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

Java 62 Comments
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.
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GTK+ 2.4.2 Released

GTK+ 16 Comments
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.
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Celebrating Ten Years of BeOS

Haiku 118 Comments
PalmSource ain't gonna make a birthday party for BeOS but it would only be fair if the rest of us, users, remember the "media OS" as the innovative operating system of the late '90s, still used by some. Depending on how you count, it was early 1994 when the first BeOS version left the Be, Inc. offices and headed toward Be's "partners" and "developers". It was 1994 when the word started to spread around among geeks about this "new and exciting" OS and soon, external devs got access to it.
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Microsoft offering free OS for ‘cold’ servers

Windows 6 Comments
In what could be a sign of things to come, Microsoft Corp. is offering a small sweetener to its Software Assurance licensing program. From this week the company will allow servers used for disaster recovery to carry copies of its Windows server software at no extra cost. Update: Elsewhere, IBM this week relaxed stringent requirements for running the highest-end version of its Windows server software, effectively lowering the overall price 30 percent in some cases and potentially expanding the pool of interested customers.
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An Apple in Academia

Apple 52 Comments
It's all Waterloo-Maple's fault, really: if they had maintained a version of their computer algebra system for the Amiga, I wouldn't have found it necessary to switch to Mac. Or maybe it's Commodore's fault for mismanaging themselves into oblivion; I don't know. Either way, I became painfully aware three years ago that my little Amiga would no longer satisfy my computing needs. I needed a new home computer.
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IBM J2EE vs. Microsoft .Net Whitepaper

  Submitted by Amanda Reidy Rumors 32 Comments
A new white paper positioning the IBM J2EE Middleware Platform vs. the Microsoft .NET Platform is now available and reflects IBM's overall marketing plan to aggressively combat Microsoft. While it will be useful to many, its primary target is CEOs, CFOs, and other high-level decision makers at ISV companies who are focused on the mid-market and looking to make a platform/partnering choice in the next 12 months. The outcome of the J2EE vs. .NET decision by ISVs is critical to IBM's ongoing success and relevance in the midmarket arena, traditionally a Microsoft stronghold.
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Making An Operating System Faster

General Development 21 Comments
The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it is rather difficult to establish an objective performance metric for software as complex as an operating system: a "faster OS" is a very subjective, context dependent phrase. Read the article at KernelThread.
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