Eric writes in: "The Prospero project is the recepient of the 2000 Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award. The award was presented on May 9th by the Medical Library Association at the association's annual meeting, held in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The award is sponsored by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).

In a presentation about Prospero given later in the conference, Eric Schnell publicly thanked ALL of the developers who have contributed to the project."

Wooh-hooh! Congratulations Eric, and Eric, and everyone else involved. You really earned this one with your commitment to supporting and improving Prospero for the whole community. If anyone still questions whether free software could really have an impact in libraries, tell them all about Eric et al. Btw the MLA Rogers Award page will be updated soon I hope... :)

SilverPlatter responded on SPIN-L to a brief thread (just click around for it) asking if SP had considered the free software model. The answer, to paraphrase, was "we thought about it, but it wouldn't work with our business model." Understandable... but hey, there are other business models out there, too: just ask Cygnus, RedHat, Caldera...

from the press release: "SilverPlatter is pleased to announce that ERL Database Server version 4.05 for Linux, is now in general release... SilverPlatter Information has responded to many customer requests by developing ERL Dbserver on the Linux platform. This release is fully year 2000 compliant, runs on RedHat v6 for Intel and incorporates the latest software improvements for statistics retrieval and searching." good news... and you can get it here.

The coming service announced in Netprints: the next phase in the evolution of biomedical publishing (BMJ 1999;319:1515-1616) is now up and running at clinmed.netprints.org. Warning: useless warning page approaching...

Ben writes in: "In an e-mail response to my suggestion that epixtech (formerly Ameritech Library Services) consider open source for their next product, epixtech President Lana Porter said that they have indeed been considering open source:

'We have certainly discussed this possibility about some of our products and will continue to do so. Some products certainly seem to be better candidates for this than others and we will solicit input from customers such as you when we determine which products would be good candidates for this... We try to develop quality products that provide solutions to help customers do their jobs better and having them in in an open source environment would add to their value I am sure.'

It's encouraging to see that they're thinking about the benefits of open source."

anon writes in: "I saw a cool new company that promises to bring open source to the publishing world, specifically the text book world... What do you think?" See openmindpublishing.com for more. A chief rule (as told by ESR) of open source is that you must present a plausible promise of working code; I can't find anything on their site to evaluate so it looks like vapor to me. Give us at least one textbook to review before more press releases...