Sun Microsystems is trying to persuade Hewlett-Packard to move its HP-UX Unix customers over to Sun's Solaris, Sun President/COO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. But HP is not interested, an HP representative said. During his presentation at the conference and in a subsequent interview, Schwartz said Sun has proposed merging the road maps of HP-UX and Solaris. And on a related note, HP will offer complete SUSE Linux server packages.

It seems like flee-in-Apple's-fur, cracker 'Maxxuss', has succeeded in cracking Mac OS 10.4.4 for Intel. "We were just about to hunker down and wait through the cold winter and a wet spring until we saw some results on the OS X 10.4.4 for Intel hacking efforts, but it looks like we're getting a little Valentines present from 'Maxxuss' who has already broken through Apple's heightened security that is present in their shipping version of the OS. It's just a preliminary release, not all hardware is supported and it requires a bit of futzing around to get it to work, but seeing as we weren't expecting this kind of breakthrough this early, we really can't complain."

Apple released the fifth version for Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. A number of bugs are fixed and upgrade is recommended for all PPC, x86 and Server OSX users. This update focuses on iChat's video conferencing, Safari's rendering engine, usability of Dashboard widgets, iDisk syncing, and much more. It's available as a stand-alone download (delta | combo), and through Software Update.

On Feb. 15, Microsoft will release to testers first beta releases of three Office Live small-business subscription services. Office Live is a family of add-on services designed to complement Microsoft Office, the same way that the growing stable of Windows Live services will extend Microsoft Windows. The LiveSide.Net Web site on Feb. 13 posted details on Office Live Beta 1's availability, as well as some screen shots of the pending Office Live beta releases. The Office Live beta bits will be downloadable by testers starting at 6 a.m. PST Feb. 15, Microsoft officials said.

As one can already see by the activity of the mailing lists, Haiku seems to be moving forward in a serious pace. Studio-33 takes a look at the latest build (many screenshots included, boys and girls), and concludes: "I was pretty impressed by this build. Deskbar and espacially Tracker seemed much more stable and Haiku didn't crash every four or five minutes like previous builds I tested. Work on Haiku seems to go pretty fast lately and more and more pieces are getting finished. Offcourse Haiku still needs a lot of work to become somewhat useable, but it is definately going in the right direction."

"Every time I've ever spoken with Mark about DLS to ask him if Ubuntu would come to the show and participate, he says the same thing - Ubuntu is hesitant to come to 'The Linspire show'. Now, Mark has never actually been to the Desktop Linux Summit personally, and try as I have to explain to him the history of the show, I can tell he's just not buying it - it seems that there is nothing I can say to change his view that the Summit is and has always been a 'Linspire show'. If Mark Shuttleworth is misinformed, I'm sure others are misinformed as well. So, rather than dodge the controversy that arose four years ago during the birth of the first DLS, I would like to address it head on."