See also: last week's Commerce page.

Linux and business

Minoru Development Corporation has made a strong commitment, moving from proprietary to open source development. The announcement states that all future Minoru products will be made available under the GPL. We are particularly interested in the future of open source software in the health care market and are looking for opportunities to deploy open source software for health care providers, manage the release of internally developed software under open source licenses, and manage new open source projects in this field. No actual products are yet available but it will be interesting to watch Minoru's progress.

Red Hat has announceda partnership with the folks at Frozenriver to improve documentation for the GIMPand to work on Linux graphic design tools in general.

Paul Iadonisi sent in a note about improved support for the Rex PC Companion under Linux. For those of you that haven't checked out this fun toy yet, you might want to. Of course, the public release of 1.0 of the software isn't scheduled until September 21st, and schedules like that are known to slip, so don't count on using the Rex immediately ...

The German Language version of Star Office 5.0 is now out in a pre-final version. One rumoured ship date for the English version is October 15th.

Some questions were posted recently to one of the newsgroups about Linux-Canada, a Canadian firm selling Linux products which they had tried to contact without success. Linux-Canada provided this response, explaining the recent problems and giving some background on their company.

The folks at Amazon.com have put together a list of recommended Linux book, all of which, of course, they would be delighted to sell to you. See their Linux books page for more.

Novell and Caldera plan to tighten up their relationship, according to this news.com article. Among other things, that should mean a port of the new "Novell Directory Services" (NDS) to Linux.

Press Releases:

• Cyclades outlines the use of the Cyclades-PR3000 to replace statistical multiplexors
• NetBeans, Inc. announced the last beta release of NetBeans Developer 2.0, which is Beta 3
• IBM Research has released new updates for Jikes
• O'Reilly has announced the third edition of "DNS & Bind"
• Equi4 Software announces MetaKit for Tcl
• ZSP introduced a high performance digital signal processor (DSP) with tools to support Linux
• Mercantecintroduces SoftCart(TM) 4.0
• Chase Research announces a new PCI-RAS4 multi-modem card
• Mayko mxmap, software for displaying maps.
• PiN EC/SB 0.9 Electronic Commerce Toolkit, tools for web commerce sites.

Next: Announcements