The Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Redistributable includes everything you need to run applications built for both .NET Compact Framework v1 and v2, including the Common Language Runtime and the .NET Compact Framework class library.

The Free Software Foundation is just weeks away from announcing the roadmap and process that will govern the release of the first draft of the rewritten GNU General Public License.

Jes Hall, credible supporter of the KDE community has set up this months new SVN report which primarily targets the mature KOffice suite for KDE.

Hyperion Entertainment, creator of various Linux game ports and currently working on the next generation Amiga OS, has now unveiled their new dedicated Amiga OS 4.0 website. It showcases important features and is targeted to current and new users as well as potential OEM clients.

Oracle has just released the beta version of its free Express Edition database. This Oracle 10g Express Edition features a small download size, Windows and Linux native installers, and easy-to-use HTML DB interface to the database.

Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability? Singularity is working to answer this question by building on advances in programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system (named Singularity), with the aim of producing a more robust and dependable software platform.

"It's not often that you see a desktop operating system aimed at power users. Usually an experienced user is expected to build the operating system from the command line ala FreeBSD, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, or Linux From Scratch. Either of those options can take hours of research, config file hacking, and software downloading and installing. Mandriva Linux PowerPack Edition is quite a departure from both of those scenarios."

Microsoft on Thursday said that an investigation by Korea's antitrust watchdog could lead to the withdrawal of Windows from the country, or to delays in introducing new versions of the OS there.

Avahi on its SVN repository now sports a compatibility layer for the HOWL API/ABI and a second one for the Bonjour API/ABI. Hence users could be able to run nearly all Zeroconf-enabled software for Unix on top of Avahi.

Yet again hell freezes over. As if Apple's switch to Intel wasn't enough, Sun has announced that IBM is going to sell Solaris on its blade servers. "IBM has agreed to sell Sun's operating system with its BladeCenter servers in "the coming months," according to an IBM spokesman. This is quite the surprise given IBM's contentious relationship with Sun. IBM's services organization, however, does do a large amount of business selling Sun servers and Solaris, which may have helped seal the deal." Jonathan Schwartz announced it in his blog as well.

"Since we wrote a yarn about how opening OpenOffice was slower than a Lada full of elephants going uphill, we have had a few tips from our readers as to how to speed it up. The changes are not difficult and do seem to have an effect. We can't be certain how much this will affect the functionality but we pass these ideas on."

Herb Sutter, a software architect from Microsoft, gave a speech yesterday at In-Stat/MDR's Fall Processor Forum. Addressing a crowd mostly consisting of hardware engineers, he talked about how the software world was ill-prepared to make use of the new multicore CPUs coming from Intel and AMD.

In the business IT shop of the near future, open source software will gain equality with proprietary software, but it won't get there on its own power, said Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. "From the beginning, we have never been religious about open source. We think it's the most effective way to produce software, but we've always realized that there are vendors that will stay with closed source products. Our users live in the real world where both open source and closed source software have to work together."

Linus has released kernel 2.6.14 after two months of development. There's a big amount of changes: new features like HostAP, FUSE, the linux port of the plan9's 9P protocol, netlink connector, relayfs, securityfs, centrino's wireless drivers, support for DCCP (currently a RFC draft, PPTP, full 4 page-table support for ppc64, numa-aware slab allocator, lock-free descriptor lookup and many other things. Read the comprehensible changelog or the full changelog.