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.”

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.”