It's a Beautiful Libre Software School Day, Nov 28, 2000

Sick of good old Golden Rule days? Break out of the educational box. Try Libre Software School Days. Evolved from continuing mailing list discussions in Italy and France throughout the summer of 2000, the Libre Software School Day group's mission is to assist Linux user groups (LUGs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in enlightening school administrators about free software's utility through educational materials and demonstrations of free, or "libre", software.

EuroLinux is lying across the European software patent road again--and Richard Stallman is now enlisted to help. The Association for the Promotion of a Free Informational Infrastructure (FFII), a member of the EuroLinux Alliance, has scheduled a "European Software Patent Horror Gallery" in Munich, Germany, on November 21, 2000. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=00/11/20/8332837

While a number of groups are leading the open source charge into the highly specialized battlegrounds of medical informatics, barriers to the adoption of open source software persist, delaying what may be an ideal solution to the burgeoning problems of the health care IT arena.

Tim Cook speaks softly, but carries a big stick. With the public debut of his project at the Los Angeles conference of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the soft-spoken, ex-Marine and ex-hospital IT tech is swinging a stick that could crack open an area where the open source force could really make its mark.

Linux has been making an impact in one economically troubled country after another--and India, it seems, is next on that growing list. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=482

Open Source documentation and opal mining, garden ornaments and fractals, physics and hedge funds. What do they all have in common? Andamooka project coordinator David Sweet. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=481

With the promise of fresh financial infusion, new projects forthcoming and its very own sugar-water due for October release, openCOLA is charged up for its next projects and powered by an open source, heavily caffeinated buzz. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=450

Mozilla's designated "Chief Lizard Wrangler" seems pleased with the maturity level the organization's two-and-a-half-year-old pet project has achieved. Mitchell Baker, whose other titles on the mozilla.org Web site include "manager, problem arbitrator, and speaker to suits," recounted recent happenings within the organization and described some of the development criteria and expectations that will shape Mozilla's 1.0 release.

Daniel Phillips received a big shock recently while reading the wording of three software patents forwarded by a friend on his developer list. The cause of his astonishment, according to Phillips, was his recognition of the software described in the patents as his own Tux2 filesystem. Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based Network Appliances filed three patents, one each issued in 1998, 1999, and 2000, that spell out the details of a filesystem Phillips says is based on his earlier work on Tux2. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=380

A lot of hackers prefer to "abandon the world of real society" by cloistering themselves in their home-based cyber-think-tanks--but two unique hackers decided to invite the world back into their home--via the Internet. CyberFlat, a virtual representation of a Netherlands apartment, gives prying eyes a peek at the cyberlife, times, interests and pets of two Dutch hackers who prefer to be known for interview purposes as Juggler and ||MeG. The majority of CyberFlat's functions run on Linux--mostly Slackware... http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=348

The U.S. government is recognizing the best and brightest of its Linux community and focusing on the operating system's future with a conference and awards presentation October 30. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=331

In order to face the shift of the Internet to serious business use, IBM announced a new range of servers built specifically for business--entrusting a number of its new server models to the stability of Linux. http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=334