Today, Mozilla 1.5 Beta, the next version from the Mozilla Team was released. As per usual; Linux, MacOSX and Windows packages are available. A spellchecker for Messenger and Composer in addition to many bugfixes are just some of the updates in this beta. For more info, read the release Notes.

Despite trolls' claims to the contrary, BeOS is still alive and well, and no one shows it more than active BeOS usergroups . The German BeOS User Group, DeBUG, has reformed and reorganized and the next BeGeistert is planned for mid-October. More details within.

Red Hat is making no secret of the fact that it's trying to focus on revenue-generating enterprise customers, even if that means losing throngs of small users who provide little to no revenue. Many of the largest hosting companies use Red Hat Linux, but as the company changes its focus, that may change, especially if Red Hat is slow to release important patches for non-paying customers, says a Netcraft report.

I started rsync'ing a Mandrake 9.2 beta 2 CD this morning and when I went to start the second CD this afternoon, I noticed that the beta 2 CDs were gone and there was a RC1 CD becoming available.

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

Contiki is a usable (internet-enabled) OS for Commodore 64 hardware. System requirements for Contiki is about 20K RAM for the base functionality and about 50K for full functionality (desktop icons, web browser, web server, etc.) See the videos of Contiki in action.

For an alternative OS to be a viable desktop contender, it must have a good web browser. Mac OS X's biggest stumbling block at its introduction was its limited selection of (slow) web browsers. Things have changed. Now there are more than 9 to choose from. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison. Gecko-based browsers stand out in speed and functionality, but look like ports, while Safari earns the top spot for just being well put together. In a similar vein Mac P2P outlines the various P2P options for Mac users.

Multiple readers submitted this newsbit: Linux related websites all over the net are down "due to software patents. Spotted so far are: the Gnome website, the KDE website, and Knoppix homepage. All pages point a visitor to http://swpat.ffii.org. Update: This topic seems to need clarification. These sites are down in protest of a proposed patent law in the EU that many people believe is too broad and will hurt rather than protect the rights of software developers. Read the "swpat.ffii.org" site for more details.

SCO's own Chris Sontag responds to the recent remarks about SCO's presentation of "stolen code." My Take: Is there an IT professional left in America who would ever consider buying SCO software again? Update: It never ends. Novell has joined the fray.

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox believes that Microsoft's upcoming major OS release will not be generally available until 2006, a year later than what Microsoft is currently predicting. He believes that the changes planned are too far-sweeping to be rolled out quickly, when you take into account that developers need time to prepare their software.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux is a simple to use, easy to configure alternative to XFree86 Graphics Drivers. This latest release supports 125 graphics cards on multiple Linux distributions with full 2D acceleration and adds support for the latest hardware from ATI.

The DotGNU project is holding an international competition in the area of collaboratively implementing the System.Windows.Forms namespace in the C# class libraries, a GUI framework that will allow developers and end users to run and develop applications on many different platforms, anything from GNU/Linux, MS Windows, OS X to even handhelds. Participants will have a chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500. The full anouncement is here.

PHP developers have just released PHP 4.3.3. This release fixes a large number of bugs and all users of PHP are urged to upgrade. Full list of fixes can be found in the news file . Read the release announcement here

The dot is running a piece on a recent presentation given by Matthias Ettrich, director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of KDE, in the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. He details what will be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next major version of KDE after 3.2. New features will include much faster startup speed and memory usage as well as a general cleanup of Qt's architecture, including the splitting of GUI and non-GUI related classes in Qt.