"SCO's contract dispute with IBM has been accompanied by a smear campaign against the whole GNU/Linux system. But SCO made an obvious mistake when it erroneously quoted me as saying that "Linux is a copy of Unix." Many readers immediately smelled a rat--not only because I did not say that, and not only because the person who said it was talking about published ideas (which are uncopyrightable) rather than code, but because they know I would never compare Linux with Unix." Read RMS' editorial at ZDNet.

Analysts and others are raising questions over Apple Computer's claim that its new Power Mac G5 is the world's fastest personal computer. Articles at News.com, ExtremeTech. Apple is defending their benchmarks. In the meantime, the first reference of how faster the G5 is against the G4s, is available.

Terra Soft said today that its Yellow Dog Linux will soon include support for 64-bit processing on the Power Mac G5. As an Apple Authorized Reseller, TerraSoft is receiving pre-orders for the new Macs.

At the International Supercomputer Conference 2003 today, MandrakeSoft announced its latest entry to the company's growing portfolio of middle-to-high end server products. MandrakeClustering is a high performance clustering distribution for IA-32 and AMD64 (Opteron) architectures. IA-64 support should come in September, the company reported. Read about the announcement at OfB.biz and here..

In various discussions that we've had with readers about advertising, many people have suggested that we devise some more direct way for regular OSNews readers to support the site. (This is usually amid complaints about online advertising in general or about some specific ad method that we're trying out) I personally don't like the idea of soliciting donations, because I want people to get something in return for their monetary support. What we've come up with is an OSNews membership program. For a yearly fee of $20, you will be able to show your support of OSNews and receive the following benefits:

I was present at Apple's WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple's history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the "other" platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what's new in yesterday's press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.

Novell will launch a bundle of its network services running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server later this year. And in 2004, the entire services stack from Netware will be running on Linux, the company said, as revealed this April by vnunet.com, VNUnet reports.

DistroWatch reports: "It seems that LindowsOS 4.0 has arrived. While the official product launch won't happen until Tuesday, the Lindows.com web site has come back to life, ready to sell us their latest and greatest. The information on the product page and also in a recent edition of Michael's Minutes will take some serious research before we can present it in a clear and concise way, but basically, the cheapest available product is LindowsOS 4.0 for US$49.95 for digital delivery. This is a 2-CD product (installation CD + live LindowsCD)." Update: The first review of LindowsOS 4 is at TuxReports. Update 2: ExtremeTech posted another LindowsOS 4 review.

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.