SearchEnterpriseLinux.com recently caught up with Sleepycat Software Inc. CEO Mike Olson to find out what's new with open source Berkeley DB. In these excerpts from that conversation, Olsen talks about where Berkeley DB is positioned in the marketplace, and where it's going in terms of features and functionality. Also, Olson discusses why he thinks ever-evolving attitudes toward open source will make hybrid offerings lucrative. He then runs through an interesting "thought experimentation" to show what would happen if Microsoft ever decided to embrace open source.

I decided to write this review to provide a quick inside to the new Linspire 5.0 released on March 15th, 2005. The review will determine the use of Linspire 5.0 in a SOHO (Small Office Home Office) Environment. The download was free for me since I'm a current CNR subscriber. UPDATE: Another Linspire review, and the Linspire 5.0 Live CD is now available for free download.

Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative seems like an odd mix for the company when it works openly and a clever shot across the bow of open source when it works selfishly. How can the rest of us reconcile both positions? Microsoft ex-employee Stephen Walli shares his perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative from within and without the company.

Tom Adelstein, distinguished analyst at Hiser + Adelstein in New York, says in his review today on Linux Journal that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) destkop (not Fedora)--this is the one selling in units of 10 for $2,500--"meets and exceeds" the criteria established by the Open Source Maturity Model and most surely the standards established by the legacy desktop system many organizations are finding to be unacceptably compromised and overbought.

Microsoft will rename a product it was ordered by the European Commission to offer--a version of Windows with its media player removed.

Several new features of the recently released OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta require a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Since Java's license is neither free nor open source, a small but vocal minority has responded both strongly and negatively.

The folks at Haiku have put out another newsletter, with two more articles from the series on coding Replicants, and another editorial from the quotable MJP.

The following article summarizes my experience with AMD64 and Fedora Core x86-64 in desktop systems. In a few years all new computers will be 64 bit. Microsoft and Intel are positive about the 64 bit direction, and Linux seems to be ahead of Wintel for now.

Gentoo Linux is proud to bring you the long awaited Gentoo Linux 2005.0 release.

Celebrating the 6th anniversary of MorphOS, version 1.4.4 is now available. This is the last bugfix update before the next full release, and solves many bugs and problems with the previous releases. The update is currently only available to users who have registered themselves. Fixes in the 1.4.4 release include support for large harddrives, ability to read DVDs in their entirety, important bug fixes to SFS, audio, 68k emulation, network card drivers and many other things. See releasenotes for more information.

From Expert-Zone: "SkyOS Beta 8.4 has been released to the beta team today. Important changes inlcude GI3D, screensaver support, drastically improved Ati Radeon performance, improved networking, a (hopefully) fixed RealTek driver, and much, much more. Beta team members will know where to go."

The IBM Performance Simulator for Linux on POWER is a suite of performance models based on IBM's POWER series of processors. Users of Linux on POWER will be able to examine how their code executes on various IBM POWER processors so that they can identify and avoid common performance hazards on these processors.

Michael Lotz has updated his Haiku blog with his latest progress. He got a Bash terminal to run, and he has the proof to show it. Read more.

NetBSD's Alistair Crooks has announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the NetBSD Packages Collection (aka pkgsrc). This branch includes all the updates to the thousands of existing and additions of hundreds of new applications since the hereby obsoleted pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch.Some noteworthy infrastructure changes applicable to all 13 operating systems for which pkgsrc is available include the support for multiple digests to check the integrity of the distribution files as found on the Internet (triggered by the recently-found problems with the SHA-1 algorithm) and the so-called alternates framework.