Earlier this year Novell purchased Ximian Software, the primary sponsor of the Mono Project. Novell is committed to providing support for open source development and specifically the Mono Project. There are plans for providing additional services around the Mono Project including support and consulting. Novell is also involved in providing resources for contributors by way of Novell Forge which will become the home for many Mono based projects and a community around Mono. Read the article here.
Update: On other C#/Mono news, the Qt# bindings project is almost on a halt, OSNews learned. Developers wanted to help out the one remaining developer, Marcus Urban.

OSDL has been running performance tests with hackbench to measure the improvement of the scheduler, compared to Linux 2.4.18. A write-up of these results with graphical plots is posted here.

Apple on Friday seeded its Select and Premier Apple Developer Connection members with the latest builds of Mac OS X 10.3.2 Panther Server and Client. Both seeds carry build number 7D18 and weigh in at 52.8 and 35.7MB, respectively.

IBM won a tactical victory Friday in a legal battle with SCO Group when a judge ordered SCO to show within 30 days the Linux software to which it believes it has rights and to point out where it believes IBM is infringing.

"For years, it has seemed that the GNU/Linux desktop was right on the cusp of being ready for the mainstream desktop out of the box. Recent distributions, such as Mandrake Linux 9.2, bring the desktop to the mainstream, but something is still lacking: complete unity." Read more at OfB.biz. Update: On other Ximian news, the first release of Dashboard is coming along soon.

December 15 will be D-day for a number of Microsoft's established products, which the company is removing from its sales channels as a result of its legal settlement with Sun over Java.

In a followup to his original interview, Jeremy Hogan discusses some of the reasons Red Hat had for EOL'ing RHL, future licensing options for RHEL (including free devel copies), the most common Fedora misconception, his take on UserLinux and more.

Sam Hiser interviews Novell's Chris Stone about Linux, Ximian, strategy and more.

Andrew Brown has just committed a complete rewrite of the NetBSD kernel's sysctl infrastructure to the tree. More info here.

The Debian Team has offered this explanation of the recent server comprimise. In related news, a recent update to rsync was posted to patch a security hole that recently affected Gentoo .

This article by a technical marketing engineer in Intel's Software Solutions Group introduces Intel's Mobile Application Architecture Guide, which was created to help application developers understand the issues that are arising through the growing proliferation of wireless mobile computing devices. According to Intel, users expect the same functionality from applications running on their mobile devices whether they are offline or connected to a network.

Jonathan S. Shapiro, architect of the EROS persistant operating system announced that he would be putting the project on hold for at least a year. This followed a series of emails describing the mistakes he felt that EROS had made: 1, 2, 3, as well as an email describing what he thought it had done right.

"When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to install Debian on a system so I could learn more about Linux, he suggested I try the Gentoo distribution." Read the review at LinuxJournal.

"I consider myself part of the open-source community. The (Linux) community has to recognize that it can't have it both ways. Linux cannot be a hobbyist's toy and be the leading operating platform in the industry at the same time. Those two things are incongruent. For Linux to become a credible part of the enterprise, it has to go through the standard evolution and maturing process" and "Linux on the desktop is definitely an area where hype is ahead of reality by orders of magnitude. There's a sexiness around the idea of taking on Microsoft", vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's Linux strategy, Martin Fink says to News.com in a very interesting and seemingly honest interview.