"Eiffel Software today announced that the latest version of its cross-platform IDE EiffelStudio is now available under dual licensing, enabling users to choose between a license for commercial development and a license for open source development. Eiffel Software's dual licensing model is based on the principle of fair exchange. Users who write commercial proprietary software must purchase the corresponding licenses and may freely choose how to distribute their software. Users who donate their source code to the open source community can use the open source version and must distribute their software under the same license." The sourcecode is available via SVN and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The One Laptop Per Child organization will use Linux on its inexpensive machines, but the operating system suffers the same code bloat as Windows, the project's leader said Tuesday. My Take: A few months ago I blogged about this as if I knew what was coming. I still believe that the $100-laptop project should be targetted as an embedded application and so Qtopia with ARM is a better/cheaper/faster solution than Fedora/RHEL with x86. If Palm is able to sell the Zire 22 at $99 and still make lots of profit (yes, they do), then it is probably feasible to manufacture and market my suggestion at $100.

Someone who claims to have an NDA with Apple, has revealed the new features MacOS 10.5, Leopard, will have. He claims all these details are already available on other websites, hence he can list them without having to worry. The most interesting bit: Leopard will ask during install if you want to install Vista or Linux on a seperate partition so you can run them simultaneously (a heavy Mac is required). Please note that the authenticity of these words is debatable at best. My take: There have been numerous rumours that Apple is going to add virtualization support to Leopard, so that might be true. And I expect Microsoft to support this. Why? Because of this, and because a Windows install equals money to MS. Whether on a Mac or not.

Bill Gates himself writes about how he works in his office. "It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft (Research) was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle. If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity."

"The delay of Windows Vista means that computers sold this holiday season will predominantly be running Windows XP. Microsoft hopes that Vista won't be far from the minds of new computer buyers, however, as they are pushing a new 'stickering' campaign aimed at informing customers that most of these machines are capable of handling Vista. The basics of the announcement were covered last week by Matt on M-Dollar, so I won't repeat them here. Instead, I'd like to address a couple of concerns with the program, and highlight some little known facts about the new OS." Update: A new CTP release of Vista is on its way.

In a rare discussion on the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation. "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit."

OSDL coders are looking to solve one of Linux's greatest problems for developers: the battle between GNOME and KDE. The Open Source Developer Labs is previewing work that attempts to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE, the two competing graphical interfaces most widely used with Linux. The effort, called Project Portland, began showing its first software tools on Tuesday in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces.

A review of RR64 Linux, a distribution based on Gentoo with Xgl included. "While I will probably never move completely away from the Debian system, I think I have found a winner in RR64. I get along quite nicely with the Gentoo portage system, and I have found the Gentoo community extremely helpful and the documentation both on the DVD and online to be extensive and answer all questions I have had very clearly and concisely."

"Novell today announced the beta program for Mono 1.2, which now includes support for Microsoft Windows.Forms to more easily port .NET client-side applications to Linux. Other enhancements in this beta release include additional platform and hardware support, virtual machine upgrades, and enhanced Java support, as well as significant performance, memory consumption and stability improvements." And on a related note, Novell also released the code to the server side of iFolder.

"Evans Data today announced the results of Developers' Choice - IDEs, a study in which over 700 developers ranked the features and capabilities of nine top IDEs that they currently use. IBM's Rational Application Developer edged past Borland's JBuilder to receive the highest overall relative scores against top IDEs including Eclipse, Macromedia Studio MX, and Oracle Developer Suite. IDEs were ranked in 13 distinct categories including compiler/interpreter, debugger, editor, compiler performance, performance of resulting apps, ease of use, sample apps, and libraries/frameworks."

A company called eSoft was recently granted a patent for "systems and methods for selecting, ordering, installing, managing, updating, and if necessary, uninstalling software applications." Their first step has been to sue their major competitors, but it appears that online software update systems of all kinds could be covered by this patent, which would mean that Windows Update, OS X Software Update, Redhat's up2date, and YUM, among others, would be infringing.

"Nowadays I collect, store, and listen to music mostly on digital media, so I thought I'd find myself a Linux audio player that does all the things I need it to do. Little did I know how many options I had! After evaluating more than a dozen applications, I've found three that I feel provide the best mix of features and performance." Read more at Linux.com.

VMware is taking another step to try to maintain its market dominance. VMware announced today that it is opening its virtual machine disk format specification to allow other vendors to use it in their products.

"The 10.4.6 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies: login and authentication in a variety of network environments; file access and byte range locking with AFP file sharing; network access when using proxy server automatic configuration files; searching iWork '06 and Microsoft Office documents with Spotlight; creating Automator workflows for iPhoto 6; synchronizing contacts and calendars to .Mac and mobile phones; and much more." There's a delta update for 10.4.5, and a combo update for 10.4.0-10.4.5. Easiest method is to just use Software Update.