SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that the first branded blogging community, www.blog-n-play.com (TM), will go beta on February 15, 2005, to coincide with the opening day of the Web Services Edge 2005 East International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edg e2005east).

Michael Stutz, author of The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use, discusses what inspired him to write this book, when he first started using Linux, and other world views.

'Sunshine returned recently to Silicon Valley after two weeks of Seattle-like storms and overcast skies,' writes our West Coast Bureau Chief, Roger Strukhoff, reporting from from Mountain View, CA. 'Now comes news of fair weather for Mountain View-based Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is reportedly eating up as much as one percentage point per month of the browser market recently dominated by that dour giant from the grey Northwest.'

Up to 5,000 Oracle/PeopleSoft employees are about to be fired. 'What's not known,' write Roger Strukhoff and Matt Vande Voorde, reporting direct from Pleasanton, CA yesterday, 'is how many of those jobs will be plucked from the sprawling PeopleSoft campus, which dominates the Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton and is a major employer and economic driver in this region.'

Although Larry Ellison has promised Oracle will be supporting PeopleSoft's products for the next 10 years, that hasn't blunted his determination to dispense with a huge number of its employees. When the stock market closes today, Oracle will announce the casualty figures, certain to be 'several thousand' according to rumors and likely to be as many as 4,500.

Distancing itself ever further from arch-rival Microsoft, whose CEO Bill Gates tried during his keynote at CES 2005 to liken open source software development to a kind of modern-day communism, IBM will today be giving away rights - so it is announcing - to 500 of its software patents.

Did the geek-fest just finished in Las Vegas, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005, herald the return of technology and the beginning of the 'post-PC' world?

Unlike version 6.0, the latest version of Adobe Reader - 7.0, released yesterday - supports Linux and is available as a pre-release through Adobe's beta program. Linux support had previously been offered by Adobe for Acrobat Reader 5.0, but was discontinued with version 6.0.

'As we enter the new year, you should expect 2005 to be one in which we place an ever heightening focus on our dialog with the community, and the developer community in particular,' writes Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, in his first blog entry of the new year. Firefox comes in for especial praise: 'I'd put the Firefox community (enabled by the Mozilla Public License), near the top of all open source community efforts.'

Coming behind such terms as 'MP3' and 'spybot,' the word 'Linux' turns out nonetheless to have been the fifth-most-searched 'popular tech' term on Google in 2004, according to the annual Zeitgeist report by Google, Inc. - which pulls together interesting search trends and patterns based on the millions of searches conducted on Google.com over each year.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3.5M - as the wider Internet community joins the fund-raising effort.

'There are some people who are passionate about the differences between 'free software' and 'open source',' wrote Kevin Bedell earlier this year. But he was beginning to wonder if the difference matters, he added. 'I think it's time to stop dividing the community using labels. We don't need different names for the same thing.' Read the rest of his essay here, in the start of our end-of-year 'Best of 2004' round-up of articles from LinuxWorld Magazine.

'Stop saying that 'Java is not Open Source,' and realize that 'Sun's implementation is not open source.' Even better, stop saying that 'Our implementation is open source,' it is not you know that, and this is OK, we're not blaming you, we want to work with you.' As part of our end of year round-up of the Best of 2004, read Bruno Souza's answers to Sun's Onno Kluyt, who earlier this year asked what the open-sourcing of Java would make possible that people can't already do today with Java.

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this new, expanded group begins in February.

Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final 'cut' to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to twenty, not (yet) to put the twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote. Happy voting!

As a Linux desktop user himself, system administrator Chris Spencer did not relish having to clean up his wife's infected Windows PC after it had become compromised. By the time he'd solved the immediate problem, Spencer had become so fed up with spyware, trojans, viruses, and spam, that he decided it was time to write a letter to the world. It's a simple message: it's time to switch from Windows to Linux. 'The letter serves as a guide,' Spencer explains, 'taking you through some of the history of Microsoft right up to this present day.'

The boards of Sprint Corp. and Nextel Communications Inc. have both unanimously approved a 'merger of equals' transaction. Each company's shareholders will own about 50 percent of the new company. Associated Press reports say that 'Sprint Nextel also intends to spin off Sprint's local telecommunications business to shareholders following the merger.'

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

It's official. According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, and confirmed by Reuters reports from both San Francisco and Beijing, China's personal computer giant Lenovo Group Limited today signed an agreement with IBM to take over the latter's personal computer business for $1.25 billion. Lenovo will move its HQ from Beijing to New York, a change that the new Lenovo CEO - who comes from IBM - says marks the creation of the world's 'first genuinely global Chinese-American company.'

