According to The Register, Sun’s giving away free copies of Solaris (8 if you’re on Intel, 9 if you’re not), and they don’t miss the irony of that compared with the recent switch from free as in beer StarOffice.

Brian Proffitt is talking business, TCO, and purse-holders. Find out how to gradually steer the Titanic away from the Windows iceberg and towards the peaceful waters of Linux, here at LinuxPlanet.

Slashdot’s talking about the big announcement to come from Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux, and Conectiva: they’re making a “super-distro” to go against Red Hat.

“Tait Electronics infrastructure manager Barry Ireland thinks the firm may have one of the biggest Linux installations in the country, running 500 Windows users over about 400 active Samba sessions on a Linux Red Hat server. MasterTrade, meanwhile, another Christchurch company, is running Linux on 300 desktops.” More at ComputerWorld.nz.

Anonymous Reader writes: “OOoDocs.org, the openoffice.org user community site, is running a commentary by Gary Edwards about the unfair treatment the OpenSource community is receiving from the hands of Gartner and the like. Says Gary:

” The real wonder is that there is any users left who buy the grist that comes out of the shill mill. It would seem to me that Microsoft has been so fully discredited that their methods and minions would also be suspect.

The Microsoft Anti-Trust trial painted them fully as the Enron of the Information Industry, with Gartner playing the role of Andersen. How Gartner escapes the destructive and discrediting taint of Chairman Bill’s own special breed of Enronitis is beyond me. Enron collapsed because the investors (users) discovered the scam. Andersen kept the scam going long after the jig was up.

Will someone please explain to me how what Gartner does is any different?”“

– By Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
This essay is not about Linux or Open Source, but if you like music and the Internet you may want to read it anyway, because record companies are being so amazingly stupid about the Internet and how to use it as a sales medium that I often wonder how the people who run them ever made it beyond the local McDonalds counter into jobs that pay seven or eight figures per year.
On one side of the music promotion coin, record companies constantly complain that they are forced to pay huge fees to “independent” promoters if they want their latest releases played on broadcast radio stations, as described in an ABC News report.

At the same time, the very same record companies are complaining that online music stations are playing music without paying for it, and are agitating like mad (although so far unsuccessfully) for government-mandated royalty payments from webcasters that are much higher than most webcasters’ incomes, and much higher than the fees paid by over-the-air music broadcasters.

Yes, broadcasters pay fees to play music. But they don’t play a lot of songs that they don’t get paid to play. This seems to be especially true of big broadcast station chain owners like Clear Channel, a company that runs mind-numbingly similar (and boring) radio stations in many U.S. cities, none of which seem to have playlists with more than 30 or 40 songs on them. (We can get into the evil of the FCC’s nasty decision to allow a few large companies to control most radio broadcasting in this country another time. It’s a separate topic.)

Are you with me so far? Does what you’ve just read make any sense? It doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, the words do, but the idea of record companies trying to gouge webcasters even as they complain about getting gouged by over-the-air broadcasters is, flatly, nuts. You would think people who think like this would be kept in asylums, not allowed to run large businesses.

I challenge you to sell me music over the Internet

Why none of the record companies have figured out how to sell music over the Internet is beyond me. Perhaps all of their executives have taken too many drugs. So I will now explain a simple system that will get me to buy music over the Internet, using existing technologies, that could revolutionize music distribution and increase record company profits:

• Sponsor webcasters and help them flourish
• Give them low-bandwidth versions of your music to play
• Make sure every song has a “click to buy” button available on the Webcasters’s sites while it is playing, in lieu of royalty fees.
• Charge me 50 cents or a buck for a high quality download of the song that is currently playing; make sure the fee is low enough that it’s an pure impulse purchase.
• Make sure the “click to buy” feature prominently features not only the current song but the last 10 or so that played, so if I missed one I can go back and pick it up later. A whole catalog of available music should also be on the webcaster’s site.
• If sell-by-the-song is too radical for record company executive’s drug-addled brains, at least have “click to buy” CDs of the artists being played, preferably at a semi-reasonable price like $10.99 for current hits and less for older stuff.

You cannot click on your radio and instantly buy music from K-BOR FM, your local over-the-air “alternative” rock station. You can easily set this up for a webcast that people listen to through their computers. It is as natural and simple an ecommerce application as can be imagined, and one that could be used to sell albums and songs not only from a few “major” artists but those produced by a broad spectrum of musicians.

A wider range of sales would make a wider range of music profitable and might kill that constant “only one group in 10 ever makes us money” whine the record companies use to justify their horrible behavior toward artists and their tendency to go with pap instead of producing music with substance to it.

There would be no reason to stay away from pap. Most people, being ordinary, tend to like ordinary music. “Click to buy” would probably help sell Brit’Sync albums as much as it would sell music by the more musically adventerous artists I prefer personally. That’s the point: Webcasting can be narrowcast, not broadcast, so teenage girls who want Boy Bands 24/7 can get what they want, and so can those who might want a Basic Bach channel that played nothing but old Johann Sebastian’s work all day and night.

Another sales possibility here is exclusive interviews or “behind the scenes” videos of favorite artists. Those who want to know every detail of J. Lo’s life would certainly pay for reports of what she ate for breakfast last Tuesday if they were presented in an appealing enough manner.

I’m sure you, being a creative, intelligent NewsForge reader, can come up with another dozen ways record companies could earn money from webcasting, while also using it as a method of promoting the musical diversity we’re losing as radio stations become more insipid, to the point where a growing number of classical stations now play the same “lite” classics over and over instead of giving us the hard core stuff.

Too bad record company executives don’t read NewsForge. Or perhaps some of you do. If so, the ideas outlined above are free for the taking. I have no intention of going into the webcasting business. I just want to be a listener — and a customer, too.

dep writes, “Monty Manley has written a response to recent remarks by BitKeeper author Larry McVoy, as a Guest Essay on Linux and Main. He takes the view that the era of commercial software is, simply, over.”

“Mozilla 1.0 is out (unofficially)! AOL-Netscape’s Mozilla Organization has not placed its Mozilla 1.0 browser suite on its public FTP server as an official release. But you can download for what all intents and purposes is Mozilla 1.0 now”

Check it out at ReactiveLinux.com.

LinuxDevices.com: “There’s a new Embedded Linux kid in town, and his name is the “Dragonix”. What’s Dragonix? It’s an “Open Hardware” single-board computer (SBC), based on a Motorola Dragonball 68VZ328 processor running uClinux. The Dragonix project has already spawned a series of add-on boards that make it easy to build things like firewalls, MP3 players, and home automation apps around the Dragonix SBC.” Story here“

Meredith Derby writes: “One-third of software in use today is pirated, according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a worldwide anti-piracy organization. If your company uses illegally downloaded software, the BSA is after you. If they catch you, your company could spend a bundle on new software licenses. Rather than living in fear, you could stop using licensed software, said Evan Leibovitch, Chairman of the Board of Brampton, Ontario-based Linux Professional Institute. In other words, stop using Windows and go open source, he said. If you do, the BSA can’t touch you.” More of the interview at SearchWindowsManageability.techtarget.com.