Melbourne Bennett has written an editorial on his opinions regarding Linux & Online communities, detailing how and why you should be giving back to them. Read the full opinion piece here.

Cooperation between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft probably won't drastically alter the information technology landscape, analysts and IT pros say, but it should eliminate some integration headaches.

Multicasting is the ability to transmit a single stream to multiple subscribers at the same time. Unlike conventional streaming, it does not need one stream per recipient. Instead, there is one stream on any one segment of the network on which there is a subscriber. It is the task of the routers to track subscriptions and to create copies only on an as-needed basis. Unlike broadcasting, segments on which there are no subscribers do not receive the stream. Read the article at FreshMeat.

"There is an unfortunate holdover in the BeOS API which has been depricated in the next version of Zeta: BLooper::PostMessage(). This method has a few special cases which make it dangerous to play with, at least one of which is detailed in the BeBook's entry for it. But judging from numerous bits of code I have seen, no one really reads the BeBook that closely anyway." Read the dev article here. Update: Ex-Be engineer Dianne Hackborn replied to the topic.

Video and new screenshots of SkyOS 5.0-beta6 available for download. (MPG, 352x240, ~7min). In other news, the Diff-Filesystem is almost finished. The Diff-Filesystem is a layer between the VFS and any disk's file system. Elsewhere, the Syllable team released experimental new USB drivers.

Pawel Dawidek has been working on GEOM Gate since Aug. of last year, adding incremental features and making requests for testing as required. Earlier this month the code was committed to -current.

Following Paul Ferrill's article "What is Mono and why should you care?" on DevChannel.org, find an all-around Linux article by Dee-Ann LeBlanc "And Then There's Mono", while yesterday the LUGRadio had a show dedicated to the controversial nature of Mono.

Sun Microsystems, once a great enterprise computer company, has been shrinking. Sun is also shrinking in other ways, such as the enterprise-only part, by entering to the consumer markets. Sun has getting slow at some things, such as copying off competitors.

It's looking more like the next-generation Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, will get key orchestration features derived from BizTalk Server. Microsoft is working on workflow and orchestration technology, called the Windows Orchestration Engine (WinOE), for the Longhorn/Orcas time frame, several sources familiar with the company's plans said. The technology manages how processes or software services interact in distributed systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft will 'componentize' both the client and server versions of Windows Longhorn, its next-generation platform.

Gnome 2.6.1 was made available, a bugfix version which was pending release for about a week. Update: Michael Hall replies to Petreley's review of Gnome 2.6.

Apple Computer seeded its developers this week with a new build of Mac OS X 10.3.4 Panther, labeled Mac OS X 10.3.4 build 7H56.

In a multi-user, multi-process operating system, files are continually being created, modified, and deleted, often by apparently unrelated processes. This means that any software that needs to keep aware of what is happening in a filesystem needs to employ a file monitoring technique. Monitoring, in this sense, means keeping a watch over a set of files, waiting for any of them to change. Read the article at DevChannel.

Join MSDN TV for a glimpse at the newest release from the patterns & practices team. In this episode they discuss memory management, COM Interop and the Dispose pattern.

.NET developer John Carroll wrote two articles on F/OSS claiming that the proprietary model is what drives the economy (article 1, article 2) while Rebecca Reid wrote her own piece "Open-source development models fall flat". What these articles don't discuss is the "fully open standards" model, which is a model Sun Microsystems is particularly fond of, and in a way it falls in between of "closed" and "open". Here's a reply from Sun engineer Glynn Foster to the second article.