Linux Weekly News posts a summary of a proposed amendment to Italian copyright law. The article, written by the Associazione Software Libero, says “… in addition to going against a subsequent European Community recommendation (February, 2001), (the amendment) poses a potentially serious threat to the activities of independent software developers and makes it difficult to legally distribute free software in Italy.”

InfoWorld reports: “The beleaguered peer-to-peer music-trading site Napster and its court rivals, The Recording Industry Association of America, (RIAA) have met with a court-appointed mediator and have another meeting scheduled, according to a report in the Feb. 26 issue of Newsweek magazine. In an attempt to reach an out-of-court settlement, Judge Marilyn H. Patel appointed former federal judge Eugene Lynch as mediator for the two sides, Newsweek said.”

CNN reports that the mayor of Sneek, Netherlands has offered the creator of the Anna Kournikova virus a job. Mayor Siebold Hartkamp doesn’t know what kind of job “OnTheFly” should be offered, but figures the kid would do well as a computer security expert.

From Slashdot: “Philip Zimmerman, the creator of PGP[?] has left Network
Associates. NA had bought PGP Inc back in December 1997, and PRZ has
been working there since then – his depature marks an interesting turn in the life
of PGP.” The post includes a message from Zimmerman to PGP users.

New Perl modules this week include: Finance-Quote for fetching stock prices via the Internet; Net-Jabber for access to the Jabber instant messaging protocol; Schedule-Load for remote system load, processes, and scheduling; and DDL-Oracle, a module that reverse engineers and defrags object DDL. Full details and more modules at usePerl.

IBM Asia VP Kakutaro Kitashiro revealed IBM’s Linux strategy last week, saying the company was “hoping to
“wrap” its services, middleware and servers around Linux applications from
independent software vendors.” Big Blue believes the move will increase its hardware and services revenue. Australian IT has the full story.

Craig Black writes “It looks real nice!! This is what they have to say.

Kapital is our personal finance manager package for KDE and Linux. It is meant to be in the spirit of Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money, but without the bloat associated with those packages from years of justifying upgrades. Kapital has everything you need for managing all your personal finances. Here’s the Link
http://www.thekompany.com/products/kapital/index.p hp3?dhtml_ok=0
Here’s the screen shots.

http://www.thekompany.com/products/kapital/screens hots.php3?dhtml_ok=0

Craig”

From a report at KDEnews.org: “With the KDE 2.1 release nearing, major code changes are prohibited. Despite this restriction, we started
thinking about how to make KDE 2.1 (or future releases) even more appealing. Carsten Pfeiffer, devoted
KDE developer, remarked that while people are hard at work polishing the visual aspects, KDE suffers
from a marked lack of sounds and sound effects.”

“Kapital is our personal finance manager package for KDE and Linux. It is meant to be in the spirit of Intuit
Quicken or Microsoft Money, but without the bloat associated with those packages from years of
justifying upgrades.” Get the latest news at KDEnews.org.

“Many people still have the impression that Linux is about servers and typing commands in console. Well, that isn’t all; Linux is being used on the desktop more and more.
Why ? Here are some reasons.

Everybody likes music. The technology lets people listen to high-quality music on audio CDs. But if they aren’t using a computer, they are missing a lot. Why change the CD
because you want to listen to other albums? Lots of songs can be stored on the hard drive or CD-ROMs.” Read more at LinuxGazette.