Zeta to Get New Media Player and Native Codecs

yellowTAB is currently revamping the media services in Zeta by adding new native CODECs to the Media Kit, and developing a brand new native media player application, code named Champion. This will add native support for common media formats that cannot be currently played in the BeOS platform, as well as high-performance video streaming capabilities to Zeta. Also, TuneTracker will include Zeta in its CD from now on. Elsewhere, a USB mass storage driver for BeOS 5 was released.

Linux certificate puts kernel developers in impossible position

A patent expert has attacked the Open Source Community's latest initiative to document the provenance of code contributed to the Linux kernel so that proving its origins will be quicker and easier in the face of litigation. The Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.0 asserts that the developer submitting the code which it covers has either written or modified that code according to their rights to do so, or it is being submitted, unchanged, on behalf of someone else who asserts these rights.

Open Letter to Sun: The Case for Open-Sourcing Java

This was a letter I recently wrote to Sun's head of global communications, Russ Castronovo, after reading his interview with Chuck Talk on orangecrate.com, and then reading the ongoing pro-/anti-Mono arguments over at PlanetGnome. Now that Sun seems to be on the brink of making the decision to open-source Java (or not to), I thought it would be an appropriate time to take action.

GTK+ 2.4.2 Released

GTK+ and GLib 2.4.2 are released. This is a bug fix release and is source and binary compatible with 2.4.0. There are a considerable number of fixes in this release, especially in the areas of GtkFileChooser, GtkComboBox and GtkEntryCompletion. Also, a problem on Solaris has been fixed.