The Register: “It’s a major rewrite, first announced at LinuxWorld Expo in August 1999 when it was slated for a
September 2000 release. The software is accompanied by a note warning that “this release does not
include anything of use to end users,” which at least makes it consistent with all the previous versions
of GNOME Desktop we’ve used.

That’s a little harsh perhaps – working with GNOME software has always been fun, if ultimately
fruitless – but the project’s momentum owes more to politics rather than quality. Even aficionados
confide that the software resembles a triumph of improvisation over good design or quality control.”

honey writes: “7thGuard.net has just published information about PPL – Paranoid Posting License. This license was written to protect any information posted in usenet or as an email – forces anyone who wants to use it to give his (or her) work covered by DSL or GNU/GPL. The new wersion of this license has just been published – it’s much less liberal then the previous one. But… it promotes OpenSource and protects community’s rights even better than PPL1.1.”

url “Having successfully forced file-sharing rogue Napster into compliance with copyright laws, the Recording Industry Association of America, along with the major
Hollywood studios, is now launching attacks against popular file-swapping services MusicCity, KaZaA, Morpheus, and Grokster, an RIAA representative confirmed
Wednesday.

“We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally, especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched,” Hilary Rosen, RIAA
president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.” Yeah, it’s a moral thing. No money involved whatsoever.

Jeff Gerhardt wrote to remind everyone about the Disney Boycott in light of SSSCA. You can read more about it at The Linux Show.

LinuxPR: “Today Bynari Inc.’s CTO announced the release of Insight
Client Version 2.2-1. This is the fifth release of the Mail and Messaging client that allows Linux and
UNIX users to operate within a Microsoft Exchange Enterprise. The Company also announced that
existing registered users of any previously purchased Insight or TradeXCH client can upgrade for
free.”

LinuxWeeklyNews is our other favorite Linux news outlet. Their new edition is online today.

YahooNews: ““With the virus attacks of late and the numbers of those and how vicious those attacks
have been … it’s incumbent on Microsoft, being in the leadership position we’re in, to help
drive forward the industry in this area,” Brian Valentine, senior vice president of the Windows
Division at Microsoft, said in an interview.

“We can’t just sit back and think about Microsoft,” said Valentine, who is leading Microsoft’s new security task force.

The announcement follows a string of worms and other security breaches, including the Code Red worm of August and Nimda
worm in September.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Although many companies in the technology and e-commerce spaces have undertaken mass employee layoffs in order to cut costs and prop up sagging earnings, industry analysts say that a nagging question remains. Are these organizations paying too high a price for their pursuit of financial relief?”

– By Grant Gross –

Two companies working on Open Source finance software are working together with hopes of releasing a point-of-sale suite next spring that will compete with proprietary retail sales systems.

Global Retail Technology and Linux Developers Group issued a press release Wednesday describing their OpenCheckout project, a suite of retail sales management software that ranges from touch-screen cash register software to back-end report-generating and bank deposit software.

Bill Gribble, CEO of Linux Developers Group, the two companies are aiming for a pilot program with a couple of stores in the first quarter of 2002 to roll out the software suite, in hopes that the suite will catch on with more stores during the first half of 2002. “Nobody in the retail world would even THINK about installing new software between now and Jan 7,” he says in an email to NewsForge. “There won’t be a ‘boxed release’ of OpenCheckout in the
foreseeable future; rather, we are working directly with retail clients and channel partners to provide complete solutions including software, hardware, and training.”

This won’t be the first Open Source point-of-sale (POS) initiative, as such retail giants as The Home Depot and Burlington Coat Factory have converted to Linux-based POS systems. But Gribble says the market, still dominated by proprietary vendors, is ripe for more Open Source products.

“There are a few closed-source software vendors, and hardware vendors
with closed-source products, that have a stranglehold on the POS market
right now,” he says. ” The prices are high and the quality of the software is not
so good. That’s what most retailers are facing when they go to purchase
a system: high costs of startup, high costs of ownership, limited
flexibility …

“OpenCheckout provides retailers with a way to spend their money on making the software fit their business rather than the other way around,” he continues. “There aren’t any per-seat license fees for either the POS software or the operating system it runs on, which means they get a better solution for their money. And unlike some of the other
Linux-based POS systems, it runs on generic hardware with generic POS peripherals.”

The partnership between Gribble’s company, the primary sponsor of GnuCash personal finance project, and Mercator Point of Sale developer Global Retail Technology is what Gibble calls a “perfect match.”

Global Retail Technology’s Mercator will be the Java GUI for OpenCheckout; Gribble and Mercator author Quentin Olson found the two companies had much in common. “We are always looking for an opportunity to extend the GnuCash technology … into
vertical and business applications,” Gribble says. “[Olson] has lots of contacts and experience in the retail software world but needed some accounting and cash management infrastructure to make a complete system. That’s what the joint venture is doing.”

What Gribble calls OpenCheckout’s back office component will reconcile the cash
and other media in the drawer with the transactions recorded during the
day; prepare financial reports of activity; prepare daily summary information for a deposit slip; and handle configuration of the layout of the POS screen, manages employee records and inventory. Some screenshots of Mercator, based on the JavaPOSretail peripheral standard, are available at the OpenCheckout site.

With OpenCheckout, Gribble says, the front- and back-office pieces can be either
on the same machine or on separate machines connected by a network. “One
standard approach is to have the back office system running on a manager’s machine, so that during the course of the day the manager can monitor sales and so on,” he says.

The Dallas Morning News reports that “International Business Machines Corp. is expected to unveil a new server Thursday that the company says will dramatically change the market for the high-powered computers that host office operating systems.”