Wasabi Systems, a Silicon Alley firm that develops UNIX-like operating systems, has landed $500,000 in first round funding. The round was led by a range of individual and institutional investors, reported @NewYork.

Miguel de Icaza, a 27- year-old programmer from Mexico, thinks nobody should have to pay hundreds of dollars for the latest copy of Microsoft Word for Windows — or any other software, for that matter. He believes it should all be free. There’s a feature on the Gnome guru from Newsweek International.

“In the past two weeks SEUL/edu has talked about our participation in various tradeshows. Our self-defined role is to foster educational applications for Linux. So far we’ve attended and presented at a handful of Linux shows in North America and Europe. It occurred to us that that may not be getting our message across to the people most in need of hearing it: teachers and school administrators.” Check out the full report.

Linuxlab has announced the eGET Service, its custom software service supporting needs of e-commerce providers using the Linux operating system. The press release is at LinuxPR.

Just as new statistics show music-swap service Napster growing at incredible speed, the record industry has asked a federal appeals court judge to shut it down, reports Napster.

70South, the Open Source-based polar news site, extended its lead as the premier polar information site by announcing today the expansion of it WAP based services. The new feature enables users to send emails via their WAP based phones. Now besides being able to view your Antarctic and polar related news on the move via your phone, users will be able to send email via a WAP interface. In the comming weeks 70Souths plans to release several other features that are currently in trials. The press release is at LinuxPR.

Slashdot readers discuss the future of e-books. ” ‘E-books’ is the latest buzzword in publishing, made up of companies that are about as open as the NSA. Maybe the publishers ought to consider the real lessons of Net and try being as open and innovative as some of their successful young interactive writers. After all, there’s money in it.”

Media Metrix Inc. said Monday that Napster Inc.’s song-swap application quadrupled to nearly 5 million unique users from February to July and is the fastest growing application it has ever tracked on the Web. The story is at MSNBC. More from ABC News, and even more about a lawyer for Metallia and Dr. Dre asking several universities to restrict student access to the service.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM will attempt yet again to wrestle Unix server market share away from Sun Microsystems Inc. with new 64-bit boxes.
This week, HP will unveil Superdome, its most powerful server to date, sources said. IBM, meanwhile, will launch Blue Hammer, the company’s server clustering solution targeted at Internet-based businesses. A ZDNet story offers some perspective.

icosmoss.com, a platform for developers to exchange and promote their Open Source projects for Macintosh has launched. The site is still in beta. — Submitted by Anonymous Reader