With Autopackage officially declared stable, there is now an easy way for developers to create up to date, easy installable packages. Expect an Autopackage article later this week at OSNews.

There's an interview up with the creator of mach_inject, the OSS libraries that lets many apps override functions in any running process to change its behavior. It is very long, and touches on everything from compilers on the PowerPC to Apple's difficulties in breaking into the business market and why WebObjects is dying.

After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the -current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package and this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware.

From a very personal and revealing interview with ex-Sun executive Danese Cooper: "The prevailing open source wisdom is that Linux is going to win, and anything you do that doesn't directly influence Linux in a positive way is not a good thing. We spoke to Linus Torvalds about this once, the OpenSolaris team, and he expressed interest in the project as a way for him to be able to get the Open Source community around Linux to move to a higher level, you know, to match some of the advantages that are in Solaris. We were talking about a virtuous cycle where Solaris gets better because of the places where Linux is better than Solaris now. Like especially for one and two processor performance, and Linux gets better because of the places where Solaris does better now. The beneficiary is the consumer."

Thomas Hazlett, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, looks at the various competitive pressures (Apple, Firefox) facing Microsoft and wonders whether its era of dominance might be on the wane in an editorial at the Financial Times.

While XQuery was designed for querying large document bases, it serves as a fine tool for transforming simple documents as well. Whether simplifying complex pages for display on small screens, or extracting elements from multiple pages to aggregate them together on a home-grown portal, or simply extracting data from Web pages because there's no other programmatic way to get the data. This article shows how XQuery offers a fast and easy way to scrape HTML pages for the data you need.