Perens said the legal arrangement between Sun and Microsoft was "creepy." The agreement, he added, "essentially says that Sun will not stand together with the open source developers who contributed to their own product." Sun spokesperson Russ Castronovo, however, said Perens "can make whatever call he wants to make."

With GNOME 2.8 out the door, work on the next version, 2.10, is progressing nicely. There is some new and exciting software, and it's looking to be pretty sweet. There are still many things to be done, though, and if you want to help, there's a pretty good list with things just waiting to be done by you. Maybe even more important are the Nautilus bugs (over 1300 of them) and so its project leader is asking the community to get to work and fix as many as they can.

Solaris Kernel Developer Eric Schrock is bloging more about the Solaris vs. Linux issue and linux kernel moneky Greg is answering on his blog. More here. Elsewhere, Sun is looking into making OOo's XML format an ISO standard and at license options toward opening the Java source code; here are more thoughts on those, by engineer JBQ.

Microsoft's Windows platform chief Jim Allchin last week told 50 top-tier OEMs to think more like custom-system builders. During Microsoft's annual OEM executive summit at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Allchin, group vice president of platforms, advised the vendors to shift development resources into creating computing "experiences" through which they can differentiate their offerings, rather than beating each other up mainly on price and spewing out product specs.

Unununium Operating Engine got its 0.1 official release on Sunday. This release boots with a minimal shell and... a python interpreter! You can download a floppy image or an ISO from the official website.

The long awaited Syllable 0.5.4 is now available. This release includes a completly new Desktop and Registrar server which adds important functionality to Syllable.