Attendees at a Harvard conference on The Internet and Society say the Internet has neither empowered individuals nor helped small companies compete with larger firms. Companies that spend the most on advertising get the most business. Half of all e-tailers may go out of business within a year. However, Tim Berners-Lee and Esther Dyson pointed out that quality sites do exist, and that Web users just need to find them. [Boston Globe Online, 01Jun00. Edupage.]

UChicago's Open Channel website will distribute open-source software -- including university products -- organized by discipline. The site will also offer user guidance to scholarly software and fee-base technical support for some of the more commercial programs. [Chronicle of Higher Ed, 12May00. Edupage.]

ASPCode.net tracks free Application Service Provider (ASP) applications and source code. Subscribe to their weekly ASPCode newsletter at . [, NEW-LIST, 29Feb00.]

Over 900K websites now offer illegal software, according to the Business Software Alliance. That's up from 100K three years ago. [USA Today, 22Sep99. Edupage.]

----- "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily. When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking." -- Larry Wall, developer of the open-source Perl language. -----