Information has been regarded as property in Western society for hundreds of years, but can it really be owned? If you’re a movie studio, a software company, or a record label, the answer has to be "yes." Russell Peterson submitted the following editorial contribution to osViews, which proposes that information can be too valuable to be privately owned, and discusses open source as the means of bringing it into public ownership.

Agfa Monotype, a global provider of fonts and font technologies, has licensed fonts to Red Hat. Red Hat has licensed Agfa Monotype's Albany, Cumberland and Thorndale typeface families, and a font that conforms to the Unicode 3.2 specification, Unicode's latest international character encoding standard for multilingual digital information exchange. Red Hat is licensing these high quality fonts through the Red Hat Network, mostly targeting Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers.

This Security Update, available OSX's preference pane, delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. This update includes the following components: Apache 1.3, Classic, Mail, Safari, Windows File Sharing.

In the original "Ten Ways To Make Windows XP Run Better" Langa covered many fundamental tweaks and adjustments that can help you to move XP out of its bland and sometimes limiting default settings and into a configuration that better fits your own personal needs, preferences, and work style. Fred Langa now examines free add-ons and utilities that further refine and improve your operating system.

Lately, there has been a "Why linux isn't ready for the desktop" article every 3 days. Most of the time, these articles originate from a lack of understanding or acceptance of the open source system. I'd like to try to address some of the common arguments against linux here, and try to help people understand why linux probably won't be on your desktop for a while.

If you take Apple at its word, the company has no long-term strategy of aiming its products beyond its traditional markets. That message was repeated every which way I posed the question to Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, when we sat down at the 2004 Macworld. In the context of an Xserve road map, I asked Rubinstein whether Apple built products with a target audience in mind. The answer was no. “It was our customers who asked us to build these products,” Rubinstein said. It seems video editors in particular wanted more performance, he added.

For many systems administrators, choosing and managing a VPN system is often quite a headache. Inflexible clients, servers, and protocols often prevent VPN's from being smoothly integrated into an already functioning network. The fact that many VPN clients are installed on users' home computers, well out of the reach of the systems administration team, often means that troubleshooting and upgrading VPN systems is time consuming and a struggle for both admins and users.

Steve Jobs says analysts should stop worrying about market share and focus on profits. And moving the company beyond Macs could boost both. Yet Apple's market share has slipped inexorably. It dropped from 9.4% in 1993 to just 3% in 1997, the year Jobs was rehired to run the company. According to Gartner's preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple's share will fall further, if it can't keep pace with surging overall PC demand. In the meantime, the Street yawned when Jobs & Co. recently reported strong results, citing slack sales of the new G5 and ignoring plenty of good news.

The .NET Framework class library is a set of namespaces, classes, interfaces, and value types, which you'll use in .NET applications, components, and controls. In this chapter from A "Programmer's Guide to .NET", you'll learn about several of basic classes included in the .NET Framework class library, and get an introduction to collections.

This paper by veteran real-time instructor David Kalinsky provides an introduction to the subject of task scheduling, from the perspective of novice embedded systems software developers. It begins with a survey of simple "home-made" task schedulers. Then it introduces the concept of preemption and priority-based preemptive schedulers, as used in off-the-shelf real-time operating systems. It ends with a glimpse into deadline scheduling for hard real-time systems.

LinuxBeginner.org reviews SuSE Linux 9 after a week of usage.

Daniel Stone writes over at Slashdot: "A short time ago, freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 was released. Simply put, this is the collection of libX11, libXext, and other little-used libraries that kind of power your whole desktop. The xlibs team at fd.o are now maintaining all these libraries, and more, and we're going to be making releases as part of the fd.o platform, which is far more wide-ranging, but it still forms an important part of the platform. Share and enjoy!"

The previously mentioned Independent Qt Tutorial has been updated with two completely new chapters dealing with files and XML. The Independet Qt Tutorial aims at providing a readable introduction to Qt programming. Qt is available for a number of platforms such as win32, Mac OS X and X11.

Microsoft will release Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (both Home and Professional) in the first half of 2004. PCMag's look at the beta version, released to testers in December, revealed a number of interesting security enhancements in Web browsing, e-mail, and networking.