knarf noted a story linked from LinuxToday about Red Hat's IPO called Red Hat's Charity Case at Andover News. Several people noted that the story has many errors. Fortunately knarf has written a pretty good summary of what he considers wrong about the article. Several of them are a bit extreme, but many are good points. If you read the original, this is a good rebuttal worth reading.

Wil Mahan writes "Salon has a short article with some interesting details about the upcoming Red Hat IPO. It gives a brief overview of the S-1 filing, including potential "risk factors", such as the threat of being squashed by Microsoft. The full text of the filing is also available (warning: 1.5 MB of legalese). "

Miguel de Icaza , GNOME Guru, and candidate for most hyper human being in the history of humans being, has written an essay discussing Red Hat and the beating that they have taken within the Linux Community. This is worth a read.

Gryphon writes "PC Magazine has published a pretty level-headed 8-page review of the Linux 2.2 kernel. Mostly a features review, compared to Windows NT. I think this is pretty significant, considering a lot of Windows users (including me in years now past) read that magazine! "

Several people have written in lately to note that LinuxHQ has moved to Kernel Notes. But the plot thickened recently when LinuxHQ sprung back to life looking quite similiar to its predecessor, but with a different license. Kernel Notes is GPL, copyrighted by the LinuxHQ Project, but the "New" LinuxHQ is copyrighted by ECS and not GPLd (as well as not crediting the creator of the nice logo up top). Can anyone clarify the confusion for us all? I'm getting a lot of questions about this and a lot of it smells pretty fishy.

cpt kangarooski writes "Well, an enterrising reporter over at Salon has found that certain blue comments in some Linux source code may make it eligible to be censored in Australia. Take a look here " Mmm...fun with censorship. Congrats go to Jamais Cascio (known as cynical around here), Slashdot reader, and author of the Salon article.

Vox wrote in to send us a link to a feature that appears over at Linux Today. The article is called Linux is not Red Hat and describes the fears that a growing number of the old school Linux users have been expressing lately. Specifically it talks about MetroWorks deciding to only support Red Hat for their CodeWarrior for Linux release.

The first of the big Linux IPOs is here: Red Hat has announced they have filed for an initial public offering. Details are sketchy, but the word on the street is that the stock will be very difficult to get ahold of. Now, when's the VA IPO? :)

The folks at ZD are hosting the Open Source Forum in Texas June 30 - July 1 in Austin, TX. LUGs get special rates-so if you are interested in going, click below. Hot. That's what Austin on June 30 makes me think.

After many months of discussion and flaming, Debian has chosen a new logo. The new "swirl" graphic can be seen here, and the results of the vote are here.

Principal Skinner writes " The main feature on Userweb has a pretty good exposé of Linux, the open-source movement, and trends in OSes. Heavily slams NT on reliability, scalability and TCO, as well as raising questions about whether Windows2000 is The Answer. Also talks a bit about Novell and its products. "

bpdlr writes "A recent survey carried out by the Microsoft Exchange Forum in the UK shows that 20% of NT/Exchange admins in UK enterprises see Linux as a potential alternative to NT, up from 0% in six months (it's a PDF file, see page 4). Compare that with only 29% sure they will upgrade to Win2000. "

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is now formally a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, meaning that all donations are now tax deductible. SPI is the umbrella organization of several free software projects, primarily Debian, but also GNOME, Berlin, and the Open Hardware project. They (Disclaimer: I am a Debian developer, and thus associated with SPI) claim to hold the Open Source mark.

diogenes write in to send us a CNet article that speculates wildly about the IPO Intentions of Linux Heavyweights Red Hat and VA Linux Systems. Red Hat denies it (as always) and VA Speculates (as always). Mentions Mandrake working at VA and wraps up with a bit about Cygnus. I wonder where Linuxcare fits into all this, but other than that, this a good summary of the picture right now.

Andrew Dvorak wrote to us with Network Computing's take on Linux. Good chronicle of why Linux is moving into the higher end markets, and the huge surge of support that has been seen in the last six months.

munchkin writes "CNN interviews Bob Young as he explains how Red Hat will revolutionize the software market. Read all about it here " Same story as usual in many ways-but at least the mainstream press has a growing fascination with the Open Source model and how it works; especially the notion of it being impossible for one company do destory the rest.

Slain asks: "I've searched the internet looking for information about migrating from BSD to Linux. I have not found anything on the subject. Is it something that is just not done? What if you wanted to switch for cost reasons? Is it not done because you are already running a flavor of UNIX so why switch? I have a BSD box which is used as the primary internet mail server for the company. It has about 700+ users and grows about 20+ a week. Why do we want to migrate? The reason are as follows: newer hardware, user maintenance and we want to reduce services to the users (eg. make them POP only accounts). Anyone out there have any suggestions?

Fer asks: "Are there backup program for Linux that do not have filesystem or volume size limits? I am trying to make a full backup of a 22 GB FTP server, using 4 GB TR-4 tapes. I have tried tar, dump, afio, taper, and afbackup, and every one of them either did not allow >2GB volumes or had weird problems with >4GB filesystems. Currently I am using dd to do the job, but I think there must be another option. Any suggestions on free programs which I may use?"

Well I guess tonight I'm going to be a guest on the Weekender Show which is being run tonight by the boys from the Linux Show over at ttalk.com along with a panel of folks including Larry Augustin and Chris DiBona (from VA) Dave Sifry (from Linuxcare) and Doc Searls and Matt Cunningham from the Linux Journal. It starts at 11:20pm Eastern, and runs for awhile, so we'll see how long before I fall asleep. The topic will be a practical discussion of what Linux can do for an organization. You can call in at 888-591-TECH.

Ignatius writes "The jury of the Prix Ars Electronica - one of Europe's most influential computer art festivals - awarded the 1999 Golden Nica in the category .net to Linus Torvalds. One of the most important arguments for the jury was the fact that Linux is the first product to come out of the cyberspace of the Internet, which has had an enormous impact on the "real" world. "