Sun may have streamlined its Java development process and intensified its marketing around the openess of the programming language and platform, but some smaller partners are still not happy.

Every Fedora Core release outshines the previous one, Fedora Core 4 maintains this pattern with an excellent collection of the latest open source packages and improved performance. Two areas that still need some work are out-of-the-box sound mixing and package management

Thinking on the issue of licensing and KDE, an old hymn came to the mind of OfB's Tim Butler. “As it was in the beginning, is now, And ever shall be…” Yes, the issue of licensing has been a perennial problem for the Free/Open Source desktop and he suggests its biggest licensing issue remains: the GPL. Read more at OfB.biz

When BeOS was still under active development at Be Inc, the project captured the hearts and minds of many who wanted to use a more advanced operating system. Though Be has since gone out of business, it hasn't stopped many of those same individuals from wanting to continue using the operating system. The fact that BeOS is no longer under active development has caused a handful of developers to take on the task of picking up where Be left off. Alan Wilder submitted the following editorial which analyzes the current status of three BeOS projects that are currently under development.

Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, founded NeXT, developed a powerful object oriented operating system, and saw it become Apple's modern OS. That's the short version. The long version can be found here.

Matthew Dillon has made significant progress on DragonFly's journaling code, which can now mirror partitions. Essentially all that remains now is for the "reverse journaling" work to be completed (allowing for filesystem rollback), and for stability to be increased. More information here and here

By itself, the release of OpenOffice.org for Scots Gaelic is a small event within the communities of FOSS. However, the release shows a potential for FOSS that is often overlooked, particularly by those for whom English is their native language. Specifically, FOSS has the potential to help resuscitate a declining language and thereby aid in revitalizing a disintegrating culture.

Microsoft released details on a number of projects today. One of those is Microsoft Student 2006, a suite that helps parents and students with their homework and assignments. Secondly, MS released Microsft Money 2006. In addition, MS unveiled more details on the November launch of Visual Studio, SQL Server and BizTalk Server, while also previewing the long awaited CRM update.

The head of research for Microsoft's Windows Mobile software for handheld computers, Ya-Qin Zhang, was in Taipei last week talking up the company's latest major operating system release, Windows Mobile 5.0.

HSQLDB is the leading SQL relational database engine written in Java. It has a JDBC driver and supports a rich subset of ANSI-92 SQL (BNF tree format) plus SQL 99 and 2003 enhancements. It offers a small (less than 100k in one version for applets), fast database engine which offers both in-memory and disk-based tables and supports embedded and server modes.

The FreeBSD 6-CURRENT snapshot releases in July 2005 are now available. The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has released snapshot releases of 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT to encourage people to test new features and improve the reliability.

Version 2.0 of MBSA includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems. MBSA runs on Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows XP systems and will scan for common security misconfigurations.

Debian is facing difficulties getting timely security updates to users of its Linux distribution due to lack of manpower and hardware problems.

Random numbers are utilized in many different areas, ranging from cryptography (in general) to source port and process ID randomization in some operating systems. So what is exactly a random number generator?