Salon has finally published its story on Eazel. They plan on making money by offering a subscription service that allows users to easily find software they need and keep their software up to date.

I didn’t know that Al Gore is a death penalty supporter. I’m very strongly against the death penalty, and I have to say that I’m quite disappointed in the Vice President. I credit him for being honest enough to admit that enforcing the death penalty means that innocent people will die. The one thing that came across to me in the course of reading the interview is that Al Gore is an unabashed political pragmatist. If the Republicans take soft money, he’s going to take soft money. He’s not going to raise tax rates on the rich, and he’s willing to compromise on the Endangered Species Act. Pretty boring, but effective in Washington, I guess. Too bad about the death penalty, but it’s not like I’m going to vote for George Bush, Jr. or John McCain.

Charles Connell’s article What the Linux Community Needs to Grok makes some interesting points, but I’d like to correct him on a few issues. First of all, he somehow seems to believe that using open source software for mission critical tasks is something new, and that the community is naive about it. While it may be true that many Linux hackers are newbies when it comes to solving these problems, there are tons of open source applications that see heavy use in mission critical settings. Apache, BIND (which runs nearly all DNS servers, gcc, and sendmail all immediately come to mind. The idea that open source software is something new that doesn’t know how to deal with business is a persistent myth. My second point is that even if Linux achieves dominance and is replaced, it still will have made an incredible impact. If Linux ever becomes dominant, then there’s little chance it will ever be replaced by something proprietary and closed, and will thus have effected the most important change in computing history.

News.com is proclaiming the death of Usenet because MSN is dropping their newsfeed. If anything, this will probably make Usenet healthier. I’m sure that hardcore newsniks would probably like AOL to drop their newsfeed as well. Usenet is probably the best example of how a forum can become worthless when it grows too quickly. As Yogi Berra said, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”

Hot on the heels of the introduction to RFCs that I mentioned yesterday, Webmonkey has published RTFM: A Guide to Online Research, by rc3.org friend Steve Champeon. It explains all of the relevant Internet standards bodies and what they publish. It’s a really excellent article, and I offer it with my standard advice: even if you don’t need to read it, someone you know does.

I’m definitely going to save a link to Paul Boutin’s introduction to RFCs over at sendmail.net. I get tired of explaining them to people.

It’s been awhile, but David Boies is back to abusing Microsoft’s defense attorneys in the antitrust case. During the long break, Microsoft came up with a version of the Chewbacca defense (WAV file) based on copyright, but Judge Jackson was having none of it.

So Dell is offering Web hosting now. Interestingly, they’re offering shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and colocation. More interesting, however, is the fact that every level of hosting they offer includes a Linux option. Their cheapest hosting solution runs exclusively on Linux, and at every level of dedicated hosting, it’s cheaper to go with Linux than NT.

Salon has an article about an interesting plan to thwart investigators looking for DeCSS sites on the Web. Mr. Bad has created another application named DeCSS — this one’s used to removed Cascading Style Sheets from HTML documents. He’s hoping that lots of people will mirror his new, admittedly useless, program thereby making it difficult for investigators to find sites that host the real DeCSS software. Of course, if his plan takes off, how will people who want to play DVDs under Linux find the software they need?

Palm is finally shipping a color handheld, the IIIc. It looks nice, but I’ll stick with my mono IIIx for now. The unit has built in rechargable batteries, like the Palm V, so even though it burns through batteries pretty rapidly, you can just put it on the cradle to recharge it.