The software industry is very fearful of open source software, but this fear is irrational. The software industry can quite easily combat OSS as similar challenges have been met successfully in other industries. Part II of "Why Good Ideas Fail" discusses the future evolution of the software industry, and the implications of this evolution for innovative ideas.

MySQL has taken a step to mend a rift in the open-source world by updating a controversial licensing provision that had broken a close tie between the MySQL database and another software package.

The PDF online magazine Technoids issued v5 with a number of articles including an interview with BeOS MAX 3.1 people, 20 years of Macintosh and a review of the latest Zeta (all in German).

Today we feature a very interesting interview with well known *BSD hacker Matthew Dillon over his latest project, DragonFly BSD (also known for his Linux kernel contributions, Amiga C compiler hacking back in the day and the Backplane distributed database). Matthew discusses DragonFly's status, goals, the overall BSD platform, innovation, and more. Update: Added one more question at the end of the Q&A.

This release of Subversion fixes about 25 small bugs discovered during the six-week code freeze for 1.0.

DotGNU's Portable.Net is a portable suite of tools (including a C# compiler, assembler, and runtime engine). In this release, the C to IL bytecode compiler is now in good shape, and many bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms and System.Xml.

Even if Sun prefers to retain control over a stragic asset like Java, it should take a hard look at the components of Java that are related to platform-breadth and market-reach rather than to profitability, and slough these off to small, reactive Open Source efforts. javax.swing.text.html would be a good component to start the experiment with, says Rick Jelliffe. Check out the comments on that page too.

Download the second beta of Gnome 2.6, while you can read the announcement and changelog here.

David Mohring has written an open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide, asking for relief from Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics.

Preliminary support for Interix, a UNIX-like environment for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, has been added to NetBSD's Packages Collection. The support is still new and incomplete, but it is now possible to bootstrap pkgsrc and install simple packages. Interix is part of Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX package. See Todd Vierling's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.

I have completely skipped Mandrake Linux 9.2 because previous versions of Mandrake Linux were not exactly that "glamorous". However, I wanted to try out the new Linux kernel 2.6.x on my new Linare PC and so I decided to give Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition a spin. Here are some quick thoughts on it on how MandrakeSoft has earned back my trust with this release. Update: MadPenguin reviews it too. UPDATE 2: More bugs, more bugs. I have changed the rating of the software because as much as I keep using it, I find more and more and more bugs all over the place. MandrakeSoft should REALLY sit down and think hard about their QA department (I have already emailed them about it).

The Mono project has a clear goal: to become the first-choice platform for Linux software development. Considering that Mono is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, that goal might sound particularly audacious to many Linux fans, says Edd Dumbill. In the meantime it was announced today that the SPARC port of the Mono JIT engine has been completed.

"If you don't have oodles of usability people, up front design by a good designer provides a lot more bang for buck than using that same designer to do usability tests" says Red Hat's Seth Nickell.

Conscious, Emotional machines, will we ever see them? How far can technology go and can technology be applied to us? In this final part I wonder into the realm of Science Fiction. Then, to conclude the series I come back down to Earth to speculate on the features we'll see in any radical new platform that appears. Update: Never let it be said I ignore my errors, in the interests of clarity and with apologies to Extreme Programmers I have revised Part 1.