The software and server company published very early versions of the source code of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 6.0 on its Web site so Java programmers could better see and participate in its development, said Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice-president. Java 6 is due in the first half of 2006, Hamilton said.

A report has predicted that more than one in seven ERP servers will be running the open-source operating system by 2007. Companies running ERP systems are increasingly choosing the Linux operating system, rather than Windows or Unix, according to a report published on Friday.

For this article, I chose to take a slightly different approach than the standard "Linux distribution review". As I have written not just one, but two reviews of Fedora Core 2 for this site, I want to base my review of Fedora Core 3 on my experiences with its direct predecessor. Update: FC3 shots here.

This study compares the real-time capabilities of various Linux kernels. It was part of a project to upgrade the control software in water-wave generators at research institutions around the world. The results of the study were used by Akamina for the selection of a new RTOS for the control system upgrade of Canada's largest hydraulics and coastal engineering laboratory, the National Research Council Canadian Hydraulics Centre in Ottawa.

FreeVMS is an OpenVMS-like operating system which can run on several architectures like i386, PPC, Alpha, and many others. CONFIG_VMS can now execute on ODS-2. GRUB with ODS-2 support was added, and diskimage builder was updated accordingly. The kernel can also be booted from ODS-2. Partition support for both ODS-2 and Ext2 was improved. Directory creation functionality for ODS-2 was implemented. In CONFIG_VMS, a partition related bug with RMS Ext2 read and write was fixed. A problem in which Init set 000000.dir fat ffbyte to length when it should be 0 was fixed.

You can try the new Solaris 10 Online on SPARC or Opteron/x86 platform at freely (registration req.)

JetBrains IDEA developer, Sergey Dmitriev, talks future programming paradigms and the problems with today's programming models.

I admit that I'm a geek. I use Linux. I use Solaris. I use FreeBSD. At times, I use Windows. And without a doubt, I download and try almost every Linux distribution when they come out. Over the last few years, I've tried all of the RedHat/Fedora releases, 2 different Lindows/Linspire releases, Mandrake, Gentoo, Xandros, Suse, Ubuntu, and the list goes on.

With a relatively hostile environment that has pitted proprietary software against open source as a backdrop, the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GNU General Public License, is working on the first revamp to the license in 13 years.

Programmers new to the Mac platform, as well as newbie Mac coders often ask (or complain) about available development tools.

A survey of 200 iPod users in the United States showed that 6 percent of former PC users bought a Mac after buying an iPod. Another 7 percent said they intend to buy a Mac within the next 12 months.

Client and server implementations of the 9P and 9P2000 distributed file system protocols for Unix-based operating systems. Download the latest from here.

I would like to announce the arrival of a newsletter for the ReactOS operating system. It covers and summarizes the activities on IRC, the mailing lists, and CVS. Splash will come out on a roughly bi-weekly basis, sometimes weekly.

As promised earlier this month, ISO images of the recently released Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 are now available for free download from Terra Soft's FTP site and mirrors, as well as via BitTorrent.