Microsoft and Sun have a very suspect legal settlement going on possibly relating to openoffice.org customers. More info here, here, and here. Update: Looks like this isn't quite the controversy everyone thought. Newforge has an update.

Gnome Desktop Environment 2.8 was released today, on schedule. Including a slew of new features and the much anticipated Evolution 2.0, Gnome 2.8 achieves several milestones. Release notes can be found here, and a number of screenshots here. In other Gnome news, a new Gnome news site, gnomejournal.org, was announced today.

A while ago there was an article Mozilla's web site mentioning that they are switching their browser component to a new one (at the time called Phoenix). It was a simple and fast browser so I started using it instead of Mozilla. Mozilla Firefox uses the same engine as Mozilla. The difference is in the user interface as well as some features.

With pro features like 16-bit per channel support, camera RAW and the healing brush, Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 3.0 today. Digital photo users in particular now have the choice of this powerful application that has little competition in its range, be it the free Gimp or the similarly priced PaintShopPro. Picture Window Pro is the only photo application that can outfeature Elements (and depending on the case, even Photoshop itself sometimes). Picture Window Pro is one of the favorite applications of photography professionals and it's at the same price range as Elements, 90 USD.

Formerly known as SilverOS (previously featured on OSnews), FireFly is a commercially supported BSD system based on DragonFlyBSD. You can read the FireFly whitepaper here.

Amidst pressure from several avenues, Microsoft was forced to cut features from its new Windows emulation software in order to deliver G5 compatibility without further delays.

"The UserLinux Project has placed a downloadable installation mini-CD in beta test. The CD is only 4.5 megabytes in size, and downloads the rest of the system during the installation." LinuxBeta.com's screenshot slideshow shows UserLinux in action.

Apple is holding their European Expo and nowadays being a Mac owner thought I'd go along. If Apple has such a pitiful market share then you'd expect it to be a small show with little software and few visitors. Er No, this was the complete opposite. Pictures of the Expo included.

Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday. Also, Jonathan Schwartz showed 32-Way UltraSPARC chip that runs Solaris 10.

ReactOS 0.2.4 has been released, and is downloadable from sourceforge.

New builds of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger operating system are beginning to surface with dozens of previously unpublicized features.

When Novell's Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users. The desktop combines functionality from Ximian and SuSE Linux, both acquired by Novell last year. Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of R&D for desktop development, told vnunet.com that this was what enterprise customers wanted.

Over the past couple of decades Microsoft have, through fair means or foul taken over the vast majority of the desktop computer business. This business however is no longer subject to the stellar growth rates of the past and Microsoft now need to find a new way to keep their profits up.

The Contiki operating system is a multi-tasking operating system with full TCP/IP support. Contiki is designed for memory contrained devices ranging from tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers to old 8-bit homecomputers like the Commodore 64. Here is a screenshot of Contiki rendering the mobile/text-mode version of OSNews (double sized, C64 only does 320x200 in this mode).