From LinuxGram: “On the theory that the proof is in the pudding, Linux International (LI) has set up a Case Study
Repository project on Source-Forge to prove that open source works …

The SourceForge site, at http://casestudy.sf.net, is a place where the open source community can
submit successful case studies. Besides sticking out its tongue at Microsoft by highlighting open
source successes, Linux International figures the case studies will be useful to anyone.”

– By Dan Berkes –
Stocks were a bit worse for the wear on Friday, as Wall Street considered the possibility that a rebound in corporate profits could take a little longer than anticipated.
Investors appeared to be spooked by new government data showing that orders for durable goods fell 5 percent in April. Economists had been predicting a decline between 2 and 3 percent. Remarks from Alan Greenspan after-hours on Thursday may have moderated the downturn. The U.S. Federal Reserve chairman said that further rate cuts may be needed to shore defenses against long-term economic weakness.

“Bottom line here: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Recovery won’t happen overnight,” said analyst James Philburn. “The street is still skittish; investors are trying to adapt to a long-term view, but the panic [from first-quarter reports and government economic data] in the tech arena won’t be easy to shake.”

Heading into the three-day weekend, the tech-heavy Nasdaq closed at 2,251.06, down almost 31 points for the day, but up 53 points from last Friday’s bell. The Nasdaq peak closing for this week happened on Tuesday, when it closed at 2,313.85.

As traders head off to grill burgers this Memorial Day weekend, they leave the Dow Jones Industrial Average standing at 11,005.37, down 117 points for the day, down almost 296 points from last Friday’s close. The Dow’s high closing this week was Monday, when it closed at 11,337.92.

Volume on both markets were the lightest so far this year, due to the holiday weekend.

The first quarter was less than kind for the U.S. Unix and Linux server market. Dataquest researches say the domestic market for Unix servers shrunk almost 2 percent in the first three months of the year, thanks in no small part to the sluggish economy. Despite the doom and gloom, the big dogs — Sun, Dell, and IBM — saw double-digit growth in their server business.

Borland blends Java and Mac

Borland Software Corporation on Monday raised the curtain on the beta version of JBuilder 5 for Apple’s Mac OS X. This marks the software maker’s return to the Mac, a platform it hasn’t supported since the mid-1990s. JBuilder is a visual Java development environment; in addition to OS X JBuilder is supported on Linux, Solaris, and Windows.

VA’s loss leaps 41 percent

VA Linux, parent company of OSDN, of which NewsForge is a part, released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2001. Revenues were $20.3 million for the first quarter, down from $34.6 million in the same quarter last year, a 41 percent drop. Shares closed at $4.70 after the announcement, and settled at $4.46 on Friday.

Investors tune in TiVo

Digital recorder maker TiVo saw its stock rise 72 percent on Thursday, when the company released news that it had been awarded additional patents for its technology. After closing at $8.50 on Thursday, shares shot up to $11.21 at the end of trading on Friday. TiVo’s Linux-based devices allow consumers to record television shows onto a hard drive. The company is also considering going after Microsoft for licensing fees. Microsoft recently introduced a competing digital recorder.

Peace, love, and petroleum

IBM announced its latest supercomputer, a cluster of 256 IBM eServer systems, all running Linux. Oil company WesternGeco will use the cluster as a seismic imaging system to “sniff out” in its never-ending quest for new oil deposits, thus eliminating the more costly and time-consuming drilling method.

Intel founder retires

Intel founder Gordon Moore retired from his company’s board of directors on Thursday. He’ll continue to serve as chairman and director emeritus, but will no longer hold any voting power.

Handy speculation

A Morningstar.com analyst speculates on the possibility that Apple could purchase PDA maker Handpsring. With a market value around $1.3 billion, and Handspring founders who created the original Palm device, the deal is certainly attractive and possible for Apple.

MandrakeStock?

NewsForge was first with the news of top management changes at MandrakeSoft, including an email interview with CEO Jacques Le Marois. While reassuring that MandrakeSoft was in tip-top shape, Le Marois also mentioned that the company is currently working on bringing an IPO to market.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks did this week:

Company Name	Symbol	5/25 Close	5/18 Close
Apple	AAPL	22.76	23.53
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	10.06	10.04
Caldera International	CALD	1.95	1.89
EBIZ Enterprises	EBIZ.OB	0.77	0.82
Hewlett Packard	HWP	30.05	29.85
IBM	IBM	117.80	117.44
Merlin Software Tech.	MLSW.OB	0.28	0.30
Red Hat	RHAT	5.95	5.82
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	20.47	19.97
TiVo	TIVO	11.21	4.39
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	4.46	4.20
Wind River Systems	WIND	25.03	22.52

The Register reports that TiVo, fresh from winning new patents for its digital recording system, is “positively spoiling for a fight with Microsoft… and anyone else who wants to make boxes which decode TV streams, and play them back.”

The Duke of URL: “I hope it’s now clear that if you want to try Linux, odds are there is a distribution out there for you. Lucky for us, newbies have selections, intermediate users
have them, and so do advanced users. What I’m going to attempt to do today isn’t answer the eternal question of which distribution is the best, but give you the
tools to make that decision for yourself.”

Cryptome has posted a transcript of the report from the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System. In this summary, we learn “The Commission and Member States are asked to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption
technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software.”

PR Newswire: “MontaVista Software Inc., the company
powering the embedded revolution has announced that STMicroelectronics has
designated MontaVista, provider of Hard Hat(TM) Linux(R), for embedded
applications, as the first and preferred supplier of Linux for its
system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for consumer electronics and other markets.”

