In this IBM developerWorks article, Northern Light programmer Teodor Zlatanov supplies a few ideas on the use of Perl and the configuration engine (ccfengine) to streamline system administration.

Commentary from LinuxPlanet: “As readers of this column cannot have escaped noticing, there is no one louder in defense of copyright protections
than I am. But there is a difference between the ability to violate copyright and actually doing so.

The community is enraged, but the rest of the world doesn’t give much of a toot, one way or the other. Sound
familiar?

That is how totalitarianism is achieved. You pick a fairly small, even fringe, community, and you use them to create the
underpinnings for what could result in far broader controls. There’s no broad outcry, because people figure it doesn’t
effect them, and they’re too busy worrying about the truly important stuff, such as how the Yankees are doing.”

Germany’s SuSE Linux AG has announced a 10 percent reduction in its workforce. The company said that it will eliminate about fifty non-technical positions in various locations around Germany. In a press release announcing the job cuts, the company said its move was “a direct response to recent economic trends in the overall industry.” In February, SuSE laid off the majority of its US-based marketing and product support staff.

According to this eWEEK article (at Yahoo), IT departments are sick and tired of dealing with the never-ending flow of serious security bugs in Microsoft’s enterprise software. To quote one admin: “Maintaining IIS servers is a cumbersome, tedious process. Any time you bring a new server online, you have to apply 40 or 50 patches.” So, what are these mad as hell and not going to take it anymore admins planning to do about this? For the sake of convenience and the departmental bottom line, most plan on waiting around for yet another patch from the Redmond mothership.

Fredericksburg, Va.-July 23, 2001-Zope Corporation (www.zope.com), the premier open source content management company, today announced its name change in recognition of the broad acceptance of its Zope platform and services. Zope Corporation also announced the availability of Zope 2.4, which provides even richer features to enable organizations to deploy and manage complex content management applications. These new features continue to improve the time-to-market advantage for Fortune 1000 companies, corporate intranets, community Web sites and content publishers.
“The name change from Digital Creations to Zope Corporation is a natural move as our product offerings, and services business, continue to evolve in the content management space,” said Hadar Pedhazur, chairman of Zope Corporation. “Zope has a tremendous following in the open source community as well as in many large companies whose solutions have been deployed with the Zope platform. This name change is intended to ensure that Zope, and the company that develops Zope, are more closely associated with one another in the marketplace.”

The Zope family of solutions makes it easy to rapidly build high-performance, scalable, secure, content management systems so that even non-technical users can maintain them. This ease-of-use combined with its open source roots make the Zope family of content creation, distribution and publication solutions extremely flexible and customizable. Zope offers premier for-fee products and services for complex, large-scale applications. In addition, there are over 20,000 developers contributing to Zope who can assist on smaller scale projects.

Zope 2.4 provides enhancements that help businesses quickly build powerful custom content management systems. The new features include:

Support for Python 2.1 Programming Language-Zope 2.4 is compatible with Python 2.1 and all of the features and functionality that come along with the new version of this renowned open source scripting language. Python enables developers to customize and build content management solutions for a wide variety of applications.

WebDAV-Distributed authoring and versioning allow content creators to interact with Zope through a file-based system for ease-of-use, which in turn enables seamless Web content development and updates from popular desktop programs.

Developer Productivity-Zope 2.4 empowers developers to quickly write new components and have them automatically update the system, which promotes developer productivity as they focus on the components they are writing rather than on updating the system.

Consulting Services, Pricing, Availability
Zope 2.4 is open source and available at www.zope.com. Zope Corporation also provides a full range of solutions for corporations requiring implementation assistance and/or specialized applications.

About Zope Corporation
Zope Corporation is the creator of a family of open source and for-fee content management solutions that help companies deliver and manage information. Zope also delivers a wide range of consulting and support services to a broad array of customers including Fortune 1000, media/telecom and government. The company’s flagship platform, also called Zope, is built using Python, a high-level, easy-to-use, open source language enabling the quick development and deployment of comprehensive, flexible solutions. Zope is used by customers in over 62 countries, and supported by a global developer community. Zope Corporation is headquartered in Fredericksburg, VA, and its PythonLabs division is located in Tyson’s Corner, VA. Opticality Ventures I, LP, J.H. Whitney IV, LP and The Intel 64 Fund, are investors in the company. For more information, please visit www.zope.com

After spending several years talking about making the .us top-level domain more acecssible, the U.S. Department of Commerce is finally ready to transform its words into action. Public interest groups argue that the DoC is needlessly auctioning off a valuable public resource, and that such moves are not needed now that ICANN is in the processes of rolling out new global top-level domains, such as .biz and .info. Full story at Interactive Week.

Anonymous Reader writes “Wincor Nixdorf Inc. today announced that The Home Depot has
chosen the Linux-based BEETLE/Mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) platform
for supporting their mobile inventory management applications in
the company’s Expo Design Center stores. Story at LinuxDevices.com . . . “

Interactive Week takes a look at FTC chairman Timothy Muris and the ideological-political circus surround his agency’s privacy initiatives. Muris says his agency is in the process of developing a privacy agenda, and while he hasn’t announced his position on any privacy legislation to date, he promises more investigations of privacy violations than took place under Robert Pitofsky, his Clinton-era predecessor.

Microsoft can huff and puff about Open Source all it wants, but that hasn’t stopped a few large companies from adopting Linux for mission-critical business systems. While Craig Mundie was calling Linux and other Open Source code “a security risk,” Korean Airlines was preparing to move its flight crew scheduling and revenue accounting systems over to an IBM mainframe running Linux. Over at Newell-Rubbermaid, the household goods manufacturer has been running its Multi Router Traffic Grapher network analysis tool via Linux for the past ten months, saving about $60,000 in the process. And RV maker Winnebago has saved a bundle on software licensing costs by consolidating its various e-mail systems on a IBM mainframe running Linux. Full story at ZDNet Interactive Week.

Slashdotters are talking about SirCam – bottom line: if you’re using Windows, don’t open any email attachments, no matter how tempting. Or get Linux.