For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer's new music service, a quick look suggests that it's a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market.

Microsoft is considering an open source approach to one of its software libraries, following heavy pressure from developers and sharp competition in the growing mobile device development arena. The decision would be a radical one for Microsoft, a fierce opponent of the open source model of making intellectual property available for modification and redistribution. The surprise move to open source is being considered for the Windows Template Library (WTL) - an enhancement of the C++ language.

Matthew Garrett demonstrated his success in building a Debian system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux.

This is a desktop comparison of Red Hat Linux 9 and SuSE 8.2 Professional Edition. We have used Red Hat Linux 8 for all our work since last fall, and installed version 9 as soon as it became available. However, we have not been fully content with Red Hat, so we gave SuSE 8.2 a try when it became available this month.

Will Red Hat and SuSE be drawn into the SCO v. IBM fracas? In an informative interview SCO-Caldera's Chris Sontag tells MozillaQuest.com's Mike Angelo there is SCO-owned code in Red Hat and SuSE Linux and no tainted code in the "Linux kernel that Linus and others have helped develop."

Avoid the overhead of large numbers of very similar classes with the Flyweight pattern. Learn how to recognize instances that are fundamentally the same except for a few parameters, move those variables outside the class instance, and pass them in as part of a method call. There is more development articles for C, C++, Java etc to read, here.

Within the next year, PC makers are expected to start selling a powerful new generation of home computers that run on 64-bit microchips. But consumers might initially find little extra value in these PCs, despite their exponentially more powerful features. Read the rest of the article at Reuters.

Today we feature an in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). It is a long read, but we touch a number of hot issues, from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even re-unification of the BSDs. If you are into (any) Unix, this interview is a must read.

"The installation of a new distribution from SuSE has for several years here been a battle between two conflicting issues: the install has a better than even chance of not going smoothly, but once the ordeal is survived it is quickly forgotten in the face of an excellent system. That was exactly the case here with SuSE 8.2 Professional." Read the review at LinuxAndMain.

Nicholas Blachford from Genesi (also ex-Amiga, ex-BeOS developer) sent us in an announcement regarding the new Pegasos machines, the BeOS connection and the availability of NewOS for Pegasos.

BeGeistert 010, the place for BeOS developers to meet up, is now over and BeOSJournal features a round up of the event, plus an interview with Sequel OS' Frans Van Nispen.

Matthias Ettrich is the creator of the KDE desktop environment. At LinuxJournal, Aleksey Dolya interviews Matthias about the process of creating KDE and what he's up to these days.

Today, we feature a mini Q&A with Vikas Deolaliker, Group Product Manager of the Competitive Strategy Group at Sun Microsystems. We discuss a number of issues that arise on Sun's stategy in light of the recent releases of the AMD Opteron and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. We also get a taste of Sun's position on the limited hardware support of Sun Solaris 9 on x86.

ActiveWin features a review of Visual Studio .NET 2003 development suite. They cover feature-set, usage, installation, pricing and what's still missing.