Debian Planet: “Without any fanfare, the woody base system was frozen this weekend, right on schedule. The only evidence of the freeze is occasional ‘Package is frozen, not considering’ lines in update_excuses. Next up, in about a month: Standard and tasks freeze.”

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.”