The first draft of the next version of the General Public License should be released for public comments in early 2006, according to a key player in the effort to modernize the foundation of the free and open-source programming movements.

"Windows Vista is actually quite interesting for an administrator. When I first saw it on MSDN, I thought, "Over 2 Gig's. What could they have done for it to be that large without the drastic new UI?" Well, I have been looking at this thing for about a week now and I uncover more and more each time that I look into it. I am going to cover some of the enhancements that Vista will provide for administrators as well as a few neat little tidbits that I have not seen much of."

Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Novell's vice president: "(Linux on the desktop) is not the sexy story that it used to be. However, there are some very steady and irreversible trends."

Red Hat's announcement that it is adding network and system monitoring to Red Hat Network isn't that much of a surprise. More unexpected is Red Hat's decision to support Solaris with it. In other news, the Fedora Foundation has been delayed.

When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.

Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities. He argues that no company in America gets away with selling a "defective" product the way Microsoft does.

Microsoft has released six patches for its Windows operating system today. Three of them are rated critical, one important and two moderate. The three critical ones are related Internet Explorer, Print Spooler and PnP. They all three fix issues where your machine could be taken over completely.

Microsoft has begun beta testing their solution to the slow and unprotected PC dilemma: Windows OneCare. FlexBeta reviews it: "Would I personally use the Windows OneCare service? Well, it depends on how much MS is going to charge for this service. If the service will range from $10-$20 a year, then I would say it is worth it."

Microsoft on Monday signed off on the Windows Vista SDK, or software development kit, which will enable developers to create applications for the next-generation Windows release. The SDK, complete with code samples, tools and documentation will be available via MSDN and distributed at next month's PDC conference in LA. In addition, Microsoft has finally released an updated version of Messenger:Mac, bringing it up to par with its Windows brother.

The Debian Common Core Alliance hasn't even been formally announced yet at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, and already one of its prospective members, VA Linux Japan, is explaining why it isn't joining.

What is slewing? Agere Systems Engineer Sean Schultz demonstrates the LCK4013 clocking device to implement flexible processor-slewing algorithms in a PowerPC 970 environment.

Adurbe was the first of many to submit the news that openSUSE (aka SUSE 10.0 Beta 1) is now available. The roadmap also includes some interesting information.

ARSTechnica took a new 64 bit laptop out for a test run using Gentoo Linux. How did it fair? Just that: fair, as it turns out. Lightening fast, but with more cons than pros.

Many people don't know that Microsoft provides an Installable File System (IFS) SDK kit for writing filesystem drivers. This SDK provides necessary info for writing a filesystem driver to manage Linux/OS X drives from Windows 2000, XP or 2003 Server. Stephan Schreiber wrote an Ext2 IFS driver for Windows which supports Ext2 and Ext3 with read/write operations and almost everything else available under Linux except access rights, defraging and some other minor things.