Kevin Dankwardt raises a number of serious issues and concerns regarding the ELC Board's ELC Platform Specification proposal and provides some possible answers, many of which are given as alternatives. Plus he points out what appear to be inherent contradictions in the announced goals and purposes.

There is nothing like having a new experience. But, in Microsoft's case the experience is old, mundane and undesired. Microsoft is trying to brainwash everyone into believing otherwise. More so, many tech writers expect us to eat up their tales of Windows XP propaganda. But Microsoft is neither successful nor a hit anymore. Here's why.

"If one asks prominent opensource authors what they mean by "opensource" and why they are working on this type of product each answer will be different. People outside the movement tend to think of those great authors as  a rather homogenous crowd  who are in complete agreement with the movement's political and business leaders.  I think that this is far from true ..."

Windows won the war for the desktop. But there's a new struggle over operating systems embedded in everyday objects, and this time free software has the inside track, says Claire Tristram.

"In this article, I'll argue that the open content movement--a movement to release written documents with a license similar to the GNU General Public License (GPL)--is due to the realization that a for-profit industry was about to lock up indispensable public knowledge and, in so doing, pose a grave threat to the advancement of knowledge and human welfare. The stakes are very high."

While the technical arguments against Linux and Open Source are being gradually silenced, several unrefuted myths about the economics of Open Source continue to float about, confusing and scaring off people considering these alternative products. Worse, the Open Source community is itself divided on such issues, and is unable to provide a cogent rebuttal. This article is an attempt to set the record straight.

Since Microsoft's office productivity line is a major revenue stream, IBM would be netscaping Microsoft, just like Microsoft netscaped Netscape half a decade before. So there's a certain delicious irony in that. And if the bad investment in Corel finances the purchase of the WordPerfect assets by IBM, that is poetic justice and the world is again just.

Some of the reasons Microsoft has not cracked into the embedded software market as much as might be expected are peculiar to the software giant, and some pertain to the market as a whole. Initially, the conditions of the "new" appliance market will tend to favor Linux. As the appliance market matures and moves upstream, Windows will capture more opportunities.

Last week a pack of lawyers set upon Red Hat Inc., as earlier they had infested VA Linux. Soon other publicly traded Linux companies will be targeted. Prepare for the litigious rape of the Linux companies. Class-action law firms have very little concern for right and wrong. The rest of us get to pay for it, and it's something the Linux community can ill afford.

For programmers who need to develop sophisticated, high-performance code where the user interface is only a small part of the project, Kylix may not be the right way to go. But, for a corporate developer writing vertical applications -- especially for in-house use in an environment where many such applications are needed in a short time -- Kylix is a splendid choice.