There is so much controversy surrounding the Open Source General Public License (GPL) - especially with regard to the SCO v IBM case - that it makes a sense to review the simple basic legal points involved, writes Bloor Research president Robin Bloor.

Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See here for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.

LinuxDevCenter takes a look at the Sony PlayStation 2 and add-ons that make it into a Linux computer. Elsewhere, the effort to port Linux to the GameCube -- a longtime goal for many hackers -- finally came to fruition in December 2003 at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany. Read about it at the LinuxDevCenter.

After their recent video codec shootout article ExtremeTech now offers an audio codec one. Find out which technologies are the best for each job.

This paper provides detailed discussion regarding the algorithm, implementation, kernel tunables, and messages you are likely to see on a system running the appropriate kernel updates.

In many pro-Linux circles, it's a given that The SCO Group Inc. can't possibly win in court. Obviously, SCO disagrees.

Dan Gilmor writes for the Mercury News: "It looks like I'm going to have to reconsider something I'd been taking for granted -- that Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, was a non-starter in the operating systems race. While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up. One reason I'm rethinking this long-held conviction is in my lap. I'm writing this column on a nearly 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad, a computer that was a marvel of technology in its time but is now fairly old stuff. Linux has rejuvenated this machine."

The Io Language, has been ported to Syllable by Kas de Vos. Here is a screenshot.

The Zero Install system makes software installation not merely easy, but unnecessary. Users run their applications directly from the Internet from the software author's pages. Caching makes this as fast as running a normal application after the first time, and allows off-line use.

This tutorial will show you how to create custom widgets using PyQt.

Now the C# compiler will properly flag errors in CLS-compliance while it gets Basic support. Marek Safar has been working for a few months on adding support to the C# Mono compiler to support the various checks required by the Common Language Specification (CLS).

InnoTek has updated its OS/2 Kit for Java product to the most current 1.4.2_04 level.

Principles are fine things to have, but only if you can afford them. With its stock declared a 'junk bond' and finishing a terrible quarter, Silicon Valley's leading Microsoft antagonist Sun Microsystems has now decided it can't, says Andrew Orlowski for TheRegister.

Doug Swain takes a look at the Gentoo Linux installation and offers a quicker guide than the available online documentation of the distro.