For those of you who might have been wondering: no, the billion dollars does not include funds for purchasing or creating a Linux distribution of IBM's own. Daniel Frye, director of IBM's Linux Technology Center, says the company has no interest in having a distribution.

Gimp 1.2, the Hadjaha Release, has been released. Get it via ftp or cvs.

Forrester Research says companies are overcoming fears of relying on open source products in their networks. The research firm estimates that more than 55% of the world's 2,500 biggest firms use open source software, with almost a quarter using the software in production systems.

Forrester Research says companies are overcoming fears of relying on open source products in their networks. The research firm estimates that more than 55% of the world's 2,500 biggest firms use open source software, with almost a quarter using the software in production systems.

Recently, plex86, a PC virtualization program, was ported to NetBSD as a host operating system. The open source plex86 project allows users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine.

The code will enable a 64-bit driver for the IBM eServer z900, the reinvented mainframe. The submission comes several months earlier than expected and ahead of the 64-bit Intel driver code, which many believed would be the initial 64-bit Linux code.

More than a year after members of the French parliament first proposed that French government agencies be mandated to use open source software, Linbox announced that the French tax authority, is preparing to deploy 950 Linux-based application servers at sites all over France.

Itanium is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2001, but a new version of Windows tailored for the chip won't arrive until the second half, Intel and Microsoft representatives said. Meanwhile, compatible production versions of Linux from Red Hat, Turbolinux and Caldera Systems are scheduled to debut at the same time as the chip itself.

Red Hat has introduced the SID project, an open source hardware simulation framework for embedded developers. This package consists of software components interacting with each other to imitate the behavior of physical hardware before its actual creation.

Userlocal.com is reporting that the Slackware Linux port to SPARC is now available for download (ISO image and individual packages available).