Major music distributors are jumping into online sales because of threats from services such as MP3.com and Napster, according to a story at InfoWorld.

From a Sm@rt Partner story: A poll circulating among various developer groups asks whether Sun should make Java Open Source. The developer who organized the poll calls Java “broken,” because it isn’t getting new features.

O’Reilly’s latest edition in the popular In a Nutshell
series, “Linux in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition” covers all the core commands
available on common Linux distributions. “Linux is changing rapidly, and so
are the needs of its users,” says Andy Oram, O’Reilly Linux Editor. “Among
the most significant features of this new edition are the in-depth tutorials on
each of the three graphical interfaces that confront users when they boot
Linux KDE, GNOME, and the older, but highly stable fvwm.” From a press release on LinuxPR.

A BusinessWeek story says: New e-payments technology being developed by a startup could let the record labels collect each time a music file is shared.

Upside.com reports on the gaming company’s efforts to make a name among several competitors: “One Linux company, Indrema, is diving into the pool head-first. Staking its life on the belief that current software development and hardware trends sweeping the embedded systems market will continue to sweep their way into the realm of gaming consoles, the company has been showing off its L600 Entertainment system, essentially a Linux-driven set-top box with a 600 MHz processor and the potential for 100 Mbs worth of broadband connectivity. ”

KDE, a desktop for Linux/UNIX operating systems, was honored as Show Favorite in the Desktop category at the LinuxWorld Expo, held in San Jose, Calif., last week, according to a press release on BusinessWire.

Caldera Systems, a provider of Linux eBusiness Internet Solutions, reported revenue of $1.2 million for the three months ended July 31, 2000, a 9 percent increase over revenue of $1.1 million for the comparable three-month period of the previous fiscal year, according to a press release on BusinessWire.

From a Don Marti column at Linux Journal: “After making sure that all the SCO people around were otherwise occupied, I asked him (Linux freak to Linux freak) about his secret plans for his newly acquired SCO flock — which is now meeting quietly on a tree-lined college campus, like a pre-venture-capital Linux gathering.”

Caldera chief Ransom Love says his company will continue sales and support for SCO’s Unix products, ZDNet UK reports. More at InfoWorld.

From a Reuters story: “Popular song-swapping sites like Napster and Gnutella have come under attack by the record industry, but a new study suggests they could face a more insidious threat from their own users who take free music more often than they contribute any.”