The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is GNU's tool for secure communication and data storage. It is a complete and free replacement of PGP and can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures. It includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant with the proposed OpenPGP Internet standard as described in RFC2440. Version 1.0.5 has just been released and should be available at the mirrors really soon.

Ministry of Finance (Poland) in response to parliamentary inquiry took a stand in case of taxation of free software. In the opinion of Finance Minister in case of using free software there is no income from free services. Use of such a software isn't taxed with the Inheritance and Donation Tax either. The reason is that it is impossible to find the financial value of such a service when it is addressed to unlimited number of users on the same basis, free of charge.

The end of the merger isn't the only change. According to this article, LinuxCare is throwing in the towel on technical support and moving to developer support. This change, more than the failure of the merger, is a mark of the changing Linux market.

Electronics makers are creating Palm-like gadgets based on Linux software, a development which shouldn't please its rivals Palm and Microsoft. Can Linux kill the Palm platform? No, but it can compete with Palm and Microsoft's Pocket PC, and it may ultimately dominate the market with an 85% share and maybe even more than that.

Microsoft Corp. boss, Steve Ballmer, said that a $135 million investment in competing software developer Corel Corp. -- the subject of a U.S. antitrust probe -- does nothing to crush Corel's fledgling Linux business.

GNOME has launched a binary packaging project headed up by Gregory LeBlanc. Designed to help users test upcoming beta releases of GNOME 2.0, the project will initially focus on providing RPM's and Debian packages.

The final, consumer-ready release of the Agenda VR-3 has been delayed again, this time until May. The device, which was slated to begin shipping to customers on April 23 is now being pushed back to May 21. The Agenda was released as a developer's edition in November, and review units were handed out at Spring COMDEX. The device was generally met with lukewarm reviews owing to reports of unstable and slow performance.

Linux users say once they started using the free source operating system they were hooked. Stability, reliability, the absence of software licenses and being able to view and change the source code are some of the reasons. It has been embraced by a range of businesses, from a company that checks term papers for plagiarism, a provider of business and technology solutions to the retail industry and Web developers.

Based on Mach, and POSIX compliant this distributed Operating System, supported on i386 and SUN SPARC among others, can be used to paralell process many single board computers over Ethernet.

The Unununium Core Team now offers the nicest Boot loader for 386+ OS. It boots with a little demo running while it loads the core. This all fits in 512 bytes, along with CPU detection, protected mode jump, partition check, some error messages and a lot of little other features.