Wendy, spokesman and policy counsel for the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), says he just wants to make sure government agencies don't unduly favor open-source or free programs over proprietary software. "We want a process that is not based on automatic preferences," Wendy said.

Linus Torvalds released on late Sunday the first test (-pre) kernel of the upcoming Linux Kernel 2.6. Download or get more information here and make sure you report any bugs you might find on the way.

"Can Macintosh software run on an Intel machine at speeds that approach the same performance as on Apple hardware, or visa versa? Not yet, but that day may be closer if a Los Gatos start-up gets its product off the ground, and it could have implications for chip makers." Read the rest at siliconvalley.com.

Cosmoe 0.7rc20 is now available. During all the furious patching, "Pulse" started working and now has apparently broken again. Most other patches submitted via the mailing list have now been applied.

The 2nd Syllable developers' IRC meeting recently concluded, and the logs can be found here. Our first one can be read here with a summary here. According to Shawn, "We are throwing around ideas of what we'd like to see in Syllable 1.0."

A new PDF-based magazine is available, regarding NEXTSTEP and OpenStep. You can find information ahbout X11 under NeXT, how to run OpenStep under VMWare, a Rhapsody FAQ and how to run it on VPC and more. This coming week await an introduction article to the NeXT universe, here, at OSNews.

While a 2-year-old project to develop an open-source version of Microsoft Corp.'s .Net Framework is making progress, it's still a long way from prime time. "Yes, of course it's late," said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project leader, last week. "We were supposed to release the ECMA components, but