Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) - A White House technology adviser and a fund-raiser for Attorney General John Ashcroft sought to help a key Microsoft rival who was trying to scuttle the antitrust settlement between the government and the software giant, according to court records and interviews. In a sworn deposition, technology executive James Barksdale described how he tried to reach Ashcroft by contacting E. Floyd Kvamme, director of President Bush's Office of Science and Technology late last year. Kvamme, in turn, promised to speak with Kevin Compton of Saratoga, Calif., a partner in Kvamme's venture capital firm and a fund-raiser when Ashcroft...

Sources inside AOL and Red Hat say AOL is making a major internal switch to Linux, and the long-rumored AOL default browser switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla -- or at least Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine -- is well under way, but AOL will probably not offer an AOL client for Linux in the forseeable future. According to several Red Hat and AOL employees who spoke to NewsForge but asked us not to use their names, recent negotiations between AOL and Red Hat that led to rumors about AOL considering a Red Hat acquisition were really negotiations for support...