Business Wire: “Covalent… today launched the Apache 2.0 Zone at apache.covalent.net, the first comprehensive information source for Apache 2.0. The site will combine articles written by Covalent’s team of Apache experts, discussion forums moderated by many leaders in the field, open-source merchandise and free software tools that will help enterprise users maximize their use of Apache 2.0.” Read more in this press release.

The Onion: “I’ve heard the stereotypes about Java programmers being uptight nerds who don’t know how to cut loose. Well, that’s about as far from the truth as Enterprise is from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision. Contrary to what you may have heard, Javaheads can be quite the cut-ups.” Read more here.

Irish writes: “Paul Horn, head of IBM research, proposed a challenge to the computer industry to make computers ‘self healing’. In this Financial Times article, Horn claims that if we keep increasing our server usage without lessening Systems Admin workload the size of the IT support industry could grow to 200 million… [T]he solution is ‘autonomic computing,’ where a computer would be able to independently track its vital signs and regulate health. His group has recently introduced eLiza, a feature that enables the computer to perform some low-level self-repairing functions.”

Kevin A. Lenzo writes,
— Yet Another Society, a non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation for the advancement of collaborative efforts in computer and information sciences, today announced the formation of the Perl Foundation as an internal unit dedicated to the Perl programming language. The Foundation will consolidates responsibility and authority for the Perl Mongers users groups organization, perlmonks.org, perl.org, the Perl Development Grants, the international Yet Another Perl Conferences, and copyright issues regarding Parrot and Perl 6.

The Perl Foundation is opening with a campaign to raise US$175,000 for two 2002 Perl Development Grants, to be awarded to Dan Sugalski and Dr. Damian Conway for the ongoing work in Perl, including development of Perl 6. The grants will each be a total of US$80,000: US$60,000 stipend, with US$20,000 for travel. US$15,000 is assigned for administrative overhead.

The first Perl Development Grant was awarded to Dr. Conway by the Yet Another Society in 2001, when a individuals and corporate sponsors made it possible. Individual and small companies accounted for nearly half the US$75,000 award. The list of contributors, as well as the work produced under the grant, are at http://yetanother.org/damian. BlackStar, Morgan Stanley, VA Linux, Manning Publications, O’Reilly and Associates, and Stonehenge Consulting also made major contributions.

For more information on The Perl Foundation, Perl Development Grants, please visit http://perl-foundation.org.
To find out more about the Yet Another Society, yetanother.org.”

From EET.com: “An open-source ‘design organization’ tool created
by Kevin Hubbard, an ASIC designer at Siemens Ultrasound, promises to
help manage large chip design projects without the overhead of
commercial, graphically oriented tools. Called ChipVault, the offering
provides Verilog or VHDL hierarchical file organization, revision control,
issue tracking, hierarchy viewing, block instantiation and hooks for
launching EDA tools.”

Posted at LWN.net: Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT)
today announced that at 10:00 a.m. EST on Wednesday, December 12, 2001, CEO
Matthew Szulik has been invited to testify on the proposed anti-trust
settlement between Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT), and the federal
government. As an invited witness, Szulik will testify before the United
States Senate Judiciary Committee as part of a panel comprised of noted
legal, government and industry experts.

Slashdot readers discuss an interview with Stefan Merten of the German mailing list Oekonux, which discusses the revolutionary implications of Free Sofware. From the interview: ” … the organization of the production of Free Software differs widely from that
of commodities produced for maximizing profit. For most Free Software producers there is no other
reason than their own desire to develop that software. So the development of Free Software is based on
the self-unfolding or self-actualization of the single individual. This form of non-alienated production
results in better software because the use of the product is the first and most important aim of the
developer — there simply is no profit which could be maximized.”

The Register reports that Intel has released to the Open Source community its Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV) 2.1, which “enables
computers with optical detection mechanisms to be programmed to recognise both
2D and 3D images. Intel has also included tools to perform facial gesture
recognition.”

Here’s a week-old story from GovTech.net: “For reasons of national security and national pride, government officials
in countries like China, France and Germany are increasingly adopting the free, open-source computer
operating system known as Linux.

In some cases, the software being replaced is produced by the Microsoft Corp., which, users say, is
more prone to viruses and hackers.”

Jeff Gerhardt writes, Tuesday, December 11th, 2001 from the home of Wayne’s World, Aurora IL,
Tonight LIVE on
www.thelinuxshow.com

At 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et…. Kevin Hill, Jeff Gerhardt, PJ Hyett, Doc Searls(Linux Journal), Arne Flones and Russ Pavlicek; have another interesting holiday show lined up tonight on The Linux Show!!

In Segment One – Hot News: We will be covering the hot Linux news of
the last few (several) weeks. Although we have caught up with our glut of news to purge, we sort of like what has been happening with the 2 segment format the last few weeks. At least it works well when there is interesting news and a good guest. So, we are going to try this format for a while.

In Segment Two- The Road To TOLIS- or The Return of BRU
On that road full of good intentions, many a good Linux Company fell by the roadside to become part of carrion making up the IT Road Kill that has littered the American business landscape in this post DOT COM era. It becomes VERY sad when those companies are not only managed and staffed by friends of TLS, but when they actually have a REAL GOOD PRODUCT. The fact of EST and the BRU product failing is one such sad story.

So, it thrills us to know end to see one of those groups of friends with that killer product pull themselves out of the flames and once again stand tall. This is the story of The TOLIS GROUP and their effort to resurrect BRU.

Tonight we will be joined by Tim Jones, President of The Tolis Group. Tim will take us on a wild ride that will include a short trip down the EST vs. TOLIS Group history. We will chat about how many Linux companies (including EST) were being handed too much money for initial capitalization leading to unchecked spending and then eventually their demise. We will talk about how Tolis was able to pull together a number of the key EST employees to put together the Tolis team; and how the “once burned” TOLIS Group has been totally self funded. This conservative business approach has lead to Tolis closing the second quarter in the black!

We will also discuss the current state of the art for BRU. BRU was first developed in 1985 for the general UNIX world, and ported to a build-it-yourself environment with Linux kernel level 0.99.pl12 in the Summer of ’94 before a Red Hat was something more than the Fez worn by Shiners. BRU has always been viewed as a breakthrough product not only because of its reliability in backup, but as a restoration tool as well. The philosophy over at the BRU house was always, “if you can’t restore, what the hell good is your backup anyway?”

Since 1985 BRU has had broad broad acceptance due to its UNIX platform cross compatibility (backup Linux boxes, restore to Sun, HP, AIX, et al). Future plans (Pending 17.0 release with Quick File Access – shortens restore time on large backups from hours to minutes) – this release will occur the first week of January and so listeners of tonights show are getting an exclusive on the announcement!

For BRU-Pro, Tolis has been hard at work improving what has just won Linux Journal’s Editor’s Choice award for Best Linux Backup for 2001. Tolis has broadened the supported platforms and added client/server encryption and compression to improve the security and performance of BRU-Pro. The 2.0 release of the product is scheduled in January with a planned release date of the end of that month.

Other opinions are welcome at GeekCast. If you would like to join us on the show, check our IRC Chat(irc.thelinuxshow.com #linuxshow).

Remember tune in at 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et.
Catch the Linux show at www.thelinuxshow.com