If the PC industry is in one of its worst slumps ever, how did chipmaking giants Intel and AMD manage to pull off increases for their most recently concluded quarters? Analysts say the contradication can be explained by a cutthroat price war between the two companies, and the fact that cost-conscious PC builders are stocking up on parts now in antcipation of stronger sakes for this quarter. Full story at ZDNet.

Help Net Security: “The PHPLib Team announces phplib-7.2d, availible now. This release fixes the recently
discovered hole in prepend.php3 that can allow a remote attacker to inject non-local
code into any phplib based script.

Please note that this affects all applications that depend on PHPLib. Some apps have
decided to distribute phplib along with their app for easier installation. Please check
your phplib apps to determine if this is the case.”

CNET News.com reports on Caldera’s most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In that filing, the company said that major investors Tarantella and MTI Technology will be allowed to sell its shares in the company. Early investory MTI holds 5.3 million shares of Caldera stock; Tarantella came into its 16 million shares when it sold off its SCO Unix business to the company. With CALD trading at an all-time low of 0.84 at the time of writing, it is unclear just how much longer both companies plan to hold on to those shares.

– By Grant Gross –

Formerly warring MySQL companies MySQL AB and NuSphere met Friday and agreed to meet some more.

During a phone-in meeting, characterized by NuSphere representatives as “cordial and
low-key,” the two sides “exchanged information and opinions,” says Britt Johnston, CTO for NuSphere. Johnston’s company will propose a time for the next meeting, perhaps at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention in San Diego this week.

The two companies posted a sentence-long joint statement to the mysql mailing list Friday.

Reactions on the mailing list ranged from “we don’t want to know” to encouragement about the cease-fire.

Wrote one list member: “Since these issues are between two private companies, please take your discussions off this list. It is none of our business. By all means, tell us the result.”

But another said: “Thanks for the update. The neutral tone and lack of result make it sound like you had a ‘frank exchange of views’.”

The two companies’ business dispute, complete with competing lawsuits, came to public light a couple of weeks ago, when MySQL AB sent out a press release condemning NuSphere’s launch of MySQL.org. MySQL AB, owners of MySQL.com, said it had terminated an agreement allowing NuSphere to use the MySQL brand.

An anonymous reader writes: “There’s a fascinating interview with the chief operating officer of Lineo at linuxdevices.com — definitely worth reading. For example: “We have a team with significant technology litigation experience — inside and outside the company — which we plan to use if and when the GNU GPL is ever challenged. It is our belief that a successful commercial Linux company such as ours will be in a unique position to defend the license if it comes under serious attack . . ” Note: this is no idle threat — these are the folks who extracted a sizable settlement from Microsoft the last time they faced them in court!”

The Register: “The DVD Forum, the movie and consumer electronics business-backed consortium
that controls the DVD standard, has begun taking steps to eliminate Chinese-made
players and drives that play fast and loose with DVD region encoding.

Its tactic: to threaten Taiwanese DVD player makers with legal action to enforce a
ban on all unofficial DVD products, the prohibition to take effect on 1 October.”

BBC: “Napster has named German media executive Konrad
Hilbers as its new boss to lead the company’s
transformation into a legitimate music subscription
service.

He replaces Hank Barry, who steered the online
song-swap company through its landmark legal battle
with the record industry.”

Wired: “Adobe backs down and recommends the release of the Russian programmer arrested for writing code-breaking software — but Dmitry Sklyarov’s freedom is still a matter for the Justice Department.”

“The existence of different distributions of Linux has always given rise to conflicting views. Some feel that this leads to
fragmentation and is therefore bad. Whereas there are others who feel that these actually enhance the product and help to
customize it. So they are good for Linux’s growth.” More at FreeOS.com.

Kelly McNeill of OSOpinion writes: “It seems much of the press and many Mac folk have taken a mighty step into the deep end of a very dark pool of stupidity and expectation. They seem to think the only way Apple can survive is to release “insanely great” products every January and July and that any misstep is, perhaps, one foot back into the grave dug by Spindler and Amelio.”