The most frustrating aspect of the open source crowd is the assumption that if you're not part of their solution you're part of the problem--that one must choose between Free Software and the Dark Side, as represented by"traditional" software companies such as Microsoft.

Netscape is now part of the AOL-Time-Warner megacorporation, and if comments by company officials are any indication, we may see an end to Netscape being an active participant as a browser supplier. Consider these comments from Netscape President Jim Bankoff, made to the Reuters news organization.

IBM has announced that NHL.com, the official Website of the National Hockey League, will run its Website on IBM Linux systems as part of an overall site-improvement plan. The Linux-based solution was chosen by Website managers who demanded easy, flexible and reliable systems to handle the heavy Web traffic to the media rich content on the site.

Dennis Powell, looking at a list of some of the worst recent privacy abuses, from weapon-sniffing scanners to the seemingly innocuous TiVO, talks about the ironies inherent in a computing community intent on maintaining its firewalls while personal privacy vanishes.

"It was a hard road to get to the release of PGP. To add to the stress, a week before PGP's first release, I discovered the existence of another email encryption standard called Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), which was backed by several big companies, as well as RSA Data Security. I fully expected PEM to crush PGP, and even briefly considered not releasing it.

Xinetd runs with umask 0 - this means that applications using the xinetd umask and not setting the permissions themselves (like swat from the samba package), will create world writable files. This update sets the default umask to 022. Also, the Web interface for linuxconf did not work in Red Hat Linux 7.1. Other minor issues have also been addressed.

Now that all the hype has died down from DeCSS, it's finally time to get going with DVD video on Linux. There's a couple ways to get DVD done on Linux -- either software or hardware decoding. So, let's get you up and going with DVD on Linux.

Open Source advocates are often embarrassed at the suggestion that their favorite type of software may be a socialistic phenomenon. Though they protest this insinuation strongly, many secretly fear it may be true. The sharing aspect of Open Source, its emphasis on community and its cost free availability, certainly sound like Socialism. And Open Source doesn't lend itself, easily, to commercial exploitation. Is it anti-capitalist, then?

Intel is finally shipping production quantities of its revolutionary 64-bit Itanium chip. More than 10 OEMs–including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM–have announced plans to release Itanium servers and workstations. Instead of Wintel, early Itanium adopters will be running Linux on Intel, or Lintel, as some insiders call it. Linux platform firms Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux have announced the release of Linux 2.4 based Itanium Linuxes in mid-June. So, where are the Microsoft operating systems?

The Hague Convention defines a set of provisions for the execution of foreign judgements in the event of international disputes. Current drafts include industrial property and intellectual property within the potential scope of the proposed Convention. EuroLinux feels very concerned by the eventual enforceability of foreign Internet & software patents in Europe.