Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open-source operating system, has some strong views about the legal dispute between The SCO Group and IBM, which he shared with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli in an e-mail exchange last week.

After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is ready for download by all Mac OS X users. With anti-aliased fonts, to name but one feature, this Golden Master satisfies the needs of professionals and individuals wanting a free, complete, and open-source office suite able to operate in an office environment alongside Windows, Linux, and Solaris machines. Elsewhere, AbiWord 2.0 Beta 1 was released.

This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. Read more at FreeBSDForums.

Apple has published details of new Panther features on their web site. Read more for the highlights:

Linux and other open source software has been widely used by government technologists for years in an unsanctioned way, but a recent Department of Defense memo officially puts open source software on the "approved" list. Government research contractor MITRE recently published a study that found that OSS was in wide use in the government, and warned that if it were to be forbidden, the costs and security fallout would be considerable. See this Forbes.com story for more.

A Lycoris community member named "jmcqk6" has created two unofficial "television" commercials. One is in QuickTime and the other in Flash. They can be seen here.

If you have a mixed network like I do sometimes you have to compromise. At my job we run Windows, Linux and a sole Mac (Graphics dept.) and lets face it, when you do consulting work and if you design and develop custom applications you have to be able to develop for your clients platform and as much as I hate it, it's a Windows world. Before I used to have 2 workstations, one Windows and one Linux, or I had to dual boot. In the past, virtual machines have been lacking. Either they were too slow or lacking a certain pizazz to get the job done. Enter VMWare Workstation 4.

For the 21st of June, there was an 'AmigaOS4 on Tour' event planned for Basel. I travelled from Holland to Switzerland to write an extensive report for AmigaWorld.net regarding this event.

Three tech allies demonstrated a new storage technology that they believe will keep a venerable hard drive standard safe from extinction.

Many of us have done it. What does it take to do it?

The new OpenBeOS newsletter is discussing the new VM and file caching implementation for OBOS.

The OpenBSD folks are informing us that mozilla works in -current, the SMP branch works okay with a big lock on i386, the UltraSPARC III goes single user now and the AMD Hammer port: kernel works so far, toolchain/compiler stuff in the works now.

With the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), you can develop a stand-alone Java application that feels and operates like a native application. If you've spent any time developing Java client-side applications for Windows, you've probably wanted to integrate some native Windows components into your applications. This article shows you how to use Eclipse to easily leverage and integrate ActiveX controls within a stand-alone SWT application.

4osx has some screenshots of panther. Because there site is down from time to time, they have asked for mirrors. We have mirrored their screenshots and can be found here.