Software developers will soon have their chance to smoke what Sun Microsystems is rolling. At the JavaOne conference next month, Sun will release a developer kit for its Project Looking Glass 3-D software. This will be the first time Sun has let anyone outside of the company fiddle with that code, and the move confirms that Project Looking Glass is heading toward a general release on Linux and Solaris.

Open Source database vendor MySQL AB released its latest incremental release last week (version 4.0.20), but according to some in the community, it still doesn't address what some say serious licensing concerns. Its license changed from LGPL to GPL (in order to not allow commercial/closed applications to link with its free version, but to instead push to them buy a license). Unfortunately, this license change comes to conflict with other OSS licenses, like PHP's (and maybe Perl's too).

MandrakeSoft released the Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official version through BitTorrent.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a few new developer tools but otherwise played a greatest-hits set before an audience of about 10,000 information technology professionals at the TechEd conference.

ThinkSecret reports some new details about Apple reorganization in two divisions (Macintosh and iPod). Longtime hardware developer Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, had rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president and now he will lead iPod software development. Mr Sakoman was involved in the Mac II development and was the main guy behind the creation of the Newton. At Be, he designed the first generation H0bbit-based BeBox (the one that had 5 AT&T chips), back in the early days of Be. He later left and when he came back became Be's CTO and then PalmSource's exec.

The current version of MorphOS 1.5 has been presented at PUSH. From the slides of a presentation given at the show you can see these improvements. There is also a video (12 MB) available.