Linux has only recently begun to regain credibility in the financial markets since its speculative debut. However, its licensing model, hefty competition, and lack of maturity still worry investors. Companies such as Red Hat, long past its 1999 speculative highs, are slowly gaining ground while other Linux companies, such as Linspire, are planning initial public offerings. Is Linux finally becoming a viable alternative to proprietary operating systems, or is this rise simply a byproduct of a mini-tech bubble?

OpenBSD celebrated release 3.5 on 1 May 2004. In honor of this release, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers of OpenBSD's PF, a powerful and flexible packet filtering interface. This is the second half of an interview. Elsewhere, the DaemonNews Ezine was released with new articles.

VG.NET 1.7 has recently been released, offering a full-fledged, API-stable vector-graphics solution for .NET - not three years down the road and exclusively for Avalon, but available today, hosted on any .NET platform that supports GDI+ (VG.NET is 100% managed code).

The first Release Candidate (RC1) for eComStation 1.2 is currently in closed testing. Plans call for the release of 1.2 later this month. This would include Entry, Application Pack 1.2, Subscription Services products, and the Open Beta of Serenity Virtual Station.

OpenVMS, Hewlett-Packard's high-end operating system, got its first European outing this week on the company's high-end Intel-based SuperDome server.

If Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 was about bringing Web services into the enterprise Java fold, then J2EE 1.5 is all about ease of development in the enterprise Java space.

From internetnews.com: "Microsoft's technology evangelist is offering "friendly" suggestions to Mozilla open source browser groups and calling for more discussion about how the two sides can benefit from upcoming enhancements in Longhorn, the next version of Windows." Read more at internetnews.com. Here's a really interesting excerpt from Robert Scoble's blog.

Rob Enderle visits Intel's Lab to see what's cooking in the fab. And what he finds should give IBM and Apple reason to grab their torches and pitchforks, he claims.

Apple filed its quarterly report (SEC form 10-Q) with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday. In the filing, which is available as a 65-page PDF document, Apple discloses several details on net sales, its retail stores, job cuts, iTunes and more.

The next version of Windows will sport some fancy, three-dimensional graphics, but for those with an older video card (as in the case of Mac OS X on non-QuartzExtreme capable gfx cards), Longhorn will look a lot like Windows 2000. Elsewhere, Microsoft seeks to merge Flash & hard drive storage.

Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday. Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner, recommended that enterprises boost spending on patch management and intrusion prevention software to keep ahead of worms, which are appearing ever sooner after vulnerabilities in Windows are disclosed.

After reading the recent article by a user who has switched to a Mac I thought I'd write of my experience. I've was used a Mac from October 2002 to March 2004. It was provided to me when I started working for another PPC manufacturer but they are not really in the same market and in any case don't make laptops.

The portable operating-system interface for Unix, 16-bit computing and the OS/2 subsystem will 'be lost' along with some legacy transport protocols, product manager for the Windows 64-bit client says.

If you're coming from a different programming background, one feature of XSLT (all versions) may seem especially difficult to grasp. I'm not referring to the XML-based syntax; once you get a feel for it, it is surprisingly transparent (even if bulky). For many novices, much more puzzling is XSLT's lack of an assignment operator. Read the article at DevChannel.