A short item at DebianPlanet talks about the three branches of Debian, Potato, Woody, and Sid, and what the difference is between the three. Hint, it’s about stability.

eWeek has a story about Korean Airlines switching to an IBM mainframe running Linux to power its flight schedule and daily revenue systems.

CNN.com reports on the growth of a Dutch file-trading service called FastTrack. With the service outside the United States, it’s tougher for the RIAA to go after it for U.S. copyright violations.

Slashdotters discuss an article at SoftwareUncovered saying Microsoft is lending a hand to the Mono project.

Kelly McNeill writes, “The stated goal of the Mono project is to free users and developers from Microsoft’s operating system platforms, questionable business practices and restrictive licenses. While the project sounds like a good idea on the surface, its instigators — steeped as they are in open source development — have failed to recognize that its licensing will preclude commercial developers from participating in the project or in using its output.” The column is at osOpinion.

Korean Air, Korea’s national flagship
airline, and IBM
today announced that Korean Air has completed the first phase of
developing its
core business applications running on Linux for the IBM eServer.

Korean Air’s Flight Schedule Inquiry System and the Daily Revenue
Accounting
System employ Linux on IBM hardware and software.

The inquiry system provides flight crew members with on-line real-time
flight
schedule information, which they can update anytime. More than 3,000
Korean Air
pilots and flight attendants are currently using the system.

“We decided to deploy our flight scheduling systems on Linux because we
were
able to consolidate workloads that had been running on a variety of
different
servers, said . Yong-Seung Hwang, CIO of Korean Air. “We are confident
that by
working with IBM’s mainframe running Linux, we will not only save
money, but we
will drastically improve the performance of our systems.”

Korean Air deployed the Internet-and Intranet-based Flight Schedule
Inquiry
System on Linux, running on an IBM eServer z900, taking advantage of
the IBM’s
large server’s high scalability, availability and reliability. A
single IBM
server running Linux can do the work of an entire server farm.
Multiple copies
of Linux can run side-by-side on a server, allowing for highly scalable
and
manageable environments that can handle unpredictable spikes in
Internet
activity.

“IBM has long been the IT partner of Korean Air,” said Myung-Joong Kim,
project
manager of the Korean Air Linux deployment for IBM Korea. “Korean Air’s
decision
to deploy Linux resulted from its decade-long expertise and know-how of
IT
management. We’re very excited to partner with Korean Air for the
Linux project, which will be one of the leading Linux references in the service
industry
worldwide.”

Korean Air has been developing its Daily Revenue Accounting System
since
February using IBM’s powerful, easy-to-use WebSphere Studio and Visual
Age for
Java development tools for deployment on IBM’s highly-scalable DB2
database
software and WebSphere application server for Linux. The addition of
this
application using IBM middleware will widen the scope of Linux adoption
for the
accounting system, phase by phase. Korean Air plans to allow system
access to
all of its global business partners who sell Korean Air flight tickets
and other
services on the Web.

For the overall Linux system management and connectivity with
heterogeneous
platforms, Korean Air plans to employ Tivoli’s system management
solution and
WebSphere MQ. Korean Air will integrate the Linux system with its
Service Level
Management System, which is an in-house system service monitoring
solution, to
enhance availability and reliability of the Linux system. IBM Global
Services
will manage operations of the Linux system running on the IBM eServer
z900.

About Korean Air
Founded in 1969, Korean Air now has an extensive route structure
serving 77
cities in 29 countries with a fleet of 111 aircraft. In 2000, the
airline
received 17 state-of-the-art aircraft. The airline’s highly praised
in-flight
service is attributed to the excellent quality of its cabin crew
recognized
worldwide for their friendly service and professionalism. For detailed
information on Korean Air, visit http://www.koreanair.com/.

About IBM
IBM is the world’s number one server company and information technology
provider, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate.
IBM helps
customers, business partners and developers in a wide range of
industries that
leverage the power of the Internet for e-business. For more
information, visit
http://www.ibm.com.

IBM news releases and fact sheets are available at http://www.ibm.com.
For more
information about IBM enterprise servers, go to
http://www1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/.

The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM e-business logo
with the
following descriptive term “server” following it.

The following are either trademarks or registered of International
Business
Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both:
IBM, the
IBM e-business logo, zSeries, z900 and WebSphere.

Linux is registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

All others are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective
companies.

aicra writes. “In an email msg sent to the kdev list earlier: ‘KIllustrator is now known as “Kontour” (after Adobe claimed that KIllustrator was too close
to Adobe Illustrator, in case you haven’t followed the news).’
‘This obviously breaks translations… I have kept the name killustrator.po[t] for the
message files, so this remains. But the appearances of the word KIllustrator have
been replaced.’

‘This delays the release by about 2 days – so that there is time to get the new messages
translated for rc1 if you’re fast (and for the final release otherwise).'”

Australian IT reports deciding that an expensive lawsuit with Google might not be the best way to kick off its new business, upstart Web searcher Lookle.com this week altered the layout of its home page. Lookle had apparently attracted the attention of Google’s lawyers, who felt that the newcomer’s start page was way too close to their own product. Lookle is hoping the move will pre-empt any possible legal action.

At the end of this month, the anti-spammers at the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) plan to start charging a subscription fee to use its blacklist. Kieren McCarthy at the Register wonders whether the decision had anything to do with the demise of the rival ORBS anti-spam system earlier this month. Now that there’s no competition, might as well go ahead and charge. MAPS have come under increasing criticism from the anti-spammer community for a number of reasons; this should only add gasoline to the fire.

WIPO literally wrote the book on how to deal with domain name spats that it moderates — and, as this item at The Register points out conveniently ignores its own regulations when handing out decisions. If there’s any lingering doubt as to WIPO’s aim to be pro-business and anti-consumer at any cost, this story shoud erase it.