LinuxPR: “TeamWiz Software Inc., based in Toronto, Canada, has signed a partner
agreement to market the Teamware Office groupware suite for NT, Solaris and
Linux throughout North America and the Caribbean.”

LinuxPR: “TimeGate Studios, Inc. and Loki Software, Inc. are pleased
to announce that the popular fantasy strategy game, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns,
has entered the beta stage of development for the Linux platform. A noted
achievement for the gaming industry, Kohan will be the first of the real-time
strategy gaming genre to be commercially available for Linux.”

LinuxPR: “Linux Canada Inc. has been working with Linux since 1994 and is convinced that
Linux is the business environment of the future. At the same time the organization
recognizes that many of its potential customers will want to run Quasar on a
network that includes Windows machines. With this in mind, Quasar accounting
software was designed using Qt, a multi-platform C++ GUI tool kit from Trolltech.
Qt provides single-source portability across Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Linux,
Solaris, HP-UX and many other versions of Unix with X11.”

Help Net Security: “ePerl allows the user to embed perl code (specified inside ePerl delimiters) in HTML.

ePerl has the ability to “safely” include untrusted files using the #sinclude directive. The
untrusted file is not supposed to be able to specify any perl code to run, but this safe
mode can easily be circumvented.

The #sinclude directive operates by replacing the ePerl delimiters on the untrusted file
so that they are ignored during parsing. The problem is that it still follows the
preprocessing directives, so the untrusted file can then include another file while not in
safe mode.”

The Register: “Normally, LogoWatch is the Reg’s eye on ominous corporate rebranding. We do,
however, always welcome the preposterous guff which organisations use to justify
their artistic creations.

And so our spotlight falls on The Unix versus NT organisation. According to their
website, the organisation is dedicated to setting the facts straight about the
various commercial and Open Source UNIX operating systems as they relate
to Microsoft Windows NT.

Phew. Bet their social evenings are a laugh a minute. Be that as it may. What, you
are wondering, has this group of free-thinkers done to warrant our attention?”

– By Dan Berkes –
The tech segments of the stock market were a mixed bag today. The reason, this time at least, had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with medication. Oh, and Red Hat posted an operating profit, for whatever that’s worth.The Dow closed on Friday at 10,604.59, down 110 points from Thursday but only minus 19 points from last Friday’s close. The Big Board had its worst moment of the week on Tuesday’s close — when the bell rang, the index closed at 10,596 points that day. The Nasdaq ended Friday and closed out the week at 2034.23, dropping almost 24 points from yesterday, but ending another week on the plus side, up by 30 points from last Friday’s close.

Surprisingly enough, tech stocks weren’t the whipping boys for this week’s Dow decline. Those honors went instead to the normally stable and dependable drug companies. The market edged lower on news that Merck & Co. will miss its second-quarter and full-year earnings forecasts due to disappointing sales of its arthritis medication Vioxx, and the conditions of foreign markets.

Paul McManus of John Hancock’s Core Equity Fund provided a CNN reporter with the double-edged quote of the day on the drug company decline: “If you can’t hide in drugs, where can you hide?” Something, we’re sure, that many tech investors have been asking themselves as they witnessed their securities plummet late last year. Make that a vicodin with a codeine sidecar, please.

Red Hat in the blackRed Hat Linux made big headlines everywhere this week with its announcement of a $600,000 operating profit for this quarter. Announcing profits in a market segment that, according to industry doomsayers, will never make a dime, should be cause for celebration. For Red Hat, it meant that it was time to take a beating: Analysts at Hambrecht & Quist and Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock, noting that Red Hat’s sales have actually dropped from the last quarter.

The company’s announcement may eventually bring it more than it bargained for. The accounting method — called pro forma — used to divine that profit announcement exclude items like one-time chargers for mergers and restructuring activities. Pro forma results go against the grain of Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP) that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to use for their filings with that agency. When going by GAAP — or what the Red Hat profit announcement called “on a reported basis” — the company had a net loss of $27.6 million, or about 16 cents per share.

