Linux Weekly News’ weekly edition is up for this week, discussing when exactly Linux’ birthday is, and the rap Richard Stallman’s GNU/antics have been getting.

ZDNet evaluates and compares 7 different flavours of Linux for their usability in the enterprise environment. The distributions compared are include Caldera OpenLinux eServer, Debian GNU/Linux, Red Hat, SuSE, Linux-Mandrake, Slackware, and Turbolinux.

Debian Planet is pitching Debian Gnu/Linux as an alternative operating system for users of BeOS, which will soon be discontinued.

Wireless Newsfactor reports that TeleData Technology “is shipping the first commercially available voice-messaging application based entirely on the open-source Linux operating system.”

Kelly McNeill writes “What is the best possible outcome of the Microsoft monopoly case for Microsoft, for the rest of the software providers, and for consumers? I have some suggestions. The court should rule as a matter of law that neither Microsoft nor any other software vendor can exempt itself from product liability in its EULA (end-user license agreement) unless the company makes all of its source code available with compilers and other necessary supplemental software so that the end user, or some entity contracted by the end user, has the opportunity to verify the integrity of the machine’s usable instructions and data.”

Computer User: “An independent computer programmer in Germany has discovered that malicious hackers could wield
seemingly ordinary-looking Web pages to send commands to servers behind such barriers as
corporate firewalls.

Jochen Topf, whose own software credits include a POP3-protocol server for managing user access to
large e-mail systems, says he found that many common Web browsers can be tricked into passing on
commands from hackers unbeknownst to the browsers’ users.”

Qwest DSL customers who experienced Code Red-induced outages earlier this month won’t get any relief from their provider. Refusing the pleas of the Washington State Attorney General, the telco says the problem was the virus, and not its modems, and “Qwest is not crediting for the virus.” Associated Press story on CNET.

Reuters at Wired News: “More than 50 music publishers and songwriters, including country artist Vince Gill, on Wednesday said they filed a
copyright infringement suit against Web music firm MP3.com.

The lawsuit was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against MP3.com, which is being
acquired by Vivendi Universal and is currently transforming itself from music industry rebel to partner.

Plaintiffs also include the estate of Roy Orbison.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Despite controversial comments recently made by Ransom Love, the chief executive officer of Caldera International, Inc., saying that the GPL (General Public License) was holding back commercial Linux vendors like Caldera and thus upsetting a significant portion of the open-source community, Mr. Love’s company went on record earlier this week to announce that Caldera will open-source the AIM performance benchmarks and the UNIX Regular Expression Parser, along with two UNIX utilities, awk and grep, under the GPL. Because GNU is gradually taking the place of the original Unix, many are suggesting that Mr. Stallman’s recursive GNU acronym (“GNU’s Not Unix”) may eventually have to be renamed, “GNU is Now Unix.”“

Reported at vnunet.com: “Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have
discovered more vulnerabilities in Secure Shell (SSH) which allow
an attacker to learn significant information about what data is being
transferred in SSH sessions, including passwords. “