Patrick Mullen writes, “The Duke of URL has posted their review of SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional. SuSE has
just recently secured new funding, which makes them one of the strongest Linux
distributors at the moment. The review covers what’s new, its base of applications, the install, configuration of the systme and much more.”

– by Jack Bryar –
Open Source Business –

Another fiscal quarter over, and some of us are still here. Cheer
up. As of September 30, the average Linux stock price may look like the
Afghan army after a visit from the U.S. Air Force. However, if you
hitched your wagon to one of the surviving Linux companies out there, here
are two things that might comfort you:First, you’ve got plenty of company. The same analysts that blew up
the Internet and Linux bubbles and then popped them, are doing the same
thing to the rest of the economy. I subscribe to First
Call, the bible of the investment community. It’s the place
where buy- and sell-side analysts from the likes of Credit Suisse First
Boston and ABN Amro tell the world what they think of a given company and
its prospects. These stock promoters haven’t liked most Open Source
companies for a while now, but right now these guys don’t like anybody.
Everything from pharmaceuticals to oil companies are getting downgraded. Telecom
and tech stocks generally are still getting hammered.

Some have got bashed more badly than others.

Take Compaq. This week analyst Robert Chira from ABN Amro
essentially wrote off the company, suggesting it was on a downward spiral with
quarter-to-quarter PC revenues falling 11%. Chira suggested that the fall-off
should stabilize eventually but “we are not modeling [for] much” growth in
the near future. He reiterated the general view of the street, that the
merger with HP was a “raw deal” and a “major ball and chain around [Compaq’s] ankle” creating a combo that was ” poorly positioned,” with “no clear/credible marketing message or “road map.” Ouch.

Dell Computer didn’t get slapped as badly, but even here, you
could hear the the stampede of sell-side stock promoters heading for the
exits. In the last day or so, even the analyst for Robertson Stephens, the
most irrepressible Pollyanna of sell-side stock promoters, dropped its
gross earnings estimate for Dell by another 25% over the next year.

Even Microsoft is struggling. The company Windows XP is getting harsh reviews in the press. How negative? Here was one response, from the Miami Herald: “Sorry, I’m migrating to Linux and
leaving this garbage behind.” In addition, the company is learning the
hard way that the enterprise market is very different from desktop PCs.
Redmond is getting hammered by analysts for pushing XP when the
majority of its enterprise Win2000 customers haven’t finished rolling that
product out to its clients. To top things off, this is also the week that
Microsoft chose to promote its new portal solution for the Middle East.
If ever a product was launched at a less auspicious moment than
MSNArabia, I don’t know what it would be.

Give this kind pessimism, among the icons of the tech industry
imagine the type of news could you find about Open Source businesses?
After all, for the last year Linux has been about the most widely dissed
sector in high tech.

That’s the second thing that may comfort you. The news
coming out of the Open Source companies isn’t all that bad. For
example, Red Hat’s stock price has actually gone up over the last 30 days —
by about 50%. There’s a reason for that. The company continues to make
intelligent strategic decisions. Admittedly it has suffered
a fall-off in revenues, like a lot of firms, but it avoided
bleeding lots of red ink. It has gone after obvious markets, such as the
cash register/point of sale equipment market and the home entertainment
marketplace, and won business, and it has become the safe bet for companies
looking to migrate their Unix environments to a less expensive alternative.
It looks like a real business.

SuSE looks like it could become one, too. In the last couple of
days I’ve had three different conversations with the directors of tech
support at a major U.S. bank, a leading newswire service and a top management
consulting service, and all of these gentlemen volunteered that they had
converted their home machines to SuSE Linux after spending the last couple of
weeks working round the clock to stave off problems associated with Nimda
and an assortment of other Microsoft-related viruses. There is an
emerging market here, I can taste it.

Perhaps that’s why SuSE Linux was able to go out into one of
the worst economic situations imaginable and raise 15 million Euros
(U.S. $13.9 million). More interesting was the fact that they raised
significant chunks of that cash from “professional” investors, not just Linux
enthusiasts. Money came from Accenture, Apax Funds, SAP and Deutsche Bank, among
others. It isn’t a lot of money, but they raised the cash they intended to
raise, and without too much trouble. Go figure.

