This article explores the concept of commodification in a historical context while also seeking to discover lessons that might be applied to contemporary open source business efforts. I also wrote a similar editorial a few weeks ago.

This whitepaper provides an changes that you may need to make to a customized or specialized Linux installation in order to use it with the Linux 2.6 kernel, building upon the configuration file and administrative updates that were touched upon in the third article in this series.

Morphos-news.de reports that MorphOS 1.4.2 is now available. To get it login to the beta2ftp server and download the boot.img to update your MorphOS 1.4.1 installation.

Aicas announced its hard realtime Java technology, JamaicaVM, for the QNX Neutrino RTOS v6.3. Additionally QNX Software Systems released a sneak peek at the QNX Momentics development suite version 6.3 and the OS behind it while they put up for download a free 89-page guide to porting legacy code to the QNX Neutrino RTOS.

FlexBeta has a quick look at the recent Longhorn Build 4053 with screenshots.

Distrowatch reports that a port of Fedora Core 1 to the AMD64 architecture has been released: "The port of Fedora Core 1 to AMD64 is now available. Everyone is encouraged to download it and participate by either submitting bugs or submitting fixes. All bugs, requests for enhancements, and fixes should be submitted via Bugzilla. Please keep up to date via the Update methods." Read the full announcement and the release notes for more information.

If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail (paid in cpu cycles that we rent to others).

This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X. An important goal of the discussion is to better understand the reasons, and if possible, the rationale behind Mac OS X and its important components. This, in turn, will be helpful in understanding and appreciating the system as it is today.

Imagine not one, but two, three or more separate operating systems loaded on a single PC, each of which functions as a separate OS on a separate physical machine. VMware Workstation 4 does just that by creating and managing one or more virtual machines on a single, physical host PC. Every virtual machine is a full-fledged virtual PC, where you can install a guest operating system of your choice, with network configuration and a full suite of PC software. Read the article at TomsHardware.

Some software developers may find their applications no longer work on machines using Microsoft Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which will be released later this year.

All of us who are in computers know that at present we are using enhanced software products for applications, which our predecessors never thought about or used. Why do we need a word processor when a simple text file does the same job of documentation.

The first release of the Mono port of SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, is up, here are the release notes (additional screenshots 1, 2). There are no binaries yet for it, but gtksourceview-sharp rpms have been put onto the Mono Red Carpet channel. You will also need the latest version of Mono built with ICU support and the latest GTK#.

This guide in PDF provides prescriptive guidance to enable Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to be used for authentication and as an identity and authorization data store within heterogeneous Microsoft Windows and UNIX environments.

Sun Microsystems Inc is open to relinquishing stewardship of Java to a neutral third party, but is apparently against releasing the language to open source under GPL.