ZDNet’s Matthew Rothenburg wonders what Apple has waiting in the wings. The Cupertino-based computer company has announced a press conference for May 1, and other than announcing the time and date of the gathering, Apple hasn’t said a word about what it plans to discuss at that time. Unusual behavior for a company that usually makes its major announcements at Macworld and other industry shows.

“Betcha we know something Caldera doesn’t.

Betcha it’s about to lose the biggest customer UnixWare ever had just as it’s about to take over UnixWare after
months of delay being tied up by the SEC.

Sources at Avaya Inc, the old Lucent Technologies Enterprise Networks Group, say the company is quietly moving its
voice mail and messaging products, each one of which ships with an OEM copy of Unix, from the SCO UnixWare 7
platform that Caldera’s acquiring to Sun’s Solaris 8.” More at LinuxGram.

From InternetWeek: “It doesn’t look like Google got the e-mail that
the dotcom boom is over.

While other e-businesses are cutting back,
Google is increasing its infrastructure as fast
as it can, doubling the size of its server farm
in the last 10 months, to 8,000 systems.” Google’s OS of choice, by the way, is Linux.

ZDNet: “The film industry and a hacker publication will head back into court Tuesday in
the DeCSS case, a legal dispute that could dictate whether it’s legal to publish
or link to certain materials online.

A panel of appellate judges will decide whether to uphold a lower court ruling
preventing online hacker magazine 2600 from linking to code that theoretically could
be used to crack DVD security. But legal experts say the case could have
wide-ranging ramifications for linking, publishing and copyright on the Internet.”

ZDNet reports on IBM’s eLiza project, an effort to “build computer
systems that can fix themselves while problems are in the early stages.

The effort is an attempt to bring some of the self-healing abilities of living creatures to the brittle
world of computers, where component failures can bring down larger systems and ripple across
a network to other computers as well.”

From net-security.org: Recently, several bugs have been discovered in various FTP servers. If your
Progeny Debian system runs either bsd-ftpd or ftpd, you may be vulnerable to a
remote security bug.

A few years ago, many would have laughed at the notion
of
Oracle Corporation not only tolerating open source software, but
incorporating it into their own product lines. Today, the Oracle8i
database has been ported to Linux, the open source Apache Jserv web
server is a vital part Oracle’s Internet Application Server (iAS), and
hundreds of applications are now available linking open source programs
to Oracle databases and providing new tools for Oracle database
administrators and developers.

The just-released “Oracle & Open Source: Tools and Application” (Duncan
and Hull, O’Reilly & Assoc. $39.95) is the first book to tie together
the commercial world of Oracle and the free-wheeling world of open
source software. It describes nearly 100 open source tools, from the
widely applied (like Linux, Perl, and Apache) to the Oracle-specific
(like Orasoft, Orac, OracleTool, and OraSnap). The authors describe
where to find these tools, what their advantages are, and how to create
and release new open source Oracle tools yourself.

“The combination of Oracle Corporation and open source software may
appear to be an unlikely pairing. What could Oracle, with its history
of ruthless competition, intense marketing, and cutthroat corporate
life, have to do with the collaborative, altruistic, and apparently
anti-corporate world of open source?” says Andy Duncan, coauthor of
“Oracle & Open Source”. “The answer, surprisingly, is quite a lot. In
recent years, the gospel of the open source movement has spread far and
wide, reaching even the corporate corridors and product lines of
organizations like Oracle Corporation. This new synergy between the
corporate world of Oracle and the freewheeling world of open source is
a great thing–the blended products we’re starting to see truly do
represent the best of both worlds.”

“Oracle, as the first major independent software vendor to announce
Linux support, played a key role in bringing open source to the
mainstream,” says Eric S. Raymond, author of “Cathedral & the Bazaar”
and President of the Open Source Initiative, “This book continues that
tradition by showing Oracle developers and DBAs how open source can
improve their working lives and their productivity. I’m very glad to
see it.”

Chapter 1, Oracle Meets Open Source, is available free online at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracleopen/chapter/ch01.htm.

An article by Andy Duncan, Oracle & Open Source: Gazing at the Crystal
Ball, is available online at:
http://oracle.oreilly.com/news/oracleopen_0401.html.

Registration has opened for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention in San
Diego,
July 23-27, 2001. For more information, see:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/.

Oracle & Open Source
By Andy Duncan & Sean Hull
0-596-00018-9, 424 pages, $39.95
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
http://www.oreilly.com

Acucorp, Inc. an international
provider of application extension solutions that solve mission critical
business issues, today announced plans to deliver extend 5 with ACUCOBOL-GT
on Linux for IBM S/390 in the second quarter of 2001. The extend 5
family of solutions allows software developers to leverage their investments
in COBOL applications by transforming these applications into modern
systems. Currently available on over 600 platforms, extend 5 includes
products and services for enabling Internet deployment, graphical COBOL
development, data access, distributed computing, and increased programmer
productivity.

“Acucorp has been supporting Linux for years, so there was no question
that we would support Linux for z900 and S/390,” said Dr. Pamela Coker,
President and CEO of Acucorp, Inc. “We know that our worldwide
customers, including more than 1,000 ISVs, as well as z900 and S/390 customers
requiring a robust COBOL solution for Linux, will find substantial
value in combining the strength of Acucorp’s proven technology with the
Linux for S/390 operating system. This unique combination will provide
customers with powerful Linux-based COBOL applications and data access
solutions that are unparalleled in the industry today.”

As a result of Acucorp’s industry leading portability, software
developers will be able to move existing ACUCOBOL-GT applications to Linux for
eServer* z900 and S/390 without recompilation, thereby eliminating much
of the expense and worry typically associated with moving applications
to a new platform. Moreover, by supporting Linux for the eServer z900
and S/390, Acucorp brings extend 5’s value proposition to any enterprise
requiring a high performance COBOL solution for this environment.

“Linux for the IBM Enterprise Server platform is a powerful choice for
any organization seeking a high-performance, Linux-based infrastructure
for e-business applications. This combination of technologies –
ACUCOBOL-GT and the Enterprise Server – provides customers with superior
reliability, outstanding systems management, and a breadth of applications
available for Linux,” said Joann Duguid, director, Linux marketing
zSeries at IBM.

About Acucorp

Founded in 1988, Acucorp, Inc., a member of IBM’s PartnerWorld program,
is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, California,
with additional offices in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and
Sweden. Acucorp’s products are distributed in over 70 countries
throughout the world, and its technology users include DaimlerChrysler
Corporation, GE Capital, McDonald’s, Shell Oil Company, Tower Records, United
States Airforce, and Warner/Elektra/Atlantic. The company continues to
design, develop, and market robust solutions for extending the life of
inherited COBOL applications. Additional information about Acucorp and
the extend 5 family of solutions are available at
http://www.acucorp.com.

Acucorp, extend, and ACUCOBOL are trademarks or registered trademarks
Acucorp, Inc.
The IBM e-business logo, zSeries, and S/390, are all trademarks of IBM
Corporation.
All rights reserved. All other trademarks used are the property of
their respective owners.

From the humor site, Segfault.org: “In an unprecedented political move, the California legislature passed into law today
the Energy Conservation Act, effectively banning the sale and use of Windows NT in the State of California.
Computer scientists and engineers all over the state, who never really grasped the concept of Linux, are
now flocking flocked back their one true love, OpenVMS running on Compaq Alpha (TM) processors.”

From net-security.org: An updated gftp package is available for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.1. This package
contains an upgrade to gftp version 2.0.8, which improves functionality and
fixes a format string vulnerability.