A database containing more than 500 software patents and backed by big-name vendors has been posted online to foster development of litigation-free open source. Open Source Development Labs has launched its Patent Commons Project with backing from IBM - the industry's largest holder of technology patents - Computer Associates International, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

"If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a 'Get the Facts' campaign? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a 'Get the Facts' advertisement nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me. Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me wonder."

Oxygen is the new icon theme being created for KDE4. Everything started in March 2005 when a bunch of KDE contributors met in Berlin to form the Appeal Project with the goal to promote KDE related projects and to push the open source desktop to another level. Oxygen aims to bring a modern, cool and very usable and consistent icon theme, in SVG format.

Sun today released its next generation filesystem, ZFS a few minutes ago by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. You can take a look at the homepage, documentation, source code tour, and a "getting started" screencast demo.

Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server "Longhorn" SBS and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses will only be released as 64-bit.

Oracle selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.

Sun's Looking Glass 3D desktop can now be executed on any machine which supports Java Web Start.

I recently bought one of the new dual core PowerMacs. Having used the machine for a couple of weeks, I thought I would share some of my observations and feelings about it. First, let me get my biases out in the open. I have, for about four years, very happily used Linux on my desktop. Doing so has made me very comfortable with the UNIX environment in general, and with GNOME specifically. During that time, I have used OS X machines on a regular basis, so I am quite comfortable in that environment as well. Since I switched to Linux, I have not used Windows for anything more than the occasional bit of software testing or lab work, and generally feel quite uncomfortable with it. Thus, this article is very much written from the perspective of someone who finds OS X and Linux pleasing on principle. I implore the reader to make his own value judgments based on my comments.

This article looks at the impact of schema evolution on the application and walks the reader through a usage scenario to illustrate the ease of setting up a PHP environment; the ease of integrating DB2 native XML functionality with PHP applications, including Web services written in PHP and XQuery.

Even as Microsoft readies a host of new ad-supported online services to battle rivals, the software maker has been mulling a plan to offer free, ad-supported versions of some of its desktop products, CNET News.com has learned.

The second part of the extensive Linux Tips for Free Mandriva Linux 2006 review has been published, going into details about the state of Linux hardware support and compatibility, hardware configuration and software with a whole section on digital photography.

Serenity Systems offers a promotional price for eComStation 1.2 until the last of November. This will include a one year software subscription. The subscription implies also that you can participate in the betaprogram for version 2.0 and includes the version 2.0 GA release after betatesting is done.

If a certain US senator and a certain EU commissioner are to be believed, the internet is five days away from total collapse as governments are finally forced into a corner and told to agree on a framework for future Internet governance. Both are wrong, but there is a very real risk that an enormous political argument resulting in lifelong ill-will centred around the internet could developed unchecked at the WSIS Summit. The fact that it hasn’t already is effectively down to one man: Mr Khan. He was chosen as chair of Sub-Committee A during the WSIS process, and his remit includes all the most difficult and contentious elements - not just internet governance but also how the world will deal with issues such as spam and cybercrime.

Sun this week is unveiling its long-touted "Niagara" processor, the third major rollout in the past two months for the company, which is aggressively trying to separate itself from its past as a vendor focused solely on its SPARC-Solaris platform for high-end customers. The chip offers eight cores per chip running up to four instruction threads each and addresses the growing issues of energy consumption and heat generation by using only 70 watts of power.