The Register adds more to the continuing story. Caldera sees its per-seat license as putting it “midway
between Red Hat and Microsoft in the ideological debate about free software.”

Oreillynet.com has an article with its take on Microsoft announcing plans to release a
shared-source version of its .NET infrastructure for Windows and FreeBSD.

Network World Fusion has a short item. “Via Technologies Wednesday announced that
a U.S. company, Rauch Medien, is offering
lower power Web servers based on its C3
microprocessor.
The GreenServ comes with up to 60G bytes of hard-disk space and up to 1G
byte of RAM, and comes installed with Linux, Free BSD or Windows 2000.”

ZDNet UK reports on new servers from the two companies. Also, Compaq expanded its TaskSmart line of server appliances. The TaskSmart W line, which
uses the Linux operating system, is used for hosting Web pages.

It’s at LWN.net. Among the items: “JoeSNMP 0.2.6 Released:

Following the identification of several problems related to SNMP
data collection, the fixes are in, tested, and the new JoeSNMP has
been released.”

From a press release at Sandia.gov: A computer program that enables a collection of
off-the-shelf desktop computers to rank among the world’s fastest
supercomputers has been released to the public by Sandia National
Laboratories. The program, called Cplant system software, dramatically
extends the capability of researchers to modularly assemble large blocks of
off-the-shelf computer components.

The rationale behind this open-source release is to allow researchers free
access to the body of research and development that created the most
scalable, Linux-based, off-the-shelf computer available, says Sandia
manager Neil Pundit.

LinuxPlanet has a column about the differences in Linux distributions and the confusion that can cause. “Now incompatibilities are being introduced hand over fist, as distributions fight for a bigger and bigger
piece of a diminishing pie, until one day one will own all of nothing. Does this do anything useful for the
distributions, users, Linux, anybody? Well, no.”

Reuters reports on Sharp’s plans to sell its Zaurus multimedia PDAs, using Linux and Java, in the United States in October and in Europe early next year.

From Canada Newswire: CAE today announced it has signed two contracts
with ALSTOM (Switzerland) Ltd. to develop first-of-a-kind simulators for two
different Gas Turbine-based (GT-based) power plant configurations. Already an
established world leader in the supply of power plant simulators, CAE enters
the growing market for GT powered plants with these two orders valued at
approximately C$3.5 million.
These simulators will use the Linux operating system – CAE’s latest
alternative to the Unix and Windows NT operating systems for power plant
simulators.

Imagine our surprise when this press release from PRNewsWire landed in our submissions bin: “Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today
announced it will work with Corel Corp. to build a shared source
implementation of the C# programming language and common language
infrastructure (CLI) specifications that it submitted to ECMA in October 2000.
Designed to be used for academic, research, debugging and learning purposes,
this implementation will run on FreeBSD and Microsoft(R) Windows(R) and will
be published as source code under Microsoft’s Shared Source licensing
framework.”