On-line retailer Amazon.com recently received a lot of flack for selling items at different prices to different customers, for “market testing”. Today the company appologised. The story at ZDNet Inter@ctive Investor.

A Linux World columnist address the question:
“I admit to having my own definition of open source. It is based on the usage I have seen and
heard, not on a philosophy. To me, the term means simply that source code is both freely available
and modifiable. Period. Restrictions on the code’s use depend upon the license applied to it, not on
the label.”

frontpath, inc., a wholly
owned subsidiary of S3 Incorporated , today announced
ProGear. ProGear is frontpath’s premier Information Appliance targeted to the
vertical market segments. ProGear couples hardware and software to deliver
one of the first ever wireless, truly portable, untethered, broadband-based
products capable of enabling vertical partners to fully customize content. ProGear’s software includes Linux 2.4x operating system,
Netscape browser version 4.74 and a complete set of utilities
and diagnostics. The press release is at PR Newswire.

A story from The Standard talks about Aimster forging ties with Capitol Records, just “as the music industry tries to stop
song-swap service Napster.” CNet has a similar story.

CBS Marketwatch follow up on the Sun Microsystems UltraSparc III processor release: “Sun hoping to maintain its
strong share of the Unix server market, unveiled new hardware and
software on Wednesday along with aggressive pricing.

Sun rolled out its
latest processor, the
UltraSparc III, which
runs at up to 900
mHz.” A ZDNet story describes the technical gliches during Sun’s launch party.

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.