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Leading items


The leading event of the past week was CeBIT '99, a massive tradeshow held in Hannover, Germany. The web-site" for the show calls it a "World Business Fair" and from some reports, it may very well be the world's largest trade show.

KDE and the Linux community both came in with awards from the show, KDE receiving Ziff-Davis' "Software Innovation of the Year Award for 1998/99" (see their announcement), and the Linux Community receiving the CeBIT "Highlight" award for Software, one of four categories of their Highlight awards.

SAP, a German software giant, announced its plans for Linux. That brought about a flurry of media coverage, including news.com and ZDnet articles.

Although we were unable to attend, we were lucky enough to have an on-site reporter in the form of Dan York, of LinuxCare fame. Dan is also known for his work with the Linux Professional Institute, which is developing a community-based Linux certification project. He provided us with this report from the massive tradeshow, with lots of details and even a few pictures thrown in.

In addition, a CeBIT '99 report is also available from LinuxWorld.

"Not quite Open Source". This Linux Weekly News feature article by Jonathan Corbet tackles the licensing issues of the BitKeeper software package, built by Larry McVoy, a well-known member of the free software community. It addresses the conflict produced by Larry's efforts to keep his software free, yet make a reasonable living from the years of effort he has put into his work. His novel way of extracting revenue from proprietary software developers may well fund the creation of a great new free software tool, but it also has shown that "Open Source" is not everything.

For a different commercial angle, we also offer this week our first feature story from the latest member of the Eklektix team, Dennis Tenney. In this story, Dennis has taken a look at the success of a Linux-based e-commerce solution currently in heavy use. This kind of success story was once the exclusive province of companies like IBM and Anderson Consulting. Now, however, companies that cannot afford high consulting fees and software licenses have access to similarly successful technology. They can use this technology to build enterprise e-commerce applications, open source technology that any competent engineer can evolve and apply in their customer's best interests.

The Linux Montage Project, also known as "LIMP", has revamped its website, designed to be sleeker and easier on the eye. Their goal is to "distill the Linux community's spirit down into one cool looking 'montage' poster by using user contributed images.

Eklektix, Inc., producers of the Linux Weekly News, was featured Sunday in the Boulder Daily Camera, our hometown newspaper. The article also serves as a Linux introductory piece.

It was followed a day later by an article entitled "Businesses Should Consider Free Software", by our Executive Editor, Jonathan Corbet. It is more of an advocacy piece, with the focus on the advantages free software can bring to Eklektix.

This Week's LWN was brought to you by:


March 25, 1999

 

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