The Open Source software project OpenPKG has established the OpenPKG Foundation, a nonprofit organization providing the ideational, financial, material and manned support of OpenPKG. OpenPKG is an "instrument for deployment and maintenance of Open Source Unix software when administration crosses platform boundaries."

Extended attributes are name/value pairs that can be assigned to any file and directory. They allow for more infomation to be embedded in the filesystem when file and directory names aren't enough, like ID3 tags on mp3s. Most Linux distributions and filesystems support it, and you just need to turn it on. Linux.com has more.

Updates to come in the company's next version of the Java, code-named Mustang, include language-processing, security and networking feature.

After a long wait the new major version 0.7 update to Portable.NET has finally been released. The new version features numerous performance improvements, fixes for WinForms and Xml, and many other changes - read the full list of changes. The new release also brings a new runtime package (at this stage for Windows systems only) - at just under 2MB. More details.

Michael Robertson has given up day-to-day control of Linspire and is leaving the company in the hands of new CEO Kevin Carmony.

Mandriva, with the recent purchase of Lycoris, a U.S. Linux desktop distributor, is expanding rapidly, but analysts ask whether it's growing fast enough to compete with the major Linux vendors: Red Hat and Novell/SuSE.

Recursion is a tool not often used by imperative language developers, because it is thought to be slow and to waste space, but as the author demonstrates, there are several techniques that can be used to minimize or eliminate these problems. He introduces the concept of recursion and tackle recursive programming patterns, examining how they can be used to write provably correct programs.

RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system's GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you'll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.

Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users underutilize applications, say IT officials at companies such as The Boeing Co. and Fidelity Investments. Despite those problems, most CIOs remain unaware of a 3-year-old standard designed to help IT managers compare the usability of software products.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.

Celtix, a collaboration between Iona and ObjectWeb, is a low-end, freely available back-end integration tool that adheres to Java standards. It's an enterprise service bus (ESB) -- a standards-based integration server, which use messages to carry data between different programs.

The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

Danny Thorpe is the chief scientist at Borland Software, and was part of the original team that developed Delphi. In this interview Thorpe talks about Delphi, Kylix, and the future of working with the Mono project.

With "only a little Java code and a third-party product," Bob Reselman was able to make Windows pay attention to the goings-on of a Macintosh server. Here's how he did it.