The last remains of the Indrema Linux console project are being shut down, as Indrema partner CollabNet plans to close the idn.indrema.com and gamexchange.indrema.com Web sites shortly. Both appear to be mostly ghost sites. Even the latest announcement from project hosting service CollabNet, which told subscribers to send questions to the list, generated no response.

As more commercial software vendors are exploring the potential benefits of open source, the rhetoric is reaching epic proportions. And with quasi-open-source licenses proliferating, it is becoming increasingly tougher to determine whether or not software is truly open source-and whether or not that matters (beyond purely religious war reasons) to software consumers and developers.

Two major investors in Caldera International, which sells the Linux and Unix operating systems, will be able to sell previously restricted stock, the company said in a regulatory filing. As a result of a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Tarantella will be able to sell 16 million Caldera shares through a dealer or broker, while MTI Technology will be able to sell 5.3 million shares. Tarentella got its shares through the sale of its Unix software to Caldera. MTI was an early investor.

Apache is undoubtedly the best server serving the Internet. With more than 40 percent market share in the "Web server" arena, it stands out to be the most preferred server. Years of coding have yielded ripe fruits in the form of simple configuration files along with its small 2.5 MB size. And with more and more people embracing Linux the server's popularity is increasing.

"There will soon be a major change in the way people think about computer software. Currently when looking at software purchases, one might ask questions like: How much does it cost? How many clients can legally be connected simultaneously? Can I use it on my desktop and laptop systems without paying extra? Those questions will become a thing of the past, as Open Source licenses make them irrelevant. Don't think it's possible? Remember that every industry occasionally has a major shift. The computer industry has certainly had shifts.

Not many people anywhere, let alone in the open-source world, have heard of the Mettle distribution of Linux. You won't find it in our list of downloadable distributions, or even the huge list maintained by Linux Weekly News. Indeed, it has not generated a sentence's worth of public mention until now.

theKompany.com, has announced the availability of BlackAdder 1.0 beta3, a Windows/Linux UI development environment for Python and Ruby based on Qt. BlackAdder combines a visual design environment with debugging, syntax highlighting, ODBC interfaces and extensive HTML documentation into a comprehensive platform for developing Python and Ruby applications. This their very first step towards integration. The debugger support will be missing for a while yet.

David Cantrell has announced that the Slackware port to the SPARC architecture is to be discontinued. "It's officially off now. I enjoyed working on the port and wish I could continue it, but it's a fulltime job and I simply don't have the time anymore. For now the port has been moved to the /unsupported directory on the FTP site (ftp.slackware.com). It will probably be removed eventually, but not for a couple months probably," says he.

Speaker, a plugin for Konqueror, providing text-to-speech-synthesis using the Festival Speech Synthesis System engine developed at Edinburgh University has been released. It has made Konqueror useable by people with visual impairments and by people who are otherwise unable to view a screen. Speaker is Currently text has to be selected with the mouse and the Speak menu entry selected, but hopefully the interface will be improved so visually impaired users can surf the Web with Konqueror.

"The real issue is often missed in the argument over the GPL vs a BSD-style license as advocated by Microsoft: Am I allowed to make something and give it away without the threat of someone exploiting my work? Is a "community" allowed to be charitable without having their charity abused? Can a group of people collaborate and create "Intellectual Property", put it under a license that insures that it can be shared with anybody? Is this legal? Does it have precedent in America (any country for that matter)?