Q&A: Shai Agassi, the president of SAP’s product and technology group, discusses balancing its competition and co-opetition with the likes of IBM and Microsoft. “We will compete like gentlemen. We’ll come in with swords, not bombs and guns, and fence,” Agassi explains in this interview. Quoteworthy: Something tells me that the kind of ‘compatibility’ Sun wants to preserve in the Java community is the kind that keeps all those mobile device licensees compatible with Sun’s bottom line — not to mention all its other licensees, such as BEA and IBM. The full scope of the fees Sun receives from these has never been disclosed. — Neil McAllister. Sun still not answering the call to open source Java. Hardware: Oliver Rist reviews Acer’s Aspire 9500, a machine that he concludes is “lighter than most 17-inch behemoths, but isn’t really meant to be a traveler.” Thanks to the excellent price, this all-in-one multimedia, work and gaming notebook, is right at the top of his list. The news beat: A Yahoo IM worm installs a bogus browser and plays screeching music on infected PCs. Bugs are busy plaguing a Windows Live Mail beta, so much so that Microsoft pushed the e-mail service back to an earlier version. And Microsoft says that a new iteration of Commerce Server will be available in August that will hook into back-end applications more easily than previous versions. Software Development