The Internet went all abuzz last week when a report by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posited that Microsoft was keeping open its legal options against licensees of OpenOffice.org. Commonly known as OpenOffice, the software is a freely downloadable open source productivity suite that constitutes a significant portion of Sun's commercially offered StarOffice. It also exemplifies the threat that the open-source movement poses to Microsoft.

Martin Taylor recently marked his one-year anniversary as Microsoft Corp.'s chief Linux strategist. Taylor, whose official title is general manager of platform strategy, recently spoke with Computerworld about his first year in that job. This is Part 2 of the interview. Part 1 is also available online.

Microsoft's Xbox team has been assigned to the development of Virtual PC's native graphics card support, sources tell AppleInsider.

The Intel C++ Compiler is a full fledged C/ C++ compiler and debugger suite. This 8.1 release features support for the new Intel Extended Memory 64 technology and integration with Eclipse IDE.

This release has 1650 binary packages available now. This includes binaries for KDE 3.1.4 and GNOME 2.4. The package manager has been improved and now includes a versatile system for handling variants. More documentation has been added featuring translations into Japanese, French, and Simpl. Chinese.

"Novell has lifted the lid on enhancements integrated into the next major release of Mono, its development platform for enabling Microsoft .Net applications to run unchanged on Linux. The forthcoming version, due to ship next March, will implement a native Visual Basic (VB.Net) compiler and Windows Forms (WinForms)." Read more at vnunet.com.

Fedora Core 3 Test2 was released today, and so here's a chance to preview the software. I've been eager to try out Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3, so I tried to install them on my Core 2 box, which resulted in a severe package dependency crisis, so since Test 2 was released today I figured I would just reformat and install it for kicks, and to get my KDE 3.3. Screenshots from FC3-T2 can be found here.

From ActiveWin: Daniel C. Robbins is a 3D User Interface Designer working at Microsoft Research. His current projects include visual presentation of large information spaces and scenarios for intelligent environments. View and experience research prototypes that span back to the 1990s, yet may give a glimpse of what's in store for future Microsoft products.

IBM's new semantic technology enables companies to make better use of their information by enabling software to be more intelligent, adaptive, and efficient.

After a month of the KDE 3.3 release, userinstinct has put together a usability study with user testing.

Sun is expected to unveil a collection of new products and services at its quarterly systems release event in New York. Sun executives will take the stage in New York this week to display Solaris 10, the next version of that operating environment; clarify the vision for the product; and define the rationale for moving it to open source. Elsewhere: "I get confused by a lot of Sun's technology advertising and marketing," writes Roger Strukhoff. But there are numerous reasons not to give up on Sun, he argues.

Some say the Browser Wars are over. They couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft won Round One, and Round Two is just beginning, with the impending release of Firefox 1.0. Who'll be the ultimate victor? Only time will tell. But ExtremeTech thinks that Firefox has a decent shot at taking the crown... especially since Microsoft seems to have taken its eye off the browser ball.

Linux is expected to make steady gains over the next few years on the desktop PCs of small businesses, according to a new report. The report, released Monday by The Yankee Group, says Linux has minimal presence among business with 500 employees or fewer, with not even 1 percent of such companies currently using Linux on desktop PCs. That will change, however, as companies replace aging equipment running outdated software.

Cuting throught the hype: RSS feeds can improve a range of corporate communications. But for many, it's a technology in need of a vendor.