The SEC is investigating several companies for possible deception through the use of pro forma financial results. While Red Hat is not one of those companies under investigation, that the regulatory agency is looking into such results should be taken for what it is: A warning shot across the bow of public companies hoping to spruce up their public image during the economic downturn.

LynuxWorks beats a retreat
Embedded Linux software and service provider LynuxWorks has withdrawn its plans for an initial public offering (IPO). In a June 21 letter to the SEC, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said it had chosen to abort its planned IPO “due to general market conditions.” LynuxWorks, apparently content not to elaborate further upon this decision, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Apple bitten by lawsuit
Apple Computer this week was hit with a patent-infringement lawsuit. Document processing company Pitney Bowes claims that one of its patents comprises the key technology in Apple’s now-discontinued line of LaserWrite printers. Pitney Bowes has similar lawsuits pending against Xerox, Lexmark, and NEC, and recently settled with Hewlett-Packard, who ended up paying $400 million in damages.

Dateline: Big Blue
IBM this week received a green light from the European Commission to buy Informix Corp’s database division. The EC issued a statement saying that its investigation has shown that IBM’s share of the global distributed database management systems market does not raise any antitrust concerns. IBM’s purchase of the Informix datbase business is valued at $1 billion.

Back in the land of Linux, the company teamed up with Trustix AS to release a joint product by the name of GoldBox. GoldBox was described as a turn-key IT infrastructure based on Linux, “the fastest growing operating systems for servers.”

Change of guard at Borland
Borland Software Corporation on Friday announced the promotion of Frederick A. Ball to the office of executive vice president. In addition to his new role as excecutive VP, Ball will do double duty as the company’s chief financial officer. Borland offers a range of development products; for the Linux platform it promotes a rapid application development environment under the name Kylix, and a “Kylix-compatible” version of Delphi 6.

Here’s how Open Source and related techs ended this week on Wall Street:

Company Name	Symbol	6/22 Close	6/15 Close
Apple	AAPL	22.26	20.44
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	13.36	13.40
Caldera International	CALD	1.36	1.53
EBIZ Enterprises	EBIZ.OB	0.34	0.45
Hewlett Packard	HWP	26.37	27.00
IBM	IBM	112.87	113.60
Merlin Software Tech.	MLSW.OB	0.16	0.125
Red Hat	RHAT	4.62	4.51
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	14.47	15.19
TiVo	TIVO	5.95	6.30
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	2.94	2.79
Wind River Systems	WIND	18.00	21.00

From an IDG report (at The Industry Standard): “Hewlett-Packard GmbH must pay
intellectual-property fees on CD burners
retroactively for three years, a German court
ruled on Thursday. HP said it will appeal the
ruling.”

Two items on Intel from The Register: The company will finally demo Tualatin, its Mobile Pentium III processor, sometime next week and officially launch the new chip on July 30. In Pentium 4 news, Intel will roll out a 1.9GHz version of that processor — this is in addition to the 2GHz already announced — during the third quarter of 2001.

It’s never pretty when a corporation throws a temper tantrum. This time around, the company laying on the floor and kicking and screaming is Network Solutions, who appear to be none too happy that they’re not in charge of the new .biz domain. The Register reports on (and reprints in full) an e-mail message from Network Solutions send to domain name registrars ask them to swing .biz registrations their way, instead of directly to NeuLevel, the company chosen to administer the new TLD.

The Register reports: “Notorious hacker Prime Suspectz has gone on a cracking spree against Microsoft
servers that has resulted in the defacement of FOUR of the software giant’s sites.

Three of the sites hit by the attack (all of which appear to be recently introduced,
and under development) are currently inaccessible. A fourth,
webcfeedback.msn.com, has been redefaced by hacker group Silver Lords with a
protest against human rights abuses in Kashmir after being attacked earlier this
morning by Prime Suspectz.”