"A few weeks ago, SuSE Czech created the Czech localized version of StarOffice. The most interesting fact about it is, that you can distribute the message catalogs and other parts of it freely, you can even use it freely, as long as you use it under SuSE Linux only. The localization itself, of course, works on other distros without problems. You just cannot use it legally."

"But I think that 2001 will be an important one in the evolution of Linux, and that there are a number of trends that bears some watching in the coming months. We are on the brink of an important transitional period for Linux, as it moves from the grungy garage to the corporate IT department."

"There's a mostly technical question of why the project took so long, and I could write a great many all-but-incomprehensible pages on that subject...but I won't. Instead, I'll try to focus on a less technical project-management question of why nobody realized it would take so long. My point is not that it could have been done more quickly, but that we (collectively) should have known it would not."

"Of course, the security teams for any given vendor can only do so much. We can find, identify, fix, and make updated packages for vulnerabilities, but it is up to you, the end user, to apply them."

Call me hopelessly optimistic if you like, but I'm one of those people who sees problems as nothing more than opportunities in really bad packaging. And few such opportunities are as clear as the one presented by the Ramen Worm.

For Linux to be a player in the realm of television and motion picture production it must have stunning graphics capabilities, high-performance disk I/O with support for the very large file sizes video needs, integration with analog and digital video input/output devices, and the actual video applications themselves.

"The 2.4 kernel integrates USB support. But having USB support isn't enough. Linux needs broad support for the USB peripherals themselves. For example, I have two USB-enabled digital cameras, and neither of them works with Linux. They both work fine with my copy of Windows 98SE."

I keep reading about Linux, how it doesn't cost anything, how it is a viable alternative to Microsoft. Is this true? If I wanted to try it out, dip my toe in, where would you suggest I start?

The big difference between closed source versioning and open source versioning is philosophical. In reality most software is a work in progress. Open source developers admit this up front. Close source developers, while not actually hiding the information, prefer not to draw anyone's attention to it.

People like standards. Amid the chaos of computer technology and operating systems with a list of names that can reach to the moon, people like finding similarities that they can build on. Linux needs more cohesiveness between its disparate distributions before it will seriously take on the desktop industry. Linux needs standards. As it presently stands each distribution basically does it's own thing.