The Embedded Linux Consortium has announced formation of ELC-Europe, a spirited initiative to accelerate the ELC's European presence via promotion, marketing, and standardization-related activities across the region. At an organizing meeting, representatives from dozens of technology firms ranging from startups to Global 100 companies began a process that will quickly lead to increased European and global visibility for the Linux operating system.

CodeBase for Kylix is a new database library that provides fully functional database access for Borland Kylix development environment. It offers extremely fast database performance, full-featured database functionality, small disk/memory footprint requirements, portability, and royalty-free distribution. Programmers can now take full advantage of CodeBase from Kylix development environment.

According to the company, the major improvements to this newest version include faster page loading, enhanced bookmark management, URL autocompletion/dropdowns, support for Hebrew, better form management (allowing users to presupply information), performance enhancements to the mail client, and the addition of a "history" item for the sidebar.

The UK government e-Envoy, he of the Microsoft-only Government portal, seems to have got religion after all. In what unkind individuals might term one of the great u-turns of our time, an open source approach to PKI currently looks very close to being adopted for the second round of PKI interoperability trials, to be conducted by the UK Communications-Electronics Security Group [CESG] later this year.

Expresso Release 3.1 provides major new feature enhancements resulting in greatly improved developer productivity when creating robust and feature-rich Web applications. It primarily focuses on enhanced MVC Controller functionality, performance testing, as well as enhancements to ease the learning curve of getting started with Expresso such as new Examples and documentation.

TV Linux alliance will define a standard API that will simplify the implementation of TV middleware and device drivers for the Linux operating environment, allowing network operators to select from a variety of vendors whose offerings are interoperable with the common API. The alliance plans to capitalize on Linux designs already underway among various founders and harmonize early work across the industry to ensure that Linux is delivered to the digital set-top under a common framework of evolving standards-based specifications.

Caldera International has announced the availability of its OpenLinux Server 64 preview, a fully functional snapshot of 64-bit Linux for Intel Itanium-based systems. Caldera's offering complements its recently announced AIX 5L technology--a UNIX system solution for Itanium based systems. The combination of AIX 5L with Linux affinity feature and OpenLinux Server 64 provide the industry with the most complete suite of platforms to deploy Linux solutions on Itanium based processors.

Korea's Linux companies have decided to sever ties with Red Hat, signaling that the once amicable partnership is now on the verge of collapse and that the US-based Linux forerunner could be dealt a serious blow. This move came as Korean firms are beginning to feel that this partnership did not bring much value apart from brand recognition, considering the scale of fees Red Hat demands. Nethertheless, a host of key Linux players in Korea have made some inroads into the server and applications market, demonstrating signs that their foray into the open-source platform will pay off in the end.

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.