With the push of a new campaign, Tools to Compete, Microsoft has effectively admitted that they see Linux as a legitimate threat. Even with the massive reduction in the cost of Windows in big deals, Microsoft has still lost customers. It almost causes one to ask - a passing trend, or the beginning of the end?

Slackware 9.1-beta2 is ready for testing, changelog here. The second beta includes security fixes for OpenSSH/Sendmail, updates to GNOME 2.4.0, Galeon 1.3.9, GNOME Office 1.0, KDE 3.1.4 while XFree86 was also updated. Here is a ready-made unofficial ISO of yesterday's Slackware.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is readying a series of new features for its Solaris OS, some of which will become available to participants in its early-access program in the next three to four months. Elsewhere, Scott McNealy and company are trying to change the business model for software and in the process revive Sun’s prospects, Fortune Magazine is noticing.

Athene 3.2 is now available for download. In conjunction with this release a port of SDL is available, along with a number of games at rocklytefiles.com. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release. Rocklyte Systems also announced that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display.

Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, has chosen Sleepycat's Berkeley DB database as the embedded database within its software line. The database is incorporated in key components of the Sun Java Enterprise System, formerly known as Project Orion, and the Sun Java Enterprise Desktop System, formerly known as Project Mad Hatter, both launched on Tuesday.

Jef Raskin (former Apple developer) has written a critique of the current state of Integrated Development Environments. He notes that programmers have been struggling with the same problems for 30 years, and although new IDEs have simplified many tasks, many are still a usability nightmare, noting, "most current IDEs make adding comments difficult, sometimes painful: You often have to wrap comments by hand, discouraging paragraph-length explanations, or at least discouraging their editing. It is incredible to see antediluvian interfaces in 21st-century products."

First it was MSN Messenger, now Yahoo Messenger is threatening to lock out 3rd party instant messaging apps like Trillian, Proteus, and Gaim. It's been an ironic and pleasant fact that users of alternative operating systems have had nice, multi-funtional instant messaging applications, while most Windows users didn't even know they could bypass the official clients. That era may be coming to an end, as the big IM services are starting to lock out the 3rd party apps. What will this mean for alternative platforms?

Internet-connected Xbox units are phoning home to Microsoft and downloading a patch that closes the loophole that the Xbox Linux Project was exploiting to get Linux running on the Microsoft-built game machine. The patch may also delete "foreign" files that the Xbox Linux users install on the machine. There is some evidence that even if Xbox users don't enable the "Xbox Live" settings, some games also can connect to the internet and transmit information back to Microsoft.

According to this, Borland is using wxWindows as the C++ framework for their upcoming C++ BuilderX product. Borland will be committing changes back to the open source wxWindows project.

We've been thinking of printing up some OSNews T-shirts. We're going to print up a whole batch of them, and we wanted to get some feedback on what they should look like. Would you be interested in buying a shirt? What would you like it to look like?

The french online magazine Clubic has published an interview with MandrakeSoft founder Gaël Duval. Update: English translation here.

"Before, Linux could run only on single- or dual-processor boxes," Yankee Group senior analyst Dana Gardner told the E-Commerce Times. "Now you're starting to see people many of these low-cost boxes in a gridlike fashion to perform highly intensive computing tasks." Read the part 1 of the article at eCommerceTimes. Sun stands behind Solaris from both a support and a legal standpoint, Sun's Bill Moffitt told the E-Commere Times. "As Scott McNealy says, it's a 'one-throat-to-choke' service," he said. "If there's a problem, you know who to call." Read the part 2 of the article.

Microsoft announced that Windows Small Business Server 2003 has been released to manufacturing.

Ark Linux 1.0 alpha 9, a Linux distribution designed primarily for new Linux users, has been released and is available for download here. Highlights of this release include, among the usual set of package updates and bugfixes, graphical bootup, semi-automatic recovery of corrupted XFree86 config files, and an improved network card configuration tool.The full release notes can be found here.