Microsoft has made the Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh available to its 15,000 technical beta testers. The final product is still on track to be completed this summer and will be available to customers later this year.

The Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts projects are pleased to announce the formation of a cooperative development alliance, MetaPKG, forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way, the coordination between projects will: accelerate the development efforts of all projects, avoid unwanted duplication of effort, improve the consistency, quality, and responsiveness of ports.

... strategy, saying, "IBM has been using Linus like a tool and exploiting the open-source community." Those fightin' words come from Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president for Sun's software group. Read it at ComputerWorld.

A first release of the official MorphOS SDK is immediately available to members of the MDC in the files section. Info here and here.

A number of web sites reported that the database that holds the Apple Store data has been accidentally updated (and later its webmaster took down the whole Store website). While the headline in the final rendered web page is still calling it a "G4", the specs are mentioning the following:

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is not so sure about the idea of an open-source Java. Elsewhere, Sun seeks boost from stronger Java while in the meantime Sun slips and its CEO slams takeover talk: Sun's shares dipped into negative territory Thursday after CEO Scott McNealy tried to shoot down rumors that the network-computer maker was a takeover target. Additionally, Web services must start delivering, says Sun, while they will also sell and support all x86 versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

E/OS LX NT v 0.2 is available, a graphical desktop for MS-DOS that can run Windows programs, Linux programs and DOS aplications. It´s based on Linux 2.0.30, Xfree 4.1.0, Wine, Dosemu, and Libc. The system is based on the UMSDOS file system and can only run under DOS as Desktop.

Extreme Programming (XP) founder Kent Beck likes to say he made up XP's fundamentals during a particularly troubled project in 1996. While strictly true, from talking to him you sense he'd really been formulating the process for quite some time. Find out what Kent thinks about the contribution of the Java platform to software development's success (or lack thereof). In this interview he explains how better applications can arise from the ashes of failure.

PalmSource is working on a new operating system called Sahara (PalmOS 6) that the company hopes will make the Palm OS more useful in corporate settings, Chief Executive David Nagel said Wednesday. It is expected near the end of the year.

Read more about Koffice 1.3 Beta 2 here. On another note, Ximian has a nice presentation on the changes and planned changes for OO.org here.

Forrester's Rob Enderle opines that, for all its advantages, the open source OS just isn't ready to power the systems on Starfleet Vessels. Just kidding. What he really says is that however much the geeks love Linux for the freedom it gives them, the customizability isn't always a boon to the average users and the managers who just want things to work with as little tinkering as possible. And the untested intellectual property issues surrounding the GPL and the open source development methods are a potential quagmire. He says large companies need to consider these issues, religious fanatacism aside. Do you agree? Update by ELQ: Counterpoint at NewsFactor.

Recently, an article published in OSNews by Joshua Boyles entitled "The Edge Computing System" captured my attention. This led me to publish my own article entitled "The Next Big Thing? Open Peripheral Hardware Connectivity." I appreciate all the feedback, but I feel that there is still a certain amount of confusion concerning what I was proposing. So, here is a Part II. follow-on article...with some insights that hopefully may flesh things out a bit more.

"Who needs Internet Explorer, now that Jobs & Co. has its own browser? The much bigger threat is the growing chance that Microsoft will abandon Office for the Mac." Read the article at BusinessWeek.

If your embedded system doesn't need networking and storage, porting Linux to your hardware may not be worth the effort, Embedded.com says.