Net
is the first company in Japan to run a Linux application on a
mainframe.

From Linuxtoday: “As the commercial market for Linux grows, vendors are coming under increasing
pressure to deliver a definite roadmap to their customers with features, milestones and deadlines.
Will the uneasy alliance between vendors and Free Software developers break down? Is there a
way to reconcile the demand for a scheduled roadmap with the Free Software development
philosophy that regards deadlines as undesirable?”

The Register: “In what must be one of the most surreal stories we’ve ever covered,
Microsoft has awarded a Linux devotee with one of the company’s
most coveted patents awards -even though the recipient has never
worked for Microsoft.”

A Massachusetts hardware reseller reinvents itself as an open-source co-op. Spindletop System Dynamics will become the GNU Cooperative and will discount hardware to open-source developers. From Wired.com.