Worldly Investor columnist Mitch Ratcliffe says Red Hat “wears the pants” among the top Linux companies investors should consider.

Loki Software, Inc., the
leading publisher of best-selling games for the Linux operating system,
accepted the coveted “Best of Show” award from IDG World Expo during the
Show Favorites Awards ceremony at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The press release is at LWN.net.

Dick Sullivan, vice president of integrated solutions marketing at IBM’s Software Group, talks to InfoWorld about IBM’s future Linux and Open Source initiatives.

From a story at TheStandard.com: “While noncommittal on whether Napster should be held liable for infringing on the copyrights of the major record labels, several Internet industry coalitions and trade groups, representing companies such as America Online, Yahoo and Intel, are taking issue with a federal judge’s ruling last month in the bellwether case.”

A defective memory component that Sun Microsystems Inc. has been quietly trying to fix for the past several months is continuing to create major problems for some large users of Sun’s Ultra Enterprise Unix servers, according to a story at Computerworld.

Four businessmen have trademarked country domains that begin with MP3, and now they’ve formed an alliance, reports TheStandard.com.

From a ZDII column: “VA Linux won back some fans on Wall Street this week with its impressive fourth-quarter earnings report. While it appears to have some momentum and has carved out a nice little niche for itself, investors shouldn’t expect a miraculous recovery anytime soon. That’s not to say VA Linux can’t be a fine investment, short- or long-term. Those who believe in the Linux operating system will undoubtedly take a second look at VA Linux considering it’s trading at an 85 percent discount from its all-time high of $320 a share.” (FUll disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

Emulex Corp. said on Friday it had been the victim of a hoax that caused its stock to plummet more than 50 percent, Reuters reported. A press release, reportedly put out on Web-based news dissemination service Internet Wire, said the company’s chief executive had resigned and Emulex had been forced to restate 1998 and 1999 earnings, as well as revise the fourth quarter to a loss from a gain.

Studios are not casual about losing control of films that can cost $50 million to $60 million to produce, says Rich Taylor, a Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spokesman. If media companies are going to retain control of their products, now is the time to lay the plans, says a story at IDG.net.

Aiming to create a de facto standard in the harshly competitive memory card market, EE Times is reporting that backers of the SmartMedia card have opened its interface specification and made it available free of charge.