ZDNet asks if you want Linux on your desktop, or, more pointedly, if you’d like to be a member of the Linux ‘religion.’

Saint writes “Some of the subscribers to my newsletter are colleagues and associates in health care that I meet with socially but are only peripherally aware of the goings-on in open source software. Many of them have noted how GNU-Linux (usually referred to as just Linux) was supposed to take over the world one year ago and wonder: what happened, where is it? To which I reply: December 2001. Here’s why.“

Kelly McNeill writes, “The upcoming feature in Internet Explorer called “Smart Tags” allows Microsoft the opportunity to alter content on any Web site by making any word on any site into a link that points visitors to Web sites of Microsoft’s choosing. Smart Tags would conceivably give Microsoft the opportunity to turn any instance of the words “open source,” for example, into a series of links pointing to the shared-source initiative on Microsoft’s site — to boost its ongoing effort to misrepresent legitimate open source licenses.”

From CNet: “Microsoft contritely acknowledged Wednesday that its second attempt to fix an Exchange security
hole went awry. Rather than fix the problem–and the security hole–the company’s second
attempt at a software patch included a catastrophic bug that caused many servers to hang. The
company was not aware of the problem until alerted by CNET News.com.”

IBM is pleased to announce that the ICU projects (see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu) are changing to the X open-source license. This change is at the request of many people involved in major open source software projects such as Linux, Perl, and Gnome. It allows ICU to be incorporated into a wide variety of software projects using the GPL license. The X license is non-viral, allowing ICU to also be incorporated into non-open source products.

The X license is a free software license that is compatible with the GNU GPL license( see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GP LCompatibleLicenses>http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/l icense-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses). The text of the X license is available at http://www.x.org/terms.htm.

The license change is effective starting with release 1.8.1 of ICU4C and release 1.3.1 of ICU4J. These are update releases of ICU that add very substantial performance improvements over the previous versions, especially when determining the sort order for text in different languages.

About ICU (International Components for Unicode)
ICU provides provides robust and full-featured Unicode support on a wide variety of platforms, both in C/C++ and in Java. The C/C++ libraries (ICU4C) are designed to have the same features and overall architecture as the Java version (ICU4J) for compatibility across both platforms and programming languages. ICU offers a full multi-threading model and a flexible locale model. Unlike the standard C model for internationalization, programs using ICU can get precisely the same results on each platform – even platforms running EBCDIC natively. ICU also offers JNI interfaces (ICU4JNI) for collation and character conversion, so that Java programs can take advantage of much faster performance than Standard Java for these important functions.

ICU supports a large number of countries, countries with different calendar systems, different ways to format dates, times, and numbers, different timezones, different character sets, different writing directions, and different sorting order. ICU provides full-featured character code conversion, crucial for correctly interpreting the wide variety of encodings used in HTML, XML, email, and on the many platforms ICU supports. It includes support for the new Chinese Standard, GB 18030. ICU has fast, efficient text comparison, which is compliant with the Unicode Collation Algorithm and ISO 14651 – yet takes about half the storage in database indexes compared to other implementations. ICU’s layout manager determines the precise location and shapes for characters from English, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and other scripts.

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Kuro5hin: “Linux is not the solution. Desktop users deserve their old worn-in shoe. It really isn’t ever worth debating, because Windows
will never fall from the desktop anyways. Anyone who cares to contemplate the sheer size of the the Windows-using population will realise
how laughable Linux conquest is. I don’t mean this as flamebait. It’s just true. So, what does free software do. Take a lesson from
industrial ecology. If the mountain won’t come to you, infiltrate the mountain.

We must not only give users Windows, but we must give them a better Windows. The world needs a GPLed Windows OS.”

Creative Labs stepped in a PR nightmare this week when a segment of its customer based accused the soundcard and music device maker of spying on them. The tempest is focused upon a piece of software from Creative named “newsupd.exe” that installs with most Creative products. Users say the program is connecting to the Internet without their permission, and relaying information back to the company. Creative, of course, says the feature is there to help users by telling them of new software and hardware updates. ZDNet News has the story.

LinuxPR: “Ken Sawyer, President of Sequiter
Software, announced today the release of CodeBase for Kylix, a new database
library that provides fully functional database access for Borland Kylix
development environment.”

MSNBC has an item on the latest fad to sweep the Internet provider industry: Prepaid service. Working somewhat like prepaid long-distance telephone cards, prepaid Net access cards offer credit-challenged users a way to access the Internet. A few startups are sweet on the idea, but analysts say the target market might barely exist.

LinuxPR: “Lineo, Inc., a leading innovator in
embedded systems, real-time and high availability solutions, today announced
the availability of the uClinux ARM7TDMI development kit. The uClinux
ARM7TDMI development kit provides developers with the necessary tools,
hardware and software for ARM embedded development. The ARM7TDMI
processor core, in combination with the powerful uClinux operating system,
provides developers with a convenient, low-cost embedded environment for smart
hand-held devices, industrial control, home automation, digital signal processing
and more.”