Gordon Moore, founder of Intel and the name behind “Moore’s Law” has retired from his company’s board of directors. He will continue to serve as chairman and director emeritus, but will no longer hold any voting power. Full AP story at Dallas Morning News.

Press release at Wide Open News: “IBM today announced that a major seismic acquisition, processing, and
reservoir imaging firm has selected a powerful IBM (R) Linux (R) supercomputer to substantially increase its ability to assist oil
companies in their search for new oil reserves hidden deep beneath the earth’s surface. The supercomputer will power
WesternGeco’s sophisticated seismic imaging system and will be comprised of a cluster of 256 IBM eServer systems, all running
Linux.”

Brent Toderash writes “It isn’t easy sharing an anniversary/birthday with a revolutionary like Bob Dylan, but we consider it an honour. Over here at the independant Linux and Open Source news site Penguinista.org, we’re celebrating one year of online publishing, so we’re thinking about things like being revolutionaries (or trying), what’s happened over the last year, and what’s coming up for the Linux landscape. Along the way, we’re waxing nostalgic about some of our own milestones and offering some observations and lessons learned, like the discovery of something we call “The Slashdot Echo” and the value of links from major news sites like Linux Today and NewsForge. And banner ads. Anyway, we’re marking the occasion with a major editorial as well as a shorter companion piece on the international component of the site.” Happy birthday, guys.

Linux news and advocacy site Penguinista celebrates its one-year anniversary, reflecting upon changes in the Linux world over the past twelve months. Happy birthday!

Download a copy of the latest pre-release, number 6, from one of these mirrors.

The Register reports that Intel will release a 2GHz Pentium 4 in the third quarter of this year. Whether or not that will actually happen remains to be seen; Intel’s recent comments hint that a Q4 release might be more realistic.

– By Tina Gasperson –
In a radical change to its business model, ArsDigita plans to market “proprietary extensions” to its free ACS software
beginning this fall. ArsDigita originally built its reputation by providing enterprise-ready Open Source software used by companies like America Online to build Web applications, but founder Philip Greenspun was recently forced out of the company, and the new management seems to be moving away from Greenspun’s original Free Software-based vision.The company is putting together a hybrid model, a cross between the completely free,
as in beer, Open Source track they’ve been on since 1997, and the
closely-guarded secrecy of all-proprietary companies like Microsoft, Adobe,
and others.

The core software, ArsDigita Community System (ACS) will remain free and
open. ACS is a do-it-all product that enables companies to perform a number of tasks, from ecommerce, to payroll, to inter-company communications, and market analysis. Up to this point, the company’s revenue has come only from the fees charged for support on this system.

Now, because of widespread expectations of lowered income, the company is trying to add cash avenues to its bread-and-butter main street. “It’s about margins,” says Jim McManus, ArsDigita’s director of corporate marketing. “Services models traditionally have lower margins than pure license vendors. Our goal is to provide customers with the highest quality solutions, while maintaining an attractive margin for our employees and investors.”

So, beginning this fall, ArsDigita is adding proprietary extensions to its line of products. These pre-packaged extensions will be designed to help customers using ACS integrate the software with other widely used resource planning applications like SAP and PeopleSoft. Or, they will provide more data according to companies’ needs.

“It’s important to note that we will not be closing off any features that currently exist,” says McManus, “and in fact, with the release of ACS 5.0 this fall, there will be much more functionality in the GPL version than currently exists.”

McManus points out that ArsDigita has consulted with customers about the change, and that their findings have been positive. “[Our] customers have no problem with the concept, and in fact it eases some of the initial reluctance to talk with an Open Source vendor like ourselves, since they’ll know they’re getting enterprise quality code.”

Apparently, according to McManus, one of the objections that ArsDigita’s potential customers raise is their concern that “Open Source comes from a bunch of hackers,” and he says that the licensed extensions help to show buyers that “someone is responsible for the application — meaning they are getting an ArsDigita product.”

And, he says, ArsDigita asked the Open Source community for its blessing on the proprietary extensions. “The community seems to realize that in this tight market, we need to explore all methods of generating revenue. As long as we continue to provide our core platform and applications as GPL — and not take away any functionality — they seem to understand our reasoning.”

McManus says that ArsDigita hasn’t decided the exact licensing terms for the extensions, only that the customer will be licensed to use the code, but it will still belong solely to ArsDigita. “We are exploring other Open Source licenses for the extensions,” he says, “or we may release them under our own license.”

By definition, Open Source software must follow certain guidelines, for instance, it must be freely redistributable, must allow derivative works, and must allow either modification of the source code or patches.

According to McManus, the use of the extensions does not affect the GPLed status of software that the company makes freely available, nor are the extensions required to also be under the GPL, because they are not derivative works.

ZDNET: “Men like the tab key and tend to use the scrolling wheel on a mouse. Women move
the mouse around more, even if a scroll wheel is available.

Such discoveries about gender differences in computer use are an offshoot of a new marketing
technology being pushed by Predictive Networks Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., company that
specializes in tracking and analyzing online behavior to customize ads to individual users.”

Patrick Mullen writes: “The Duke of URL has just posted its Linux Distribution Round-Up. The guide covers everything in choosing a distribution from information on each distribution, how to identify the specifications (kernel, XFree86 version, GLIBC version, etc), and even links to full looks into many of today’s distributions.”

Anonymous Reader donated this link: “ZDNET: “America Online Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have reached a tentative
agreement under which the AOL 6.0 client will be bundled into
Windows XP, sources close to both companies said late Thursday.”