The first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 will be unveiled next week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but that milestone is likely to be more of a beginning than an ending. The release of the draft will kick off months of debate over the content and exact wording of the license that will govern much open-source software for the foreseeable future.

"One of the big concerns of anyone considering moving to Windows Vista is 'How many of my applications will work on Windows Vista?' We have spent a lot of time trying to answer that very question for our company so I will share with you some of the common problem areas we found for applications to help give you an idea of what applications might have problems for you."

DragonFly BSD 1.4 has been released. "The two biggest user-visible changes in this release are a major revamping of libc, ctype, and wchar support, as well as changes made in the kernel which require us to bump the major rev for all of our shared libraries, and the introduction of PKGSRC to manage third party applications. DragonFly no longer supports the FreeBSD PORTS system." Get it here.

The CES ends today, yet we have heard nothing from the Atom Chip corporation-- the company who's claims generated a lot of disbelief six months ago. They promised to show their exceptional technology at CES-- yet no news has surfaced. Is it now safe to call their claims outright lies and deceit? Update: More, including photos, here.

Speculations are very strong just a few days before the Tuesday Steve Jobs keynote. Take the poll and choose from some of the most talked-about rumors around, or leave a comment if you have another opinion as to what Apple has in store for us.

Microsoft plans to market several versions of Vista but will distribute all of the OS bits with every product shipped so users can easily unlock and step up to more full-featured versions using electronic keys, sources said.

The study described in the following article was done by Mirosoft, so run to the kitchen and get some grains of salt. "Microsoft's Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively "put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything." Do with the results as you please, but the topic is interesting nonetheless. What are your experiences?

DualCor will ship its dual-CPU PDA-PC combo in March, the privately held start-up revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today. The company's cPC combines a Windows Mobile 5.0 system running on a 400MHz Intel PXA263 with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition running on a 1.5GHz VIA C7-M processor. Both processors take separate partitions of the machine's 1GB of DDR 2 SDRAM and 1GB of NAND Flash but share the 40GB hard drive, allowing documents created by one OS to be accessed by the other.

As expected, Google on Friday announced several new products. "Google Pack, a bundle of software from Google and other companies that was announced by the Web giant on Friday, is aimed squarely at consumers. But Google's goal is to be the front end for everything people do on a computer, and enterprise use is not far off, analysts and solution providers said." Google also enters the video-on-demand business: "Google announced a service Friday that will let people rent or buy downloadable videos online, including classic and contemporary CBS television shows and NBA basketball games."

"Linux follows the philosophy that every thing is a file. For example, a keyboard, monitor, mouse, printer... You name it and it is classified as a file in Linux. Each of these pieces of hardware have got unique file descriptors associated with it. Now this nomenclature has got its own advantages. The main one being you can use all the common command line tools you have in Linux to send, receive or manipulate data with these devices."

"The EuroBSDCon Conference is the largest BSD event in Europe, attracting more than 220 attendees from 27 different countries. November's 2005 conference, the fourth EuroBSDCon, took place in the University of Basel, Switzerland. Here are some highlights."

The latest version of Portable OpenOffice.org, an edition of the open source office suite that fits on a USB stick, includes a number of updates such as full support for Windows 2000 and launchers for each OpenOffice.org application. Portable OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 includes all the applications included in OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 and takes up only 144MB of storage space, compared to the 300MB of disk space required by the full version of the office suite. But 144MB is still too big, considering that many USB sticks only store 256MB, according to Gary Barnett, a research director at analyst firm Ovum.

Massachusetts has named an acting chief information officer, and the state is 'on track' to use OpenDocument-based desktop software next year, a spokesman for the commonwealth's governor said Thursday. Bethann Pepoli has been appointed acting CIO of the state's Information Technology Division by Thomas Trimarco, the state's secretary of administration and finance, according to Eric Fehrnstrom, communications director at Gov. Mitt Romney's office.

"As you might expect of such complex and successful software, Lotus Notes and Domino share a long and rich history. In some respects, this history mirrors the evolution of the computing industry itself-the development and widespread adoption of PCs, networks, graphical user interfaces, communication and collaboration software, and the Web. Notes and Domino have been there nearly every step of the way, influencing (and being influenced by) all these critical developments. This article briefly retraces the history of Notes and Domino, starting with the earliest conceptual and development stages and continuing through major feature releases."