Yes. Send an e-mail to listserv@main.naf.cz, saying either "subscribe arachne" or "unsubscribe arachne".
Yes. xChaos software licensed full source code of Arachne to Caldera UK. People from Caldera added animated GIFs and Novell dialer. They don't have exclusive access to Arachne in any way, so you can choose from two DOS browsers. xChaos software welcomes Caldera's DOS and Linux activities.
NAF - Network and Fiction is network company running the web server www.naf.cz. xChaos software was not able to handle growing demand for support and information, so NAF became also main distributor of Arachne.
We are planning to port Arachne to Linux (X11 or maybe new graphical standard called GGI), which will unfortunately require rewriting it a lot, while it is not clear how to get any money from it. Once Arachne is rewritten to be more portable, it shouldn't be problem to compile it on any other platform.
We are planning to add Hercules and CGA support later. However, our ability to support nonstandard hardware is limited. We suggest you to buy some second-hand SVGA card with 512 or more kB of memory anyway.
There's a list of methods how to speed it up. Our dialer is not able to deal with some extremely non-standard modem configurations. And finally, xChaos software is not responsible for any included or recommended PPP dialer: we only wrote user friendly HTML setup screens for all popular PPP dialers for DOS.