From a ZDNet story: “According to Timpanogas’ CEO Jeff Merkey, Microsoft has threatened Timpanogas with litigation over what Microsoft claims are violations of its intellectual property rights involving the NT file system (NTFS). Merkey’s claims were initially made in postings to a Linux kernel mailing list, summarized in a weekly Linux kernel newsletter called Kernel Traffic. Timpanogas is a company formed by three former Novell employees. Its original mission was to develop clustering and high-availability software for NetWare.”

From The Register: “Although Red Hat rolled out its big budget distro Red Hat Linux 7.0
this week, a far more intriguing release has appeared this week with
nary a mention from the corporate trade press.

It’s come via the flamboyant and ever-entertaining Jeff Merkey,
formerly chief scientist at Novell where he took the credit for
designing the Netware 4.11 kernel, Netware SMP, Wolf Mountain
clustering and other landmarks.”

The release features “more bug fixes and synchronziation. Also the first cut at native mode Yamaha audio.” It’s posted at Linux Today.

Here’s some scary news. Reuters is reporting that computer
security gaps at the Federal Aviation Administration
air traffic control put air traffice control at risk
of potential electronic attack.
The General Accounting
Office found “serious and pervasive
problems” in all areas policed by the FAA. More from ABC News.

UnionBuiltBox has been evaluated by the IT staff of the AFL-CIO in
Washington, D.C., and its computers have been approved for sale on the WorkingFamilies
network set up by union privilege of the AFL-CIO. The press release resides at LinuxPR.

From an InfoWorld story: “Although Linux is ever gaining more supporters, its status as a truly open-source operating system is not assured, industry pundit Nicholas Petreley said Wednesday in a keynote address at the NetWorld+Interop 2000 show. Linux is endangered by the popularity of the businesses formed to sell and service it, he said. Red Hat, Caldera Systems, TurboLinux, and other Linux vendors can potentially stifle its development by packaging a single standard for the OS, he said.”

“When we announced our ongoing development of the PostgreSQL Enterprise
Replication Server (eRServer) last month I had no idea how great the interest
and demand for this would be.” states CEO Geoff Davidson. “We have received
dozens of inquiries from customers, competitors, and development companies
asking for more information. Today I’m very pleased to announce that the first
prerelease version of eRServer has been delivered for testing.” That’s from the press release at LinuxPR.

This Salon.com article, with the writer drooling over a $12,000-a-day “educated escort” has a tenuous connection to Open Source, but a small one: The escort in question “used IP [Internet Protocol] in a sentence!!!
Now that is just super-sexy. I start to think that she could go
very far with this new site she’s planning. Imagine this: She puts
her site on her own server, and then does a seminar at a
conference called “Linux and the Lady: How a self-managed
escort used Linux servers to keep from going down too often.”

Linux Planet has a column about one man’s difficulties hooking up a cable modem with Linux. Read more of the sad story.

Several sites are reporting on Corel’s third-quarter loss of $10.7 million. The consensus: It’s good news compared to the $23.6 million loss in Q2. Maximum Linux has the story. More from Reuters.