Intel said today that it plans to release the "Foundation code" of its next-generation firmware technology -- a successor to the PC BIOS -- under the Common Public License (CPL), an open source license, later this year. More than 20 years old, the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) is the oldest software technology in PC platforms.

Sun's Schwartz isn't alone in saying that hardware will someday be "free," so long as customers sign up for multiyear software subscriptions and services contracts. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates has said he believes that, within a few years, hardware will be free and that software will be bought on a subscription basis, rather than as a one-time purchase that must be upgraded routinely.

There's been a lot of chatter about Mono, recently, varying from "its a killer dev platform!" all the way to, "the patent issues are going to destroy us all!" And yet, in all this chatter, there has been relatively little chatter about DotGNU or Portable.NET. Well, you know what they say: learning is FUNdamental...

After many requests to make SkyOS a multi-user desktop OS, implementation of the "Security Context" management has begun, and is now in working condition (however it is still a "hack" in many ways). In other news, the remaining pre-SkyOS 5.0 widgets are being updated to better fit the WindUI.

PHP enters the standalone GUI application arena with PHP-GTK. Learn the basic building blocks of PHP-GTK coding with a tutorial for first installing the language and then building and connecting its widgets, buttons, and functions.

Here are excerpts from a recent one-on-one interview with Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik.

The SoftPear Project aims to create compatibility software between the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh architecture. This is not an emulator for PowerPC Macintosh machines (like "PearPC", "Basilisk" or "UAE"), the project has more similarities to Digital's "FX!32", FreeBSD's "Linux Binary Compatbility" and "WINE" instead. Darwin/x86 or GNU/Linux will run on the PC, and the Mac OS X user interface, its libraries and all applications running on top of it will run on Darwin or GNU/Linux, using SoftPear's compatibility layer. Since today, the PowerPC to i386 recompiler works with many small test programs. The code is in the CVS.

Here are some updated notes and walkthroughs on how to update, configure and install the soon to be released AmigaOS 4.

Here's another Fedora Core 2 review (with screenshots), this time from Mad Penguin.

Among the major Linux distros, Slackware was the only one using XFree86 4.4.0 (in its -Current tree). On Sunday, Patrick Volkerding dropped XFree86 and moved to XOrg too after receiving input from his users. This change leaves XFree86 without any major distro using it.

Microsoft released the second build of Windows Longhorn at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in early May. This latest build is much more stable than the one distributed at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in 2003, and includes more features as well. In this article, you will get walked through some of the features in the most recent build of Longhorn. Update: Here is another review with many screenshots.

Robert Simmons continues his efforts to clarify confusion over the use of nested classes in Java in this week's installment, excerpted from Chapter 6 ("Nested Classes") of Hardcore Java. Robert discusses the somewhat troublesome limited-scope inner classes; one specific type within this category, known as anonymous classes; and the various problems programmers can encounter with limited-scope classes.

After complaints about the previous videos being released a video recorded from VMWare. "This is VMWare and everything runs 3-5 times slower in it than normally" Rush warns.

Gentoo announced beta level live cds and stages for ppc64. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 is PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s (such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see linuxppc64.org for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware.