In reply to an open letter by community member "why", Lycoris founder and CTO, Joseph Cheek admits that they misunderstood the GPL, and promises to have the source for the evaluation edition available soon. Rus also apologized for the lack of an announcement regarding Lycoris' new policy. Update: Read on for an official response from Lycoris:

The 10.3.1 Update via Software Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications, services and technologies: FileVault, Printing, WebDav, and FireWire 800 drives. This update also includes the latest Security Updates.

Read ArsTechnica's thorough review of Mac OS X Panther 10.3 here.

Led by a surge in the amount of data being analyzed in data warehouses, the world's largest databases are pushing new heights as they double and triple in size, according to a survey.

Commercial software companies across the industry have an often well-deserved reputation for poor customer service. Unfortunately, companies that sell Open Source Software are well on the way to establishing a reputation for being even worse than commercial firms. I believe I know why. The reason has its' roots in the origin of the free software movement, and in the cultural bias of the geek world. Here is my take on the subject, for whatever it might be worth.

Software giant Microsoft and start-up VMware are bringing closer to reality a technology for running multiple instances of an operating system on a single computer.

LinuxElectrons has a review of Fedora Core with screenshots.

A new player dares to enter the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. Tom's Hardware looks at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGI´s top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra. The site also has a benchmark article on the latest Nvidia cards Vs the latest Radeons, but it is interesting to see some new blood in the market that have left S3, SiS, Matrox, Trident and Intel i8xx as secondary players or in 'survival mode'.

LinMagAU features an article on how to get multi-boot capabilities with GRUB and LILO.

"The UK government has a 'level playing field' policy for use of Open Source Software, but although it is supposed to be considering "OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements", this does not seem to have produced much in the way of significant deployments or contracts. And who is to blame for this apparent lack of movement? A smoking pistol placed before a Parliamentary Committee last week seemed to implicate that well-known partisan of Open Source Software IBM." TheRegister reports. And all this while the press is expecting IBM to give a talk at Desktop Linux Consortium's conference on Monday about Linux on the desktop.

The new programming interface introduced in Windows "Longhorn" is called WinFX. Learn the object-oriented, managed API for the breadth of "Longhorn" and how it relates to the work you are already doing on the .NET Framework. Elsewhere, Steve Jobs is speaking of Longhorn and compares it to the Mac OS X long road to maturity and forsees that the same steep road will be there for Microsoft as well.

After 1-2 years of waiting, Microsoft has finally updated their Windows Media Player for OSX and brings version 9 to the Mac. Along with it, it also brings DRM and a Safari browser plugin. Now, someone go tell Yahoo! to fix their code so the Safari WMV/A plugin can work with launch.yahoo.com.

Ex-Be engineer Dianne Hackborn (now at PalmSource) gave an interview at the BeOSJournal.org and comments on many different things, including YellowTAB's Zeta: "Personally I find Zeta depressing. From what I have seen, it is basically the work we had in progress at Be plus various things dumped on top. Unfortunately what we had at Be was half-finished, if that. I hate seeing all of the half-finished parts of the UI being thrown around as a real product." Dianne is not the first ex-Be engineer commenting on Zeta's potential (or lack there of). Another three ex-Be employees have also commented recently.

ISOs and Changelog information about Mandrake's AMD64-RC1 Linux can be found here.