FreeBSD's Security officer Colin Percival seeks sponsorship. This has happened before with other FreeBSD contributors. "I'm hoping to raise $15000 Canadian (about US$13000) to pay me to work full-time on FreeBSD for 16 weeks over the summer. This will allow me to devote more time to my role as FreeBSD Security Officer, perform a complete overhaul of FreeBSD Update, and make some significant improvements to Portsnap."

"Novell's new SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is beating Microsoft Vista to market by months, and the Xen virtualization features in the upcoming SuSE Enterprise Server are right on target. In short, Novell's Linux roadmap looks great. Now, can Novell get business customers to travel its road?"

The Nexenta team has released alpha 4. This is a bug fix release. Nexenta OS alpha 4 is based on Open Solaris build 36, utilizes Debian's apt-get package system, and has GNOME 2.12 as its default desktop. Both a live CD as well as an install CD are available. Visit the getting started page, check out the changelog, and download.

"This time it's patents that will ensure the downfall of GNU/Linux and with it, the entire world of open source. But before hanging up your certified geek propeller-hat and retraining as a dental hygienist, you might want to consider the following brief history of Microsoft's use of fear, uncertainty, and doubt as a weapon against GNU/Linux." Hopelessly pro-everything-that-is-Linux, but an interesting overview of Microsoft's approach to Linux over the years nonetheless. Elsewhere, the Guardian looks at the challanges Microsoft is currently facing.

"The advantage of embedded Linux is that it's a royalty-free, open source, compact solution that provides a strong foundation for an ever-growing base of applications to run on. Linux is a fully functional operating system, with support for a variety of file-handling protocols, network protocols, devices - a very important requirement in embedded systems because of the need to 'compute anywhere, anytime'. It is modular in nature and is easy to slim down by removing utility programs, tools, and other system services that are not needed in an embedded environment."

"Peer into the behavior of an application with truss. When an application doesn't work as expected, you typically look at application and system logs as a first recourse. But when logs don't help, UNIX provides a powerful set of tools that you can use to trace the application while it runs. Armed with these traces and a bit of knowledge about UNIX, you can easily solve your application problems."

The KOffice team is proud to announce the release candidate of KOffice 1.5. Read the full announcement, the changelog, and download the release. In this release, the OASIS OpenDocument support is improved even more, especially in KChart. Krita has gotten faster and more stable and KFormula has a new maintainer who has really come up to speed quickly. Across the board all applications have been improved and polished. Or so they say, in any case.

A new version of Kaffe has been released. Kaffe is a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine, plus the associated class libraries needed to provide a Java runtime environment. The Kaffe virtual machine is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Some benchmarks are available too.

Today, we have something special on OSNews, something that's actually a first-timer on OSNews. Already common on other websites, we today hand the microphone to you, so you can ask questions to someone from the tech industry. Read on for the details!

GeekPatrol uses their GeekBench tool to compare Windows XP and OSX, both running on MacBook Pros. "Overall, there are areas where the Windows XP MacBook Pro was faster, areas where the Mac OS X MacBook Pro was faster, and areas where they were both roughly the same. Looking at these results, it’s hard to say which configuration comes out on top, although I think you could make a convincing argument for Windows XP (with Visual C++) being a bit faster overall than Mac OS X (with GCC)."

The European Commission said on Wednesday it told Microsoft that it had competition worries about the firm's new operating system, Vista, another antitrust concern that the software giant must answer in Europe. "We are concerned about the possibility that the next Vista operating system will include various elements which are currently available separately from Microsoft or other companies," Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd said. More here. My take: Enough already. Seriously.

Bill Atkinson was Apple Computer's main developer of the user interface that first appeared on the Lisa and later on the Mac. A passionate photographer, Atkinson had the foresight in the late '70s and early '80s to document his UI work for Apple in a series of Polaroids. The photos were published by another Mac pioneer, Andy Hertzfeld, in his book 'Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made'. Through Hertzfeld, Atkinson permitted CNET News.com to reprint the photos. Similar shots here.

Ars takes a quick look at GNOME 2.14. "The GNOME team recently announced another excellent release. GNOME 2.14 includes a variety of spiffy enhancements, bug fixes, improvements, and new features that make it the best GNOME desktop environment ever. Already available in Ubuntu Dapper and the recently released Fedora Core 5, GNOME 2.14 awaits your use and abuse. I've poked and prodded it and now I'm ready to talk about it."

In a stunning move, BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium, announced that Apple Computer has joined up as a member. BAPCo is responsible for the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites we use at PC Magazine Labs for testing PCs. BAPCo also produces the webserver test WEBmark. BAPCo members include AMD, Intel, Transmeta, ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Ziff Davis Media, CNET, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Seagate, VNU, Atheros, and ARCintuition.