The battle about Software Patents in Europe seemed as good as lost. The Council of Ministers voted for a directive that basically slapped the European Parliament in the face because they shamelessly put aside a democratic decision taken by the European Parliament. And even though the Parliament still has a second reading where it will have to go trough a lot of trouble to repair the damage done by the Council, it is a serious matter that the Council of Ministers seems to have no idea how sloppy their directive is. It does allow general, broad softwarepatents, practically without restrictions even though several explanations by the Ministers say they don't.

Read the Sun Java Desktop System review at eWEEK with much info on the product.

One year after it surprised rivals and partners by jumping into the anti-virus market, Microsoft still has no clear AV strategy, and users are still hanging on to the promise of integrated Windows protection.

Based on the restored demand for enterprise servers that began late last year, researchers at IDC are predicting strong growth for server systems through 2008, especially for Linux & Windows-based boxes.

Christoph Schittko discusses various techniques for diagnosing common problems that occur when converting XML to objects and vice versa with XML Serialization technology in the .NET Framework.

From ZDNet: A Danish developer of the popular FreeBSD operating system, who was seeking sponsorship to support him while he works on the filesystem and disk-I/O subsystem, says he has been successful in his search (OSNews was among the first to post about it). Donations came in from firms as far afield as Siberia. The funding is significant for those who develop and use FreeBSD because it illustrates that the users are willing to support full-time development at least of parts of the OS.