Kelly McNeill writes “Anyone not living on the moon for the past few days has either heard of or been affected by the Nimda worm. This worm appears to be one of the most destructive pieces of software yet, and has wreaked havoc on a large percentage of Internet users and businesses throughout the world. Reports of entire companies shutting down for days are not uncommon. Yet my company continued business as usual. Why? We run Unix.”

– By Grant Gross –

An Open Source-inspired alternative to royalty-based payments for musicians and authors got a boost earlier this month when the U.S. Internal Revenue Service gave it public charity status.

OpenCulture.org president Jesse Vincent, a veteran Open Source programmer, says he expects the year-old Web site to take off now that it’s been accepted as a 501(c)(3) charity by the IRS. Vincent hopes to have artists and musicians contributing their work within a couple of months.

OpenCulture.org is designed to work as a twist on the pay-to-view revenue model on the Internet. Authors or musicians post a description of their works and set a dollar amount they need to post their works. Fans then can donate virtually any dollar amount they want, and when the escrow account has enough money for the artist to release his work, fans who’ve paid can download it.

A few weeks later, the artist’s work is released to the general public, although the artist still retains the copyright to his work For more details check out their How it Works page.

The OpenCulture team is still feeling its way with some issues, but the way for the Web site to make money is to charge 10 percent of the artist’s cut, which Vincent says is lower than most agent fees. “That’s sort of the initial plan, 10 percent,” he says. “If it turns out that 10 percent is way too much money, and we’re rolling in dollars … we’d probably eventually drop that donation percentage.”

Vincent and his handful of helpers say on their Why OpenCulture page that their method will cut production costs for musicians and authors, while giving Internet users the “opportunity and the responsibility to make sure that books and music are available to the widest possible audience.”

“It’s my hope that things are going to ramp back up again now that we have public charity status,” says Vincent, the creator of RT, an Open Source, industrial-grade ticketing system. “Most of the folks we’ve talked to are very positive about it, especially smaller artists. They want us to get going so they can start using the system. Some folks who are more used to the traditional royalty system are rightfully concerned about a revenue stream that is not royalty based.”

But Vincent believes the concept can work for both unknown and famous artists. “I think it’s going to benefit everybody just about equally,” he says. “A small band is obviously asking for much less money, but on the ‘Net, it’s not hard to build a following. This is a hypothetical example, we have not talked to Miss Spears, but if Britney Spears wanted to release her next work through OpenCulture, she has an awful lot of fans who’d be willing to put up five, ten, twenty bucks for the release. It’s a model that scales down to a very specific fan base and up to a very large, more global fan base.”

The idea for OpenCulture came from an essay, The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier. “I had mulled it over for a couple of months, and ended up talking with some friends from college. We started riffing on the idea. Actually, we originally talked about doing it for software — helping Open Source programmers get paid to do their thing.”

As Vincent’s group was considering a site to pay programmers, a couple of other sites emerged, so they went back to thinking about works of art. “We started looking at it a little harder and realized this actually did make more sense for books and music,” he says. “From there, we just started writing and planning and designing.”

The next steps for OpenCulture.org is publishing a draft of the OpenCulture License on the Web. Eventually, Vincent hopes to offer artists several license options, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Open Audio License, although Vincent believes some artists will see that license as too free with their copyrights. “It is so open-ended,” he says of the EFF license. “It’s much more like the GPL for audio than a lot of artists would be comfortable with.” OpenCulture’s license would allow redistribution of the work “without giving up all their intellectual property rights,” he adds.

Vincent also hopes to get some grants to help sustain the project. “We do need money to make this go forward,” he says. “We’ve been doing this on a shoestring, which has been enough to pay the lawyer and keep the server in co-lo.”

From PC World: “Compaq launched the four products in its Evo family of business PCs Tuesday, along with plans for leasing the products through its Access on Demand service packages.”

From ZDNet: “The Nasdaq stock market is considering changing its regulations so the large number of companies whose share price has fallen below $1 may not be delisted, sources close to the situation told Reuters on Tuesday.”

From Network World Fusion: “On the heels of the Code Red and Nimda worms that plagued the Internet — and especially Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) systems — research firm Gartner Inc. released a report last week suggesting that users and companies ‘immediately investigate alternatives to IIS’ because other Web server applications have better security records.”

ZDNet reports on KDE::Enterprise. “Software developers associated with the K Desktop Environment project have
launched an initiative to help convince big business of the benefits of Linux–and
particularly the K Desktop Environment (KDE) –over more traditional software.”

It’s posted at LWN.net. Among the items: “Using HFS+ with Linux. There has been a discussion about using
HFS+ partitions with Linux. They are used on MacOS X for large
partitions. A Linux driver is, however, unstable and abandoned.
Several people have experienced kernel panics when accessing HFS
partitions. The only way to access this filesystem with Linux is to
use userspace HFS+ tools from the hfsplus package. Alternatively
one could use UFS partitions which MacOS X supports and for which an
experimental Linux driver is available.”

EET.com reports that Mentor Graphics Corp. has added a debugger to its
HDL Designer Series line of IC design and verification tools. It runs on Linux and Unix, as well as Windows.

CanadaComputes.com has a story about the many browser choices in Linux. The author runs some interesting tests on load times, etc., comparing six Linux browsers, including Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror.

Pat writes, “The Duke of URL has just posted an editorial on Microsoft’s latest
marketing practices. If you look back in history, you’ll find their
rushing of Windows XP out the door is nothing new for this Redmond software
company.”