Sun's EVP of Software Jonathan Schwartz uses the popular metaphor of the natural ecosystem to describe the IT world. Most corporate IT departments are what ecologists call a "monoculture." As various blights and famines have proven, when there is too much of the same plant growing in one place, it's suceptable to being wiped out by a disease. Stressing the need for "genetic diversity on the desktop" to combat security threats, Schwartz points to a non-Microsoft desktop as a viable solution. The difficulty in implementing the new OS? Says Schwartz, "you might have to train the user that a home directory named 'My Computer' on Windows has been renamed 'This Computer' . . . "

Garrett LeSage published some screenshots of the recent redhat-artwork/Bluecurve updates. In other art news, new version of the Gnome Themes Extras is released. Wasp, especially, is very nice.

SCO showed the disputed code at their SCO Forum conferece in Las Vegas to their partners and customers. SCO's CEO Darl McBride said tat they have hired pattern-recognition experts to find infringing code in linux, and that they have found "a mountain of code" and that "The DNA of Linux is coming from Unix" and thus Linux is more competitive because of it. They have also announced new version of their OpenServer code-named "Legend". More at news.com article. Heise News shows the code. The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI. Possibly from here or here?

SkyOS 4.0a has now been released. This release supports USB. USB mice/keyboard, HUB's, card readers, harddisks and digital cameras should all work once they are plugged in. SkyOS 4.0a also includes a lot of kernel and application bugfixes. For more infomation, go to the SkyOS website.

KGI, or Kernel Graphics Interface, provides a framework that allows full 3D accellerated video card drivers to compile on different platforms without any modification to the drivers themselves. KGI, which has been developed on Linux to the point that it's "rather stable," is now available for xBSD.

It's been known for a while that the new Apple G5 machines would come out before the next major release of OS X, Panther, would be ready. It's confirmed today, though, that Apple will be releasing a new version of OS X with the G5, a version that has been "optimized to take advantage of the 64-bit technology in the Power Mac G5." "The kernel has been updated to take advantage of memory expansion and the vector libraries and math libraries have been optimized," said an Apple executive. "Any application that does dynamic linking to those libraries will get an automatic benefit without having to recompile."

Syllable 0.4.5 is out! You can see the changelog here. This release is the last of the Syllable 0.4 releases, and comes after over a year of development. Development will now begin on Syllable 0.5, which we hope will bring great improvements and increased stability to Syllable.

Gnome 2.4 beta has been announced. The GNOME Desktop 2.4 Beta 1: "Jelme", is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.

Xouvert is the open, innovative X server that brings tomorrow's technology to your desktop today It looks like they intend to keep everything public and out in the open. They will also be using some advanced development software as well. See the web site to learn more.