Red Hat Chairman Bob Young responds to Slashdot readers’ questions.

From PR Newswire: Compaq Computer
Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) and
Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) today announced the
availability of a turn-key Linux-based security solution for medium to
large-sized enterprises and service providers in North America. The jointly
developed “Compaq/Check Point SolutionPaq” is a “Secured by Check Point
Appliance” integrating industry-leading Compaq ProLiant servers with Check
Point’s market-leading VPN-1/FireWall-1 software and enabled with firewall
high availability software from Rainfinity. The platform is optimized for
security applications, running on a hardened Red Hat Linux operating system
with all software pre-installed, pre-configured, tested and OPSEC-certified to
ensure “out-of-the-box” deployment as a single, fully integrated product from
Compaq and Check Point.

Posted at LWN.net: “The big news for this week is the announcement of the
LaunchPad 1.0 release. LaunchPad is a
collection of libraries for creating non-graphical tools and
applications using an API based on OpenStep and the MacOS X API. See
http://www.gnustep.org/information/lp_release.html for more
information.”

LWN.net has the update including an announcement that version 0.7.2 was released:
“The final release was prepared and the RPMs available on Friday, on
target and as planned. This release should be pretty compelling for
most users and should justify an immediate upgrade … “

From EET.com: “Concerned over the fragmentation of Linux in the
embedded world, the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) has proposed to its
124 member companies that a single unified specification be developed for
embedded Linux.

The ELC board, which met here at the Embedded Systems Conference this
week, said the need for a standard has become obvious.”

From PR Newswire: Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced at the Embedded Systems
Conference the immediate availability of two key Java technologies for the
embedded market. The first is the completion of the Java platform for Linux,
which provides embedded application developers access to the entire Java
platform for use on the Linux operating system.

TechReview.com has a feature on OpenCola. “Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi CEO John Sculley
over to Apple with the question, ‘Do you
want to change the world, or sell sugar
water?’ An enthusiastic startup called
OpenCola hopes to do both.

A software company that happens to
produce a soda, OpenCola uses
peer-to-peer searching to find information
on the Web. Its soft drink, OpenCola, helps
to promote the company.”

Posted at LWN.net: Updated pine packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 7.0, 6.2,
and 5.2. These new updated packages fix temporary file creation issues
in the pine mail client and the pico text editor that comes with pine.

LWN.net has a report on the GUADEC Gnome conference recently. Here’s the executive summary: “GUADEC was fun. GNOME Office is now real. It would be nice to
release a whole suite for GNOME 2.0. This will be lots of work. So
start.”

From LinuxSecurity.com: New netscape packages are availabe to fix a problem with the handling of
JavaScript in certain situations. By exploiting this flaw, a remote site
could gain access to the browser history, and possibly other data.