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will happen next if Big Blue truly goes ahead and sells the division to the Chinese company Lenovo.

'The OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux,' according to Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, the industry's First Blogger Extraordinary.

OpenGL (the open standard graphics library originally developed by SGI, pioneers in computer visualization) is fully supported under Linux, meaning that accelerated viewport previews, such as rotating around a textured and shaded model, and real-time or near real-time playback of scenes (as opposed to choppy, three-frames-per-second animation) is possible. These are important factors in making Linux the choice of film, effects, and gaming studios.

Linux is coming to a desktop near you. In the last year the question being asked has gone from 'Can it happen?' to 'When and how do we get there?'

While with the Java Community Process there are '900 participants out there who are happy,' according to Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz last week, he says that all is not rosy in the Linux garden. With Linux, Schwartz contends, there are companies unhappy with Linus Torvalds being the kernel gatekeeper and deciding what components are added to mainstream Linux.

'SCO...twisted my relationship with OSRM to say that it proved that I believe there are substantial IP risks in Linux.' This is FUD, Pamela Jones stresses, but it posed a dilemma: 'I kept coming back to the same thing. If my working for OSRM is doing harm by creating FUD possibilities, I need to remove that issue. Money is nice, but integrity is everything.' So saying, 'PJ' resigned from OSRM.

The computing world's First Blogger, Jonathan Schwartz - president and COO of Sun Microsystems, which Schwartz describes bullishly as 'an $11BN company trying to become a $50BN company' - and Sun's EVP, Software - John Lioacono - both envisage a world in which both Linux and Solaris co-exist happily. The enemy is not Linux, only Red Hat, they explain.

'The number one donator of open source code is (UC) Berkeley,' Sun's CEO ranted, in a rebuke to Canadian journalists last week. 'We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix before Linus Torvalds was out of diapers,' he added, as he contended fiercly that Sun is in no way being 'pressured' to open source Solaris.

Linux.SYS-CON.com's senior contributing analyst, Bill Claybrook, spoke with John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun Microsystem's Software Group about his new job, and what he has in store for Sun's Linux strategy.

Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.

The JFC/Swing API, natively precompiled on Linux for the first time, delivers measurable improvement in Java GUI performance. The Excelsior Engineering Team has ported Excelsior JET, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with an ahead-of-time compiler, to the Linux/x86 platform.

With its Novell Linux Desktop 9, says LinuxWorld's Mark Hinkle, the enterprise software maker is taking the first - albeit very early - steps towards the pervasive Linux desktop in the enterprise, 'something that is happening slowly but being watched with much anticipation on a world stage.' Novell will likely follow Red Hat's lead by looking for the low-hanging fruit in the form of UNIX workstation converts first, Hinkle reckons.

Version 1.0 of Firefox, the free browser, is officially released today, after more than 7 million people downloaded it during its 'preview release' period. The Mozilla Foundation, which inherited much of the underlying software code from Netscape, hopes Firefox will take a 10% chunk of browser market share overall, mostly from Microsoft - which currently has a 92.9% stranglehold.

In a twist that gives a whole new strength to the phrase 'a damp squib,' the much-touted pro-SCO site devoted to SCO's pending lawsuits and related issues went live yesterday. It contained just 42 words and references to two pre-existing URLs.

With Steve Ballmer's latest 'Executive E-mail', as reported yesterday, making references throughout to various studies, including Microsoft-funded ones comparing the relative TCO of Linux vs Windows, LinuxWorld feels it needs once more to draw attention to Maria Winslow's previous article debunking these kinds of studies. Here it is again in full.

Linux.SYS-CON.com's LAMP Technologies Editor, Martin C. Brown, writes an open letter to Linux.SYS-CON.com readers and the Linux community, on behalf of the editorial team for the magazine.

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't open-source or proprietary. It all depends 'upon the constituency you're serving,' Schwartz says.

Rob Pike, an early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology, and a long-serving member of the Unix team at Bell Labs before he joined Google, Inc. in 2002, has been sharing his thoughts on object-oriented development.

What goes around comes around, and accordingly the combative remarks recently of Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz about Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX have now sparked a counter-reaction from HP. The company's Asia Pacific director of business critical systems says, in an interview: 'Mr Schwartz's comments waste our customers' time and are not productive for the industry.'

'Whatever they're paid, the software engineers behind the Xandros installer are worth more,' writes Steve Suehring, after zeroing in on the version of Xandros called Open Circulation Edition as the solution to his parents' problems when they asked him to help them find a solution to a troubled computer that was running Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

So it's begun. Microsoft is admitting in its financial filings that Linux and open source are eating into its revenues. Worse for them, they say, is that what they're seeing is the tip of the iceberg.