Kelly McNeill writes “With Tuesday’s announcement that the Supreme Court would not hear Microsoft’s appeal, the company has lost its last hope of delaying judgment any further. With little recourse other than to accept this judgment, I asked myself how a company in Microsoft’s position might continue avoiding penalty. In a shrewd attempt at playing armchair CEO, I concluded that Microsoft could achieve this goal by taking advantage of its core assets in software development. Along with my army of programmers that spent as many as two days — the longest time ever invested in software refinement within my company — I would develop Microsoft’s latest masterpiece: Microsoft Court XP. The following is the news report that I would commission from my list of news agencies that I pay-off to write positive reviews about my software.”

Linux Weekly News’ weekly edition is up, and this week’s topic is the site’s financial woes. The site has lost some of its funding and its senior editor, and is looking for a new sponsor.

From MozillaQuest: “Look for the next Netscape 6.x release soon, maybe. After Mozilla Milestone 0.9.4 was released, the Netscape developers took over the Mozilla 0.9.4 branch to groom it into a Netscape browser-suite release. That happened nearly a month ago on 14 September… What now seems ages ago, it appeared that AOL-Time-Warner’s Netscape division would be releasing Netscape 6.5 in October 2001. However, that was when the Mozilla Organisation was suggesting that it would have Mozilla 1.0 ready for release in October 2001.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Closed-source software will always have a place, but I believe that the vast majority of this type of software is going to be in vertical markets, where customization is the order of the day. Warehouse management is a good example. Why develop an open-source warehouse management application for a market that is probably far less than one-thousandth that of Linux? It’s a question of demand and resources. SAP, Baan, Peoplesoft … these guys will never be replaced by open-source, but they may fold due to their own missteps. As products like Linux, the BSDs, Apache, and SaMBa gain even more presence in the business and personal marketplaces, their value will only continue to rise.”

Mike Loukides at OnJava discusses Sun’s anti-Open Source stance on J2EE certification and why that policy should change to make it easier for Open Source Java implementations to become certified.

ZDNet reports that Sony has released a memory-stick driven digital-audio device intended for use in cars, called the MGS-X1.

Kelly McNeill writes “The European Commission (EC) has accused Microsoft Corp. of trying to obstruct an investigation into the company’s alleged antitrust behavior, and of misleading investigators by falsely presenting supporting evidence, according to published reports. The EC, which is conducting an antitrust investigation into Microsoft separately from the U.S. government’s case, may seek a heavier fine — up to $2.5 billion — because of the company’s alleged obstruction and deception, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing a confidential European Union (EU) document that purportedly outlines the case against the world’s largest computer software maker.”

From Linux Insider: “If the push to extend Linux to the desktop is successful, the disabled will be big beneficiaries. The Gnome Accessibility Framework is finalizing a release that incorporates support for accessible applications programs, a move that will make it far simpler for developers to link peripherals such as screen readers to systems running the open-source Linux operating system.”

From LinuxPlanet: “The first alpha of KDE version 3 is out there, and in keeping with its status as a first alpha, it ain’t soup yet.

I downloaded and built it over the weekend, and used it a little, so I have a few impressions. A lot of applications have been ported over, mostly imperfectly. This, in turn, is due
in part to the beta status of QT-3.0. But before we get to a discussion of KDE3, a little tutorial on how you would go about building it if you were me. It requires an orderly
approach, which anyone looking at my desk would recognize as an alien idea around here.”

Microsoft shaved 2 gigs off the size of the hard drive that will ship with its Xbox console next month. Instead of the 10GB drive, the Xbox will sell with an 8GB drive. No reason for the decision was given, though The Reg speculates cost consideration played a major role.