ZDNET: “Linuxcare laid off 10 percent of its staff, mostly in
administrative jobs and technical support, said
spokeswoman Michelle Nemschoff. Though she declined
to say how many people lost jobs, Chief Executive Art
Tyde has said in recent months the company has about
150 employees, meaning the layoff would affect about 15.”

Wired has a brief blip that Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy warned the US Department of Justice not to settle in its antitrust case against Microsoft. Interesting, in light of Sun’s recent settlement with Microsoft.

From XML.com: “At the Open Source conference in Monterey last year, Sun announced their plans to release the current source code for Star Office,
renamed OpenOffice. In October they followed up on their plans, releasing both the source code and binaries for OpenOffice build 605.
One of the features added since Star Office 5.2 was the ability to save files as XML.”

In addition to being open source, saving as XML makes OpenOffice truly open. Aside from being open source, XML’s
self-documenting nature allows us to dive into the document format without having to dive into C++. And more significantly, XML
allows us to use simple, free tools to manipulate the documents themselves.”

“When I started maintaining the Usenet Linux FAQ several years ago, I made some conscious decisions about its attitude
toward Microsoft and other software companies. The main reason was to maintain the FAQ’s integrity and authority, in
addition to the fact that there’s plenty to write about Linux, and I can about do that more-or-less effectively with the time
and resources I have.” Read more at LinuxToday.

“PHP web application toolkit gets even better. phpwebtools has just reached version 0.2.” The complete list of new features is at LinuxPR.

Another LinuxPR press release: “ E-Task tracks and monitors tasks ensuring task completion. E-Task Plus provides the capability to group tasks into processes and trigger actions when certain events occur.
“

LinuxPR has a release from RidgeRun. “The embedded Linux software development company is partnering with DevelopOnline to offer DSPLinux SDK, based on Texas Instruments’ TMS320DSC21 digital signal processor (DSP), through DevelopOnline’s Web-based open platform development site.”

Slashdot has some information about the OpenFX Open-Source 3D modeling, animation and rendering suite. Apparently, it now only works in Windows, but Linux and FreeBSD ports are promised.

Slashdot reports on a GPL licensed 3D modelling/rendering tool called “OpenFX.” Currently it is only available for the Win32 platform, but ports to the free Unixes and Linux are underway.

Mozdev.org has a report on the New York Mozilla developers meeting during LinuxWorld. Highlights included presentations on state of Mozilla Web tools and Tinderbox2.