The second article in a series of articles about Mono. This article explains how to host and serve ASP.NET Web Applications and Web Services on Linux using XSP and Apache with the help of Mono.

Following the recent complaints regarding the lack of proper market research in the F/OSS world, KDE users suggested paying money through Bugzilla to see their features/bugfixes done, a proposal that was denied by the core KDE developers. The lengthy discussion comes down to SuSE's Waldo Bastian reply which illustrates once more the developer-centric nature of F/OSS (in contrast to the more user-centric nature of commercial products): "KDE will be able to sustain itself just fine without users, while it will not last a single day without developers. So when it comes to choosing between scaring away developers and scaring away users, the choice is rather easy actually." (2nd reply)

Special Note: My article the other day that seemed to have created a huge controversy, was not about implementing every damn thing people wanted, but only implement things that are really needed by the majority and only when these things are not coming in contrast with the general direction of the project. For example, if someone was asking Gnome to implement a "KDE-alike control panel", that should be rejected because that design is not Gnome's way. But when someone says "make Shift+Delete to delete a file on Nautilus automatically", that's a legitimate feature request to be taken under consideration, and many users would expect it to be there already (that's not my feature request btw).

It's about market research, it's about putting together things that really need to get done (that's feedback filtered by a special team, not by the developers who are already under a lot of pressure). That's what market research is about. It's not about listen to every single idiot out there and his little or big feature request. So, don't take my article out of context and don't make it about myself or specific feature requests, because it is not so. It is about evolving a project to become better by taking in some well-structured user feedback in it. That's all.

YellowTab talks about the details of the showcase of Zeta 1.0 on Cebit.

Microsoft is commencing a campaign to bring some major changes to U.S. patent system.

The first release candidate of Mandrakelinux 10.2 is now available, more info here.

It's called NeroLinux, and it's the Linux equivelant of the Nero suite. Screenshots to gaze upon. Unfortunately, it seems that it's using GTK+ 1.2.x instead of 2.x.

Here is a list of news from CeBIT regarding yellowTAB's Zeta 1.0:

Thom Holwerda has written a reply to Eugenia's editorial yesterday: "Yesterday, Eugenia, editor-in-chief of OSNews.com, published an editorial that angered the open-source software community. Even though I believe Eugenia can manage on her own just fine, I do want to support the editorial, with the use of some elaborations and clarifications."

Linux has so far failed to establish itself as a gamer's operating system of choice. Attempts to create multi-OS compatible games and current attempts to build a bridge between Windows-based games and Linux have yet to bear much fruit. How might things change in future?

Following up on our earlier mention that the Mozilla foundation was discussing the discontinuation of the Mozilla suite, they announced today that development of the project (code-name: Seamonkey) will be taken up by a community group that is being formed to pick up the baton.

Removable media devices are here to stay. Their ease of use and low cost have made them ubiquitous in the work environment – but at what price? In this article we look at the pro’s and con’s of removable media, and the steps IT managers can take to mitigate the security risks associated with them.

An Apple developer noticed a cryptic mention of the PowerPC 970MP processor while using Apple's MONster utility. Update: Everything Apple has even more evidence.

How do you design a computing system to provide continuous service and to ensure that any failures interrupting service do not result in customer safety issues or loss of customers due to dissatisfaction? Historically, system architects have taken two approaches to answer this question: building highly reliable, fail-safe systems with low probability of failure, or building mostly reliable systems with quick automated recovery.

Today we feature a mini-interview with Chris Schlaeger of SuSE and Novell. Chris answers some questions about SuSE 9.3.