Collaborative Development: Software and Drugs

  Submitted by Wilbur Pan Editorial 28 Comments
Open source licensing has been known to be controversial here at OSNews. Simplistic characterizations (Communism, Virus, Utopia) abound which do nothing to argue the philosophy on its merits. A medical researcher notes that there is a parallel with open source development in one of our most important (and most capitalistic) industries: pharmaceutical research.
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Linux Servers Up, Unix Down: Survey

  Submitted by Tudy Parghel In the News 38 Comments
A new survey of server unit growth and revenue shows that last quarter 1.6 million new servers were put into action, demonstrating that the server sector of the IT economy is growing strong. Linux servers showed the most growth, while Windows servers generated the most revenue. Unix servers showed a decline. Mainframe installations also grew. Our Take: As always these numbers are based on documented sales sales of commercial products, so they should be taken with a grain of salt, as they exclude FreeBSD and Linux servers based on freely-distributed software. Nevertheless, it looks like commercial Unix is in decline, while Linux and Windows move up.
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New SkyOS Beta 6 Video

  Submitted by Kelly Rush SkyOS 50 Comments
Another video of SkyOS 5.0 beta 6 has been released. Due to popular demand, this one is a bit higher quality, and also smaller in size (25MB). A lower-quality version of the same video is also available, weighing in at 8MB. The video shows SkyOS being loaded from Grub, booting up, and being put through general use. It is roughly 6 minutes long.
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Return to Hell: Inferno 4 Available for Download

  Submitted by Timur Baysitov OS News 22 Comments
Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique features, Inferno puts an unrivalled set of tools into your hands. It runs in hosted mode for: Windows (Nt, 2000, XP), FreeBSD (x86), Irix (mips), Linux (x86), MacOSX (PPC), Solaris (sparc), and Plan 9.
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Richard Stallman talks about software patents

  Submitted by Timothy Legal 54 Comments
Speaking in London last week, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU, argued passionately against the legalisation of what he calls "software idea patents". The core of Stallman's argument is that if companies are allowed to patent software ideas, big business will ride roughshod over the smaller players, and the free software movement will be effectively strangled.
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Oracle to switch its programmers to Linux

  Submitted by Dave Linux 35 Comments
Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.
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EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003

  Submitted by Gsurface Office 36 Comments
Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review.
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ROCK Linux v2.0.1 released

  Submitted by Valentin Ziegler Linux 3 Comments
ROCK Linux 2.0.1 has been released. 2.0.1 is a maintenance release from the 2.0 stable tree updating security and many packages (KDE, GNOME, Linux, dietlibc and many more). It is now easier to compile ROCK on other distributions like SuSE or Red Hat, the tools ROCK Net and ROCK Plug have been improved and there are fixes for various architectures. For details, read the release notes.
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FreeBSD 4.10 Released

  Submitted by Matthew Baulch FreeBSD 59 Comments
FreeBSD 4.10 has been released and is now available on the master ftp. It should be showing up on mirrors shortly. Changes include the addition of USB2 support, a "dumb console" driver, a host of security fixes and many other tweaks. Userland utilities such as ifconfig, killall and rtld have also been updated. This release is very much an incremental one and contains no major new features. The current plans are for one more FreeBSD 4.X release which will be FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE. After that, it's expected that FreeBSD 5.3 release will have reached the maturity level necessary for most users to be able to migrate to 5.X.
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Mac OS X 10.3.4 Update Released

  Submitted by Jason Reid macOS 42 Comments
The 10.3.4 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" and is recommended for all users. Key enhancements include: improved file sharing and directory services for Mac (AFP), UNIX (NFS), PPTP, and wireless networks, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved disc burning and recording functionality iPods connected via USB 2.0 are now recognized by iTunes and iSync, additional FireWire audio and USB device compatibility updated Address Book, Mail, Safari, Stickies, and QuickTime applications, improved compatibility for third party applications previous standalone security updates
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Chronological & Source Oriented File Management

Graphics 66 Comments
The desktop metaphor, used in practically every modern operating system, has been around for many years and has been very successful in making computer usage easy for even the most novice users. Whereas once a user had to type commands in and navigate through directories by entering every single character in a path name, the desktop graphical user interface metaphor made it possible to perform the same actions by simply pointing to and clicking the iconic views of the various files and folders.
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SAX processing in Python

General Development 5 Comments
An application developer can choose any one of a number of strategies to read and use an XML document. In some very simple examples a script containing a number of regular expressions might do the job, but normally a more rigorous technique is required. The Simple API for XML (SAX) is one of the two key techniques for analysing and processing XML documents (the other is the more complicated Document Object Model (DOM)). Read the article here.
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