First Monday (the peer reviewed journal on the Internet) has an article about open source software, and whether it’s the first nail in the coffin of intellectual property as we know it.

A former Oracle employee (with financial backing from Larry Ellison) has founded a service to provide small business accounting over the Internet for a monthly fee. It will be interesting to see whether businesses will do their books online over the Web, and how this affects the PC-centric application model. It will also be interesting to see whether it actually works, as with any Internet startup, I have my doubts.

How can you write a story on EBay, which has millions of users, and quote an unnamed source about how pissed off they are that the site is down? Aren’t there people who are willing to identify themselves that are mad at EBay? I think James Glave has written so many site hack stories that he’s forgotten the value of sources that actually identify themselves.

OK, I’ll grant that the guy stole, but let the punishment fit the crime.

Jon Carroll has written a funny column today about bad customer service.

CamWorld has been redesigned. I like it.

Anyone care to speculate on how high Red Hat shares will go during their IPO before their catastrophic plunge? I think that the existence of this company, and problems like this spell Red Hat’s doom, or at least insure that they’ll never take over the world.

I read today that the censorware product Bess blocks The Fray, along with many other useful (and completely benign) sites. Unfortunately, it does an absolutely awful job of blocking access to porn. See the problem? I don’t want my tax dollars to get spent on paying to have this crap installed in schools.

The great John Dvorak-Janelle Brown nondebate about whether iBooks are girly continued on TV this week. (Well, it continued on ZDTV, which is sort of like TV, right?) In her article, Janelle decries getting dragged down into a polarizing debate more concerned with drawing ratings than presenting the issues of the day in a logical, nuanced manner. I guess ZDTV is TV after all.

This week, the Economist takes a look at stock options; specifically at whether granting boatloads of options to executives is really good for companies. Readers in a hurry might just want to read the leader instead of the entire article.