Reported at The Industry Standard: “A spate of American companies will begin
buying back their own shares Monday, part of a
wide-ranging effort to help boost the reopening
of the stock markets, Monday’s Wall Street
Journal reported.

In the days since terrorists attacked the World
Trade Center, among other targets, and brought
stock trading to a halt, many companies, from
Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) to financial-services
concern FleetBoston Financial Corp. (FBF), of
Boston, to New York insurer American
International Group Inc. (AIG), have announced
new stock-repurchase programs or expressed
the intention to buy shares under existing programs.”

CNET News.com reports that last week’s terror attakcs shouldn’t hurt technology business very much. In fact, some analysts predict that increased capital spending will actually lead to a rebound. Nothing like a war to make the economy all better?

Reported at The Industry Standard: “Rambus
Inc. (RMBS) and Intel Corp. (INTC) signed a
patent cross-license agreement that
supersedes the prior agreement between
the companies.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Rambus said in a press release Monday the
new contract will have a positive and
material financial affect on its current
quarter.”

Reported at EE Times: “A U.K. startup has designed a Java byte code processor around the
ARCtangent-A4 32-bit RISC core and claims it achieves better Java performance than
ARM’s Jazelle at the same clock frequency.

The core, called Bigfoot, complements Digital Communication Technologies Ltd.’s current
offering, a Java and C-language CPU based on a stack architecture, known as Lightfoot.”

ZDNet Australia News: “US Senator
Judd Gregg has proposed tighter
restrictions on the use of
encryption software, which
scrambles electronic data and
hinders its detection, and has
called for international support.
Reports since the Septermber 11
terrorist attacks say that the FBI
believe such tools were used to
orchestrate the event.

Civil liberties group, Electronic
Frontiers Australia said it would be
opposed to any move by the
Australian Federal Government to
follow suit.”

Always on the prowl for new hardware news, The Register reports: “Motorola taped out the PowerPC 8500 – aka the G5 – last week and is set to go
into volume production real soon now at speeds of up to 1.6GHz – a higher clock
speed than AMD’s latest-generation, ‘Palomino’ Athlon is expected to ship at.”

Posted at Apple: “Apple today announced the cancellation of Apple Expo 2001, which was
scheduled to take place at Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles, Paris from
September 26th to 30th, 2001.

“We’re cancelling Apple Expo in the wake of last week’s devastating and
tragic events”, said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re sorry to disappoint
our users and developers, but their safety is our primary concern”

Perkypants interviews Havoc Pennington. From the introduction: “Havoc has been a GNOME hacker for a loooong time, with far too many outstanding hacks to his name. He wrote
GTK+/GNOME Application Development, which is still widely regarded as the beginning GNOME hacker’s bible, and
chairs the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors. Havoc currently works at Red Hat, and very infrequently posts updates
to the RHAD Labs news page.

GConf first appeared in GNOME 1.4, used by applications such as Nautlius and Galeon. It will be utilised across the entire
GNOME 2.0 platform.”

– By Grant Gross –

Victor Yodaiken, CEO of the company that makes RTLinux, says he believes the Free Software Foundation’s accusation that his company is violating the GNU General Public License with its patent of RTLinux may be a misunderstanding.

Editor’s note: LinuxDevices.com has a followup late Monday saying the issues have been at least partially resolved. Here’s a press release from FSM Labs saying the issue has been resolved.

On Sept. 14, the Free Software Foundation issued a statement accusing FSM Labs of violating the GPL. From the statement: “Yodaiken has attempted to use the patent to impose restrictive terms on a GPL-covered program (Linux, the kernel used in the GNU/Linux operating system). These terms conflict with the GNU GPL, and imposing them is a violation of the GPL.”

But Yodaiken, who says he was surprised by the statement, says negotiations continue with the Free Software Foundation over the license language FSM Labs uses on the GPL release of its patented RTLinux, a real-time operating system. FSM Labs and the Free Software Foundation lawyer are scheduled to meet later today to discuss the latest language of the license, which Yodaiken says has “minor problems, which we’d be happy to change.”

“We have provided a license for allowing people to freely use the GPL RTLinux,” Yodaiken says. “There’s a no-royalty license that you can use RTLinux GPL as long as it stays GPL.”

The RTLinux patent has been controversial, with some members of Free Software/Open Source communities decrying the use of a patent by an Open Source company. Yodaiken says the issue seems to be a political one at the Free Software Foundation, and he suggests the foundation is mixing its roles as defender of the GPL and intellectual property advocate.

“The FSF has its own opinion about patents, which we do not share,” he says.

The controversy illustrates some of the difficulties an Open Source business can have with creating a sustainable business model, Yodaiken adds. “We’re one of the few profitable companies out here [in the Open Source community],” he says. “We never took any venture capital, and we’ve been developing both proprietary and GPL code.”

Yodaiken says he was taken aback by some comments on the issue posted at Slashdot, when some readers there questioned who FSM Labs is. Yodaiken notes that his company has contributed what he calls “a significant amount of code” to the Linux kernel, and company employees drove the Linux Power PC port.

“We’re a long-term member of the Linux community,” he says. “I hope people stay calm and remember the difference between what’s important and what’s not.”

Yodaiken says he expects a press release to come out of the discussions with the Free Software Foundation early this week.

Some topics from this week’s edition of useful news for the Python developer community include a discussion on the impact of .NET, an example of how a Python programmer might sort out awkward code, and a summary of modules with 3D graphics support. Posted at LinuxProgramming.