Were Apple to once again start licensing its operating system to third-party 'Mac clone' hardware makers, it could reignite the OS wars. Yet whether Apple will go this route - and whether doing so would be smart - remains to be seen.

OneStat reported that Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 11.51 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 2.82 percent since April 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 85.45 percent which is 1.18 percent less as at the end of April.

"Java 5.0 offers developers some powerful new choices for developing high-performance concurrent applications. Download the IBM Java 5 Standard Edition and start your Java 5.0 coding today."

"This is the second of a two-part e-mail client comparison. In Part 1 our comparison included Outlook Express 6.0 and Thunderbird 1.0. In Part 2 we are comparing the groupware suites Outlook 2003, Evolution 2.2.1.1 and Kontact 1.1."

Ging, the only live distribution based on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, has made its way to the 0.1.0 release. Ging is now using KDE 3.4 as its desktop, and includes a mixture of KDE and GNOME applications: Konqueror, Gimp, Koffice, Gaim, and more. And for those who have tried previous versions of Ging, you'll be greatly pleased to see the boot time has decreased by a factor of ~15 times.

If Microsoft makes good on its self-destructive threat to pull Windows from the South Korean market rather than accede to local damands to un-bundle its proprietary media and IM apps, there's a safe harbour waiting in the form of blanket, country-wide licenses for the OS formerly known as Lindows. Linspire honcho Kevin Carmony has made a formal offer to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to license every computer in the realm for the bargain price of $5 million (E4.2 million).

Imendio improves Nautilus on the Novell desktop by providing support for integrated Beagle search functionality. Imendio developed the low level integration and implemented the user interface design from the specifications supplied by Novell. This has resulted in the ability for GNOME users to search for files and folders using their standard file management tool. The results are available in the Nautilus branch called nautilus-search.

A month behind schedule, Nokia starts shipping its Linux-powered 770 Internet Tablet in Europe, sporting a 4-inch 800x480 display, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 1.2, Opera 8.02 browser and more. UPDATE: Many thanks to Toni Leppänen for sending us a screenshot of Opera rendering OSNews.

On Nov. 3, the US Patent & Trademark Office revealed that Apple has filed patent application 20050246554 titled “system and method for creating tamper-resistant code.” James D. Batson is listed as the sole inventor for application 837413 originally filed in April 2004. This appears to be related to Apple’s forthcoming Tiger-Intel platform. Elsewhere, 10.4.3 for x86 is in sync with the PowerPC version.

Why would anybody want to simulate hardware when developing a device driver? This linux-based article lays out the problem and proposes an approach to solve it. Part 2 of this two-part series, "Debugging simulated hardware on Linux, Part 2: Device driver debugging." gives you a strategy for debugging the complete code flow of your drivers.

When Mark Russinovich was testing his company's security software last week, he came across a disturbing find: a Sony BMG CD he purchased from Amazon had secretly installed DRM software on his PC and used "rootkit" cloaking methods to hide it. With the story sweeping across the Net, Sony is attempting to clean up its mess.

"S3 Graphics and Fujitsu Limited today announced that Fujitsu will be producing the new range of S3 Graphics' high performance graphics processors, which leverage Fujitsu's 90 nanometer process technology to enable the realization of graphics processors that feature high speeds and industry-leading performance per watt."

"Gideon is a versatile GUI designer for GTK/C++. The goal of the project is to provide an easy-to-use RAD tool for C++ programmers who want to create multi-platform GTK-based GUI applications. Gideon is not overloaded but strives to provide all necessary features and remain 'simple and lightweight' to end user. Gideon is highly productive for experts and accessible for newcomers."

GNU Classpath now features more efficient painting for large Free Swing GUIs. Improved accessibility support. HttpURLConnection rewrite. Official CORBA VMCID assigned. Start of RMI over IIOP support. Qt4 support for OS-X. Much improved Free Swing Metal theme. Free Swing Demo includes theme switcher example (Metal, Ocean, GNU). JBoss now starts up and Jonas testsuite passes for 95%. Support for the javax.sound.midi framework and experimental DSSI and ALSA service providers. Early version of the popular StAX API. Now has 96% coverage of 1.4 API.