.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.

OSNews will feature a review of the upcoming Linare Professional edition next month. For this new version Linare has developed a new KDE theme along with other updates to their distro. Screenshots.

WineHQ has an interview with Mike Hearn, the Wine and Autopackage developer (and also frequent OSNews reader). You can read 12 more interviews with Wine developers in their archives.

Bill Gates' dream of an end-to-end search tool for corporate networks remains just that: a dream, at least until the end of the decade, says News.com.

Here's a review of SuSE 9.1 Professional. The review includes several screenshots and covers the new software included with 9.1 and a performance comparison between the x86 and the AMD64 editions.

Andrew Morton, 2.6 kernel maintainer, can be forgiven if he's a little blasÉ about this week's maintenance 2.6.6 release. Morton, who said he's handling a fraction of the kernel changes these days, is mucking his way through a heavy load of more than 140 a week. "This is a large volume of changes, a much higher rate of changes than earlier kernels," Morton told SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Wednesday afternoon. "We've just got our processes sorted out better now." Read his interview here.

"Mandrakesoft would like to alert all users and the software community at large about a recent clandestine attack by proprietary interests through covert adoption of EU Software Patent Legislation. In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament to curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers on Monday, May 17, without further debate!" Read the article here.

The software giant announced plans to release the Windows Template Library (WTL) project on SourceForge under an externally created open-source license. The WTL is a lightweight windowing C++ (define) template library that allows the creation of simple Windows GUI interfaces on Windows apps.

I've been trying Linux on and off for a couple of years. My first experience with Linux was with a version of Slackware (can't remember) way back in 1996. At the time the installation was so daunting that I gave up all together. For a little background I consider myself a proficient computer user.

NeoWin has posted the roadmap for Windows Server versions. Notice in the screenshot the "Virtual Server", which probably will include an integrated runtime engine to run multiple Windows on the same machine (for similar purposes to what IBM does with Linux). Update: Neowin removed the story but the roadmap image is still up (for now). To view the image you need to manually copy/paste its URL to your browser's address bar. Direct linking won't work. Update 2: The story is back up.

Microsoft has delayed until later this year the release of Virtual PC 7, the latest version of a program that allows Windows software to run on the Macintosh.

Take a look at these new screenshots on Paul Thurott's site and also at the new .Net Show video, mainly the section between 00:52:24 and 01:19:50. This is a discussion of how XAML is being used to develop the presentation of the UI, separating it from the development of programming code and making it possible for designers to be more integral to the development of the UI itself.

The ballyhooed "slate" version of the Tablet PC platform pioneered by Microsoft looks to be a victim of a desire to fold "electronic ink" technologies into ordinary notebook PCs.

With its brand new UI, Opera has launched a new version of its web browser with integrated e-mail-, irc chat- and newsreader clients. In addition there are rss feeds, integrated searches and much more.