Kelly McNeill writes: “Big companies like IBM and Sun are taking notice of “the Hacker’s Hobby” and are looking for it to do great things. There are people who are worried that Big Blue is trying to take Linux over. You really can’t do that with an open source operating system, but what the big companies are doing is taking a casual, informal approach to development and making it professional. I think that the main developers of the kernel (and other open source software) should realize this trend, and begin working on it in a more professional way.” The column’s at OS Opinion.

IDG reports that “Hewlett-Packard will soon offer Linux support on 44 printers and will ship servers and development tools aimed at users of the OS.”

Anonymous Reader writes “Posted at LWN.net is this story about Red Hat releasing their beta release of “Fisher” – what may well become their next distro, 7.1, of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Inc’s Preston Brown writes, “Red Hat, Inc. presents a beta release of Red Hat Linux for your hacking pleasure.”. The story contains links to several mirrors for downloading this beta release.”

From PR Newswire: “SGI (NYSE: SGI) today
announced that Paul F. McNamara has been named vice president of open source
for SGI. In this role, McNamara, 39, will be responsible for formulating SGI’s
plans and guiding its actions as SGI strengthens its commitment to the
Linux(R) operating system and the open-source movement. He will report to
Kenneth L. Coleman, executive vice president of Global Sales, Service and
Marketing, SGI.”

From PR Newswire: “SteelEye(TM) Technology
Inc., a leading application reliability company, today announced an enhanced
Linux version of its LifeKeeper(R) Next Generation Enterprise Reliability(TM)
platform that allows enterprises to quickly implement cost-effective
high-availability clustering solutions to maximize uptime of business-critical
applications.”

A post on use Perl; announces the release of perl version 5.6.1-trial 2, including a download link and more information.

A press release at Linux PR tipped us to the latest big announcement from the Free Stardards Group. Beta version 1.1 of the Linux Development Platform Specification (LDPS) is now available for review at freestandards.org. LDPS aims to create common references that enable easy portability of applications between available Linux distributions. After a two-week review of the beta version of LDPS, the group will release the official 1.1 version.

From Maximum Linux: “Good news, Eazel release Preview Release 3 (PR3) of Nautilus today. Bad news: it still doesn’t work on Red Hat 7.0 (unless you’re a hacker, or so we’re told). And who’s the biggest name at Eazel? Well that’d be Andy Hertzfeld, co-founder of Eazel, old-school Mac GUI programmer, and self-proclaimed “software wizard”, who sat down with us to give us some details of what’s the come with Nautilus.”

ZDNet News spoke with Microsoft product manager Doug Miller who proclaimed that his employer is “not at all worried about (Linux) from a techological standpoint.” or at least one of its product managers, says that people who use free software are actually doing themselves a “disservice in the long run.” Remember, folks: you’re only hurting yourself if you haven’t paid Microsoft for a server license.

PC World reports on a Linux conference tradition, the Golden Penguin Bowl. Gather the self-defined geeks on one end of the room, the self-defined nerds on the other end of the room, and wait to see who in each group is the first to do an unintentional impersonation of the comic book shop owner from The Simpsons. Well, not exactly — but do click through to find out who answered the most technical questions correctly this time around.