In last week's column, I asked why BSD-licensed operating systems didn't seem to be attracting as many corporate supporters and programmers as the GNU GPL-based Linux. (more…)

Ben Charny of ZDNet News reports that IBM will today announce plans to offer for the first time instant messaging for wireless devices. Charny writes . . . (more…)

Richard Shim of ZDNet News reports that a report to be released today by research firm Gartner predicts that Compaq Computer will topple Palm from the top spot in revenue from handheld devices. Shim writes . . . (more…)

Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal contends that Microsoft Corp., even while mounting a new campaign against open-source software, has quietly been using such free computer code in several major products, as well as on key portions of a popular Web site — despite denying last week that it did so. Gomes writes . . . (more…)

Jane Wakefield of ZDNet UK writes . . .

As if the mobile industry didn't have enough woes, another threat is looming on the horizon from the cyber labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (more…)

Socorro, NM; Tokyo, Japan — (press release excerpt) — Finite State Machine Labs (FSMLabs) and A&A Linux Corporation, a Japanese embedded Linux firm, have announced a real-time Linux joint development agreement. The two firms simultaneously announced a sales and distribution agreement for RTLinux within the… (more…)

NEWS FLASH! In a press conference today, Compaq announced an application contest for Linux-based handheld devices for the purpose of “[driving] development and adoption of Linux applications on handheld devices such as the Compaq iPAQ.” Five finalists and one grand prize winner will be announced at LinuxWorld in August 2001. (more…)

San Diego, CA — (press release excerpt) — Team ASA Inc. today announced NPWR, the first single board computer (SBC) designed for manufacturers and OEMs in the Network Attached Storage (NAS), RAID, and Personal Server marketplaces. Npwr is powered by the Intel Xscale processor, a RISC CPU with clock rates reaching as high as 733 MHz. (more…)

Sunnyvale, CA — (press release excerpt) — Filanet Corporation announced the availability of a software development kit (SDK) for the company's InterJak family of Internet service appliances. (more…)

Stephen Balacco, a senior analyst at Venture Development Corporation (VDC), has written a whitepaper entitled Linux's Future in the Embedded Market which summarizes the results of VDC's recently completed Embedded Linux market study. The whitepaper provides a market overview (including annual revenue projections) and discusses the future of Linux in the embedded market. (more…)

Beijing, China — (press release excerpt) — Red Flag Linux and Trolltech AS have signed an agreement that will result in the creation of a complete, stable, and predictable Embedded Linux platform for the growing number of handheld device manufacturers in China. (more…)

Campbell, CA — (press release excerpt) — Viosoft announced a new Embedded Linux integrated development environment (IDE) for the Intel StrongARM SA-1110 development environment. The Arriba! Embedded Linux Kernel Edition IDE is a fully integrated source-level kernel debugger for configuring, customizing, developing, and deploying Linux-based embedded software solutions. (more…)

By John Borland; special to ZDNet . . .

Just a few days after the world got its first look at the updated MP3 music format, rival open-source format Ogg Vorbis is ready to reveal a major facelift. (more…)

The following whitepaper summarizing the results of Venture Development Corporation's recently completed Embedded Linux market study is reproduced here with VDC's permission, as a service to the Embedded Linux community . . . (more…)

Bruce Perens, one of the leaders of the free software movement and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, comments on the implications of Microsoft's growing obsession Linux and the open source software movement in this entertaining guest column on ZDNet. Perens writes . . . (more…)