Today, we roll out the OSNews Meta Blog. We are trying something new. Whereas OSNews proper is moderated and logged, the OSNews Meta Blog is here solely to discuss the site, without bombing an unrelated news thread. It's unmoderated, anonymous, and, perhaps best of all.... XHTML compliant. For details, please visit this post.

SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 is ready for testing. Improvements and updates over alpha 1 include KDE 3.5 Beta 2, GNOME 2.11.1 (according to the announcement that is; 2.12.1 is more likely), smartpm, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 RC3. This alpha is available for x86, x86-64 (AMD64/EM64T), and PowerPC. Download locations, including torrents, are listed in the release announcement.

While Microsoft has no current plan to apply for Open Source Initiative approval of the new licenses that will govern its Shared Source projects going forward, the software maker has not ruled this out as a possibility going forward.

Lacking permission from the Debian project to call itself Debian anything, the Debian Common Core Alliance has agreed to change its name to the recursive DCC Alliance. Ian Murdock responds to the matter.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments. Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However, it is distinguished by the following features: Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems; Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, and more." Download: Europe|UK|other.

Eben Moglen, the general counsel for the Free Software foundation, discusses issues surrounding the GPL 3 licence in this mini-interview. Moglen also talks about his feelings on the Creative Commons licence set, and how the kernel developers may approach the new GPL.

VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.

Although open source software comes with lofty (and sometime altruistic) ambitions, some developers worry that the model just doesn't present a practical plan for the future of the software industry. Shawn Shell argues that proprietary software is here to stay — for a lot of good reasons. Why should you bother with looking at open source software though? Isn't it safer to stick with Microsoft and the other big corporate software designers? David Chisnall helps us to distinguish between proprietary (sometimes referred to as "predatory") software and its open source counterparts.

For a conventional software tester, an Extreme Programming project may be an intimidating challenge. Testers often find that they're not welcome on XP projects, but Jonathan Kohl shares how skilled testing can overcome such difficulties. Jonathan discusses lessons he learned from working on two different XP project teams, only one of which initially welcomed his testing and feedback.

Steve Ballmer wants you to know one thing: He never throws chairs. Elsewhere, here is a mini-review of the Windows Vista Build 5231, discussing interface, WMP, tabbed browsing and more.

"We are pleased to announce the availability of the first full release candidate for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and X11R7. This release marks the completion of the development cycle for the modular source tree. We have tagged both the monolithic and modular trees and have prepared tarballs for you to test. We have updated the schedule on the release plan page."

During yet another press event, Apple introduced new PowerMacs and PowerBooks as well as a new photo application called Aperture. The fastest new PowerMac holds two dual-core G5 processors at 2.5Ghz each, while the two lower-end models have one dual-core G5 at 2.0 or 2.3Ghz. The dual-core G5s have 1MB L2 cache per core. The 15" and 17" PowerBooks now have 1440x960 and 1680x1050 resolutions. Aperture is post-production photo software built for professional photographers.

"We sat here watching Ben Goodger doing a talk about Firefox at EuroOSCON, it got me thinking about this concept of taking a huge and bloated project (such as Netscape) and cutting it down to the core and releasing a spin-off project such as Firefox. With all of the recent discussion and email I have been receiving triggered from Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org, it makes sense if this process was drilled into OpenOffice.org." In addition, OpenOffice is nearing the 50 million downloads.

"This year marks the 20th anniversary since Children's BBC began using the familiar format of sitting a presenter behind a live camera in a small continuity suite, dubbed the 'Broom Cupboard'. Prior to this move in September 1985, and for several years after, the BBC used Acorn kit to produce their broadcast graphics and animations.For a happy trip down a long memory lane, we caught up with Chris Poole, who produced the early ident graphics using a BBC B and later an Archimedes which ran RISC OS."