The news for SuSE employees wasn’t necessarily good. The firm is
dumping about a quarter of its workforce. Nevertheless, it does appear that
SuSE will manage to make into 2002. That’s more than Compaq can say.

TurboLinux is another apparent survivor, at least for the
moment. The company doesn’t talk much about its financial situation, but
after all the disasters it suffered earlier in the year, it appears to have
shaken out its management issues and identified a plausible business .
TurboLinux has gone after the enterprise and “Internet infrastructure”
markets, particularly those companies and institutions with a bias towards
unique, big-box server environments. It continues to make gains in Europe and
the Far East, which is where the core of the commercial market resides,
at least in my view. New CEO Ly-Huong Pham has a background in
non-standard big-box communication applications such as video-conferencing. I think
that’s a great background given the revived interest in conferencing
systems, the role TurboLinux may play in the Beijing Olympics and the fact
that Linux makes more sense in telecommunications than almost anywhere
else. Extreme Linux guru Peter Beckman has been made TurboLinux’s v.p.
of engineering, and I think that’s good news as well.

That’s not to say that Turbo has has fully got its act together.
If you go to the company’s employment contacts page you get asked for your serial number. I
presume they’ve made a technical error and have their tech support and
employment pages mixed up. Or they’re onto something I don’t know about. Neither
thought is comforting. But they seem to be hanging in there.

Linux continues to build a solid, if not spectacular, user base. A
small Florida city here, a retail operation there, several overseas
governments, an engineering and design shop or two. It’s hardly an Open Source
revolution, but in the current economic climate mere survival should be a cause
for celebration.

Global Retail Technology and Linux Developers Group today announced
the launch of OpenCheckout, a joint venture which will build complete
Point of Sale (POS) solutions based on open source software
components. The first product of the venture will be OpenCheckout
Retail Suite, an integrated point-of-sale, back office, and cash
management solution. OpenCheckout Retail Suite will combine Global
Retail’s Mercator POS, a sophisticated and configurable open-source
POS front end, with Linux Developers Group’s GNC Components
accounting/back-office software to provide complete point-of-sale,
inventory tracking, employee tracking, and POS reconciliation
functionality.

“Mercator POS is a mature, open-source POS application,” said Global
Retail Technology CEO Quentin Olson. “It is positioned to break open
a market that is largely dominated by closed, proprietary systems.
Combining it with back office and cash management functions from Linux
Developers Group’s GNC Components will allow us to provide a
complete systems solution for small and enterprise retailers.”

Written in Java and using the JavaPOS retail peripheral standard,
Mercator has been under development by Global Retail Technology for
three years and has been an open-source project since May, 2001.
Mercator provides complete POS front-end functionality, including
sophisticated inventory management, customizable user interface,
stand-alone or networked operation, per-employee auditing, and
advanced data replication and fault tolerance capability. JavaPOS is
a standard software environment developed by IBM which allows
compliant devices to be used easily from Java software.

GNC Components is a modularized and enhanced version of the accounting
technology in GnuCash, the most popular and functional personal
accounting program for the Linux operating system. Financial logic,
data storage, user interface, and reporting/analysis routines are
independent components which can be combined to fit the needs of a
particular application. Linux Developers Group, the corporate sponsor
of GnuCash development, has developed the GNC Components to bring
powerful open-source accounting tools to businesses from small-scale
to enterprise-scale. The GNC Components architecture provides
flexible financial reporting, multiuser networked operation,
sophisticated PostgreSQL database backend, and a powerful transaction
query engine. Special-purpose POS extensions, including end-of-day
cash reconciliation, client-server extensions for use with thin-client
POS installs, and redundant data-storage modules, are under
development.

“We are very excited to be working with Global Retail Technology,”
said Linux Developers Group CEO Bill Gribble. “The GNC Components are
the best open-source accounting toolset around and Mercator is the
most mature and functional open-source point of sale system. It’s a
perfect match. We think the time is right for an open-source POS
solution to shake up the marketplace a little. Companies around the
world have learned to trust their mission-critical Internet services
to Linux; trusting their day-to-day financials to Linux is the next
step. With no per-seat license fees, we can provide our customers
with a customized enterprise-class POS solution at a fraction of the
cost of those offered by the established vendors. What they would
have spent on license fees can be used instead to customize the
package to the precise needs of the business.”

