Andrew Leonard at Salon writes about response he received to an article analysing the harm of the pained economy to the Open Source community and Linux-related businesses, saying that a sluggish economy can only help.

ZDNet reports that Compaq is exploring the idea of making a computer which can be either a laptop or a desktop, with the help of a built in stand and a removable keyboard and mouse.

Yahoo! has a press release announcing that Penguin Computing, and Red Hat are partnering up to allow Red Hat certification on Penguin Computing solutions.

ZDNet reports on a new browser on its way under the Gnu General Public License. “No Limits” is targetted to be ready by the end of the year.

From a reader: MozillaQuest Magazine (mozillaquest.com), has an interestig article about the browser wars. http://mozillaquest.com/shorts_01/Linux_browser_wa r-01-story-01.html. “Netscape 6 is noticeably absent from the Red Hat Linux 7.1 and the SuSe Linux 7.1 distributions. It’s also noticeably absent from Caldera’s OpenLinux 3.1 beta. Meanwhile, both Red Hat and SuSe include the Mozilla browser-suite in their latest Linux distributions.

Mozilla is not Netscape 6’s only competitor for the Linux desktop. For example, most Linux distributions include the K Desktop Environment (KDE), which includes the Konqueror browser. Sun’s cross-platform (XP) StarOffice suite has browser functionality and is included with many Linux distributions. StarOffice also is available for free downloading. And many Linux distributions such as Red Hat Linux 7.1, SuSe Linux 7.1, Mandrake 8.0, and the OpenLinux 3.1 beta include Netscape 4.7x rather than Netscape 6.”

“Rekall is a personal, programmable DBMS system for Qt/KDE. Beta 2 adds a few
new features but more importantly has been conveniently packaged for most
distributions.” Full press release at LinuxPR.

EE Times reports on remarks made by Edward Whitacre, head of SBC communications. Whitacre says that cable operators are keeping the telcos out of the market for delivering high-speed Internet access. The U.S. Baby Bells are currently lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would allow them to deploy broadband services without opening those lines to competitors. This, apparently, would justify the cost of offering DSL and similar services in rural areas. Sure. That’ll happen.

CNET News.com: “Ontario, Canada-based RIM charges in a suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware
that Glenayre Technologies violates a patent granted last month to RIM protecting the way the
BlackBerry redirects e-mail from a computer or server to a handheld using a single e-mail
address. Charlotte, N.C.-based Glenayre already has a pending suit of its own against RIM.”

From Linux Today: “This Mundie thing is a little weird, because it’s MegaMart complaining about mom’n pop. Seems
MegaMart’s property value is dropping fast because mom’n pop are giving away the store. It’s a
fact of marketing we all understand: when folks can get a cheaper and better product than yours,
your inventory ain’t worth diddle. Ain’t no two ways about it. Free software is real bad for
Microsoft’s IP inventory.”

– By Eric S. Raymond –

If you’re like most people, you have neither the time nor the patience
to plough through the quagmire of corporate rhetoric at
http://www.microsoft.com/ Business/Licensing/ SharedSource/.
Fortunately, what Microsoft is actually saying, beneath all the
obfuscatory verbiage, is very simple. Here’s an executive summary:Software users and programmers of the world, have *we* got an offer for *you*!

1. First, we’ll let you pay us for the privilege of seeing the source
code to our software, bugs and all.

2. Then, we’ll use your work to raise the price of our next release.
including anything you contributed. You won’t get paid for
your creative work, and you’ll have no rights in it. If we’re
feeling nice, maybe we’ll give you a discount on the next release.
Then again, maybe not.

3. Oh, and by the way…if you try to use any of what you learned from
helping us fix our bugs for your own purposes, we’ll sue your ass off
and smother you in lawyers.

Such a deal!

We here at Microsoft call this “protecting intellectual property
rights in order to create a sustainable business model”. Um, that
would be *our* intellectual property and *our* business model. You
surely weren’t thinking we cared about *your* business or *your*
rights, were you?

What’s ours is ours. And if you cooperate on “shared source”, what’s
yours will be ours too!

Have a nice day — and remember (eyes misting, hand held to heart)
we’re doing it all to support “innovation”.

Editor’s note: This was an email Raymond sent to several news organizations Thursday evening.