Opera 8-beta 3 was released for windows and unix with native SVG support.

Tuxmachines has a KDE 3.4 review and declares it to have "more shine and polish than ever experienced with any desktop environment in existance today."

Sun Microsystems has announced that it will be relaxing its Java license to give developers greater access to source code and an easier path in steering its future direction and contributing enhancements, but fears of forking have prevented Sun from adopting an Open Source license.

A PC Magazine story examines the conventional wisdom of Firefox's reputation for security (compared to IE) and finds that it's probably more secure, but that it's not so simple to just say so.

GNU/Linux is increasingly being seen as a viable, economical alternative to proprietary operating systems, and its market penetration, especially on servers, is increasing. To continue to grow Linux's importance as a secure, low cost kernel, much more serious programmers are needed not only to keep improving it, but to develop stable drivers and most importantly to help continue the rapid Linux march to the Desktop.

"The three largest computer makers--Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM--have started selling desktops and notebooks with so-called trusted computing hardware, which allows security-sensitive applications to lock down data to a specific PC."

In this chapter (pdf), the author defines system security, specifically for OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems, but also more generally. He looks at a variety of attacks so that you, as an administrator, will have some perspective on what you’re trying to defend against. He looks at risk response and describes how exactly you can go about securing your FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems. Also, the FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE schedule has been published.

The second beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 for AMD64 and EM64T processors is now available for testing.

Brighthand has some speculative information on Tungsten T6, Zire 73 and the Tungsten-E|2 (wish). Elsewhere, InfosyncWorld is previewing the most powerful communicator to date, T-Mobile's MDA-IV.

Xactium has published a white paper on Language Driven Development (LDD). LDD is a revolutionary approach to designing and implementing software and systems. LDD makes huge productivity gains by bridging the gap between the way developers think about their problem domain, and the languages and tools that implement the solution.

Microsoft has released an early version of Indigo, a new communications system intended to let Windows programs more easily connect to other software. Update: Videos showing Indigo.

Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Fuji Xerox, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC.

XMK - eXtreme Minimal Kernel - is a preemptive multitasking real-time operating system for embedded microcontrollers. What makes XMK different from other RTOSes is that XMK is designed to be small first, then scaled up to larger platforms. The BSD-licensed XMK is designed to be highly configurable and comes with a choice TCP/IP stacks: the tiny uIP stack or the more powerful but larger lwIP stack. XMK is available for a number of embedded platforms.

XFCE 4.2.1 was released today.