Stories by: Mark Gibbs

I've just seen the most remarkable documentary called "The Corporation", which is based on a book by Joel Bakan called The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

I recently emceed a Webcast titled "Sustaining Open Source Benefits" (see www.networkworld. com, DocFinder: 7828). The interviewees were Ernest Prabhakar, Apple's Darwin product manager on the Mac OS X team who is responsible for open source, Unix marketing and Xgrid; and Peter Burris, president and chief research officer at Appergy, an early-stage IT services firm.

The latest release of Knoppix (3.8.1) has arrived, and it's worth investigating what it offers the Linux faithful.

Recently unbridled joy entered your life when you got coLinux running on your Windows PC without any kind of virtual machine monitor and without the aid of a safety net. Several of you have already written in to tell of your coLinux exploits, and this week - can you believe it? - it gets better!

We are delirious with joy, or maybe it is just that we've spent too long staring at the screen. . . . Whatever, we just found the coolest hack that you just have to check out!

"There was a report out this summer by an open source group that highlighted that Linux violates over 228 patents. . . . So the licensing costs are less clear than people think today."

Dear Bill and Steve, Considering that we've never met please forgive the rather familiar greeting. I suspect the chances of actually getting a reply from either of you is pretty low, as you are very busy people and the thoughts of one columnist are hardly likely to rock your world.

"We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security." - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a July 6 company-wide e-mail.

Once upon a time, there were only Unix machines on the Internet. No, really, you could look as hard as you liked and all you would find were *nixen from wall to wall.

In my quest to find a good Web calendaring application for my son's school Web site, I have looked at dozens of solutions ranging from the simple, limited, and incredibly ugly, to the remarkably complex and sophisticated, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink and the absolutely gorgeous. Not surprisingly, simple equals free or cheap while complex equates to prices that make your eyes water.

Dear recent SCO Linux licensee, Were you that afraid of litigation that you bought a license for Linux from The SCO Group? I'm sorry, but that is pathetic.