The OpenCheckout Retail Suite will be released in the first quarter
of 2002. No pricing has been announced for the product or associated
services. The joint venture will offer a full range of consulting,
customization, installation, and support services for individual
retail outlets, retail chains, and systems integrators.

ABOUT LINUX DEVELOPERS GROUP, INC

Linux Developers Group, Inc. is a software development and consulting
firm based in Austin, Texas. It develops custom software and turnkey
solutions for e-business, finance, and retail applications. Linux
Developers Group, Inc was founded in May 2001 by CEO Bill Gribble and
a group of private investors. For more information, see the
Linux Developers Group web site, http://www.linuxdevel.com.

The LDG development staff is the core of the GnuCash development
team. GnuCash is the leading personal accounting program for the
Linux operating system. For more information about GnuCash, see the
GnuCash web site: http://www.gnucash.org.

ABOUT GLOBAL RETAIL TECHNOLOGY, LLC

Global Retail Technology, LLC, provides custom software and consulting
services for the retail industry. It was founded in 1995 by CEO
Quentin Olson. It is a privately-held company based in Seattle,
Washington. Quentin Olson has been developing retail business
software for various enterprises since the early 1990s. Worldwide, his
software is a part of tens of thousands of installed point of sale
systems. For more information, see the Global Retail Technology
website, http://www.globalretailtech.com.

Contact:

Bill Gribble
Linux Developers Group, Inc.
(512) 851-8731
grib@linuxdevel.com

Network World Fusion reports on the U.S. National Security Agency’s release of a Linux distro. “The NSA said it realizes that operating system
security is necessary and that mainstream
operating systems often lack critical security
features that could enforce the confidentiality
and integrity of network communications.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Joining forces with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), The RIAA has filed suit against the FastTrack powered troika of Morpheus, KaZaa, and Grokster for copyright infringement. The MPAA is involved because the FastTrack portals also trade movie files. Now both will try to shut down services that, by design, have made themselves more elusive than Napster. http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/sue_morphe us.html.” The RIAA site also has a press release,and ZDNet has a story.

Amanda Neimi writes, “Linuxlookup.com recently had the opportunity of speaking with Andreas Pour, Chairman of the KDE League, Inc.
Andreas Pour is a co-founder and current Chairman of the KDE League, Inc., a consortium of industry leaders and developers founded in 2000. As Chairman, he is responsible for the League’s operations, coordinating volunteers and contractors, recruiting new members and developing promotional strategies.

Read the full interview at Linuxlookup.com.”

PCWorld: “HomeRF-based wireless networking technology, which is playing catch-up with archrival 802.11b standard, moves a key step forward with the announcement of
the first shipping products to match 802.11b’s 10-megabits per second speed.

Proxim’s Symphony HomeRF, announced on Monday, is the first product line to support the HomeRF 2.0 standard. That spec offers speeds of up to 10 megabits
per second, more than six times the 1.6-mbps limit of previous HomeRF products. Proxim’s new products should deliver real-world throughput on a par with that of
802.11b networks, which have a theoretical maximum of 11 mbps.”

SeattleTimes: “In truth, most of us don’t fully understand cyberterrorism. Unlike computer viruses, worms and other
major nuisances we’ve experienced on the Internet, cyberterrorism can inflict far greater pain.

Cyberterrorism, which involves attacks on computer-dependent systems, is premeditated, politically
motivated and often coordinated. It can cause severe economic hardship, widespread loss of
electricity and possibly physical and psychological suffering. Few, if any, attacks have met the
criteria for cyberterrorism, so far.”

BusinessWeek: “With the specter of the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters
looming large in the minds of lawmakers, the cry to ban U.S. exports
of sophisticated encryption software has risen anew. Encryption, or
cryptography (crypto for short), is the science of devising codes that
cloak messages in secret language. It involves using complex
algorithms to mix characters of a message with other characters or
values in a seemingly nonsensical way. The result is gibberish that
even the biggest supercomputers struggle to decode.”

Seattle Times: “Mac owners look smug when their PC brethren discuss system security and computer viruses. “I
have a Mac,” they are wont to smirk. “I don’t have a problem.” Not quite, my friends.

The Mac is enjoying the longest stretch in its history without a serious form of attack against its
innards, but it’s not time to let down our guard. In fact, Macs remain susceptible to Microsoft Office
macro viruses, network attacks and snoopers who want to intercept data.”