Kelly McNeill writes “One day at work we were chatting about the future of the high-tech economy, and a co-worker asked who we thought would still be around in 30 years. I mentioned big companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Oracle — but not Sun Microsystems. Why not Sun? While Sun leads the high-end UNIX market, Sun is still a small company that specializes in servers and workstations. Its competitors, IBM and HP, are much larger companies with highly diversified product lines, and they are not dependent on UNIX sales for survival. While IBM and HP can have poor server sales for the next 30 years and still survive, Sun cannot.”

Linux Weekly News has the announcement that Linux kernel 2.2.19 is out.

TheStandard has a bit of a different take on the digital music hearings before a U.S. Senate committee. “One day after three of the
five major record labels
announced a deal to license
their music to a new online
company called MusicNet,
representatives of the
recording industry
appearing before a key congressional panel were able to handily
deflect criticism that they were moving too slowly to bring fans
the music they love over the Internet in a legitimate way.

Instead, the criticism that seemed to resonate more with
members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday had to
do with complaints from artists, headlined by Don Henley and
Alanis Morissette, that the recording industry doesn’t
represent their interests and hasn’t invited them to the table
during Internet licensing negotiations.”

A LinuxWorld story says Hewlett-Packard is beginning to walk the Open Source walk. “Hewlett-Packard has talked open source for a while now, but without putting any code where its mouth
is. The times may be changing.”

Reuters reports that VA Linux still expects profits by October 2002, according to chief executive Larry Augustin. (VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

From CNet: “With some of the entrepreneurial glamour gone from open-source software, companies
backing the cooperative-programming approach are resorting to more traditional means to
boost their prospects: the old-boys network.

Open-source programming, in which software code may be shared and changed, has been
popularized by successes such as Linux and Apache. Now companies backing lesser-known
open-source packages are nailing down alliances to help their prospects.”

ZD Net has yet another review of the 2.4 kernel. This story says 2.4 “promises a new level of scalability on the Linux platform, as well as better compatibility with today’s high-speed peripherals.”

Wired.com has more on the Linux kernel 2.5 summit. Among the proposals: A “plan to lock-in proposed changes and institute a
drop-deadline or ‘kernel freeze’ date was discussed. A freeze date would enable all programmers to know
when their bits of the code needed to be submitted.”

The information is at linuxdoc.org. There’s a new document: Linuxdoc Reference at
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linuxdoc-Reference.html.
Version 1.1. This article is intended to be a reference for the SGML document type definition linuxdoc.

Several sites are reporting on today’s hearing on digital musicThe Associated Press reports that Napster asked Congress on Tuesday to force
publishers to offer their “catalogues” online. (Hey, the story’s on the CBC site.) “Legislators appeared to be starstruck by Henley and Morissette, who said artists’ concerns have been
ignored during the past year’s legal battles between recording labels and Internet companies.” ABC News also reports on Henley’s and Morissette’s support of Napster.