A large group of Italians are demanding that the Italian Government switch from Microsoft software to Open Source software, claiming that the money could be better spent, according to InfoWorld.

From PR Newswire: Timpanogas Research Group is pleased announce the appointment of Linux Luminary Andre Hedrick
as Chief Technology Officer of the Timpanogas Research Group, Inc. and Chief
Scientist over Linux Development.

From PR Newswire: VERITAS Software
Corporation and TurboLinux have announced that VERITAS NetBackup, an
enterprise-class heterogeneous network backup solution will be available on TurboLinux
Workstation 6.1 this quarter.

Linux World explores the future of technology in a new column: “Peer-to-peer distributed computing and clusters are two recurring hot topics in the Linux world.
What’ll it be like, though, when those technologies truly take root, and we each have not two or ten
external processors working for us, but a thousand, or a million?”

From Maximum Linux: “After searching for months for someone to take over CEO duties at Linuxcare, the company has finally
found the right person to fill the spot. Its co-founder, Art Tyde.”

KDE Dot News has posted a first draft of “new plans for the
new multimedia architecture for KDE2, based on aRts (the “analog realtime
synthesizer”). Plans include merging the two existing media players (noatun and
kaiman), new media types, infrastructure improvements, improved MIDI and more.”

From LinuxPR: Bringing the increasingly
popular “server pages” development model to Xbase developers, PlugSys
International has announced the beta test of its new Max Server Pages
product. Using classic Xbase commands and functions, developers
can quickly access data stored in DBF files or ODBC databases and blend
the results with HTML and Javascript.

Slashdot readers talk about a report from use.perl.org and other sources that several companies have pitched in to raise $55,000 for the Damian Conway perl projects. Also, check out the press release at LinuxPR.

From LinuxPR: NuSphere, provider of NuSphere
MySQL, a packaged software product for the open source
database marketplace, announced that it will host Polycon’s MySQL
open source database training seminar from November 13-17 at the
NuSphere corporate office in Bedford, Mass. This is the first official
MySQL training session to be held in North America.

Slashdotters talk about Red-M’s
demo of its Bluetooth access point, basically it’s an x86 Linux
box with Bluetooth. The company’s product information is also available.