Silverlight 2 Reportedly on the Horizon
Silverlight 2 advanced to Release Candidate 0 over the weekend. Microsoft underscores that it is only for testing and “should not be used for launching Silverlight 2 applications for the general public.” But final release, covering Windows and Mac, is thought to be imminent.

Zoho Goes Salesforce Route
Zoho, the online apps player, has gone the route of Salesforce.com and opened up an online marketplace for on-demand apps developed by other people, who get all the revenues. Users can test drive, buy and install the programs via their Zoho accounts. The marketplace also takes requests. Zoho’s Creator development platform is free for up to 10 apps; it’s been upgraded to Creator 3, which lets developers create custom HTML pages with customized layouts and stateless forms.

Linux Foundation To Start New Conference
The economic auspices ain’t exactly favorable right this second but the Linux Foundation is planning a new annual technical conference called LinuxCon set for September 2009 in Portland, Oregon. It will be co-located with the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). The Linux Foundation said, “This is not a top-down, for-profit conference controlled by a commercial entity. This is for the community, by the community.” The organization has hired Craig Ross, co-founder of the Linux Symposium as part of its events and marketing staff.

Yahoo Plunging
Having left Microsoft’s $33 a share offer on the table back in May, Yahoo Thursday – a bad day all around – closed at 15.58, a new five-year low.

Ballmer Can’t See His Face in the Chrome
“If you talk to Google they’ll say it’s thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it.” – Steve Ballmer in London Wednesday as quoted by the Register.

A Little Light Editing
Seems we can expect Microsoft to invest Office with some “light editing” over the web capabilities. Office Live Workspace can currently do online storage and viewing. According to Computer Weekly, the British paper that interviewed Steve Ballmer the other day, “Office will have four modes of operation: Users can continue to buy the software and install it. They may choose to have Office streamed down from a centrally managed image of the software stored on a server or via the Internet. Or they can run Office using Microsoft Terminal Services, from a thin client device, which provides the windows GUI over an Internet connection. We will rewrite Office to work in a browser,” he said. “The product is likely to work a bit like the way Outlook Web Access provides Internet Explorer users with access to Microsoft Exchange.”

White House Asked To Create an IP Czar
The US Congress had trouble passing the “save the world” legislation the White House asked for this week, but it didn’t seem to have any trouble sending the White House a bill the White House didn’t want – and may veto – that would establish a so-called Senate-confirmed IP czar or Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator with cabinet-level chevrons, who’s supposed to chair an inter-agency committee and fight a tougher fight against counterfeiting and piracy worldwide.

In the opinion of the Justice Department and the Commerce Department the congressional creation of such a post “constitutes a legislative intrusion into the internal structure and composition of the president’s administration” and is “objectionable on constitutional separation of powers grounds.”

It is also supposed to create unnecessary bureaucracy and undermine existing IP enforcement efforts.

Before the bill – the House version is called the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act or PRO-IP – got passed, the White House was able to get Congress to drop the part where the DOJ was supposed to sue copyright and trademark infringers. It does however increase the penalties for infringement.

The proposed inter-agency committee, which is supposed to come up with a strategic plan, would include the DOJ, the Commerce Department, the State Department, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of Management and the Budget, the Office of the US Trade Representative and the US Copyright Office. The IP czar couldn’t force any one of them to act however.