The Register: “Further evidence of Microsoft’s uncanny knack for publicity is provided by the story
of a Canadian victim of the company’s anti-piracy campaign. According to
Canadian newswire CP Wire, 41 year old disabled mother of four Brenda Avery
found herself on the receiving end of the full might of the Redmond SWAT team and
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

“The Ximian Setup Tools 0.5.1 have been released.

The Ximian Setup Tools are a set of cross-platform configuration utilities for Linux and
other Unices. Internally they are divided in frontends and backends. The frontend knows
nothing about the underlying system and provides the same user interface across the
different types of systems. The backend knows how to read and write configuration
information. The Ximian Setup Tools do not impose a new database on the system, they work
with the default configuration files so that configuration can still be done by hand or by
other tools.”

                 Changes since last release
                 --------------------------

                 - Bugs bugs bugs. Too many to count (Everybody)
                 - New distros supported/testsed : Red Hat 7.1, SuSE 7.0
                   Debian Woody (Arturo, Joakim, Chema) [*1]
                 - Added a debian dir (thanks hadess)
                 - Blinking removed from time tool (Hans Petter)
                 - User profiles in users tool (Tambet)
                 - Significant speedup (Hans Petter)
                 - Time-tool front end improvements (Chema)
                 - Timezone setting on Debian fixed (Hans Petter)
                 - All tools can save their state between sessions (Tambet)
                 - Searchbar is complexity-aware in users tool (Tambet)
                 - Sort list of selectable distributions (Nils Barth)
                 - Fixed shares tool SMB problems (Hans Petter)
                 - Location management builds by default now (Bradford)
                 - Beginnings of FreeBSD support (Theo van Klaveren)
                 - New root authentication based on work by Chris L. Bond (Hans Petter)
                 - You can now avoid having your DNS settings overriden with DHCP information
                   with systems using pump (Arturo)
                 - Lots of strings marked for translation and typos corrected (Carlos)

                 [*1] - Debian Woody "mapping" stanzas for /etc/network/interfaces are not supported
                 yet. Modem and ISDN connections for SuSE 7.0 are not yet implemented as well.

                 Downloading
                 ----------
                 You can get it from :

                 ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/setuptools/
                 or (once the mirrors sync)
                 ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/ximian-setup-tools

Boston, Massachusetts, USA – May 25, 2001 – Richard M. Stallman, president
of the Free Software Foundation, announced today that New York University
has asked him to deliver a talk that will counterbalance the speech made
on May 3, 2001 at NYU by Craig Mundie of Microsoft.Stallman, author of the GNU General Public License, will deliver this
speech, entitled “Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation”, at Warren
Weaver Hall, Room 109 at 251 Mercer Street on the New York University
campus. The speech will be held at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, May 29, 2001, and
a press conference will immediately follow the speech at 12:15 PM. The
press is also invited to a reception at 09:30 AM at the same location.

Stallman’s speech will cover the importance of software freedom and
cooperation among programmers and users, and why the GNU project developed
the GNU General Public License to facilitate sharing, cooperation and
freedom.

To help correct the myths propagated by Mundie’s statements, the Free
Software Foundation has published a frequently asked question (FAQ) list
about the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). This FAQ list addresses
many misconceptions about the GNU GPL. That FAQ list is available at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html.

In Microsoft’s first attack against the GNU GPL earlier this year, Jim
Allchin of Microsoft, claimed the GNU GPL threatens the American Way.
Stallman responded with an essay that shows how the GNU GPL reflects and
embodies the American spirit. That essay is available at: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gpl-american-way.htm l.

About Richard M. Stallman:

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984 to
develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”),
and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost.
GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as
well as to make changes either large or small.

Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for
Computing Machinery for 1991 for his development of the first Emacs editor
in the 1970s. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship,
and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology
in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s
Pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds; in 1999 he received the Yuri
Rubinski memorial award.

About the Free Software Foundation:

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in
freedom) software—particularly the GNU operating system (used widely
today in its GNU/Linux variant)— and free documentation. The FSF also
helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom
in the use of software. This web site, located at http://www.gnu.org, is an important source
of information about GNU/Linux. The FSF is headquartered in Boston, MA,
USA.

About GNU:

GNU is a Free Software Unix-like operating system. Development of GNU
began in 1984. GNU is used most commonly today as GNU/Linux.

GNU/Linux is the combination of the GNU system and the kernel named Linux,
modified to work together smoothly. Although there is no way of actually
counting them, this combination has millions of users, probably over
twenty million.

The GNU/Linux combination is often confusingly called “Linux”, which leads
people to an inaccurate picture of the history and nature of the system.
Distinguishing between GNU/Linux, the complete system, and Linux, the
kernel, helps correct the confusion.

Media Contact: Free Software Foundation
Bradley M. Kuhn
Phone: +1-617-542-5942

Morningstar.com (via Yahoo) speculates on the possibility of Apple purchasing PDA maker Handspring: “For someone like Steve Jobs, to whom good design is a religion, getting the brains behind the first successful mass-market handheld in house would be a real
coup. After all, this is a market that Apple’s had its eye on for some time–remember the Newton? Given Apple’s renewed push into the consumer market, with
retail stores opening up just last week, having an Apple-logoed handheld seems like a natural evolution for the company. Moreover, should the Handspring
crew turn up its nose at Apple shares, Apple’s got the money to get the deal done, with around $4 billion in cash in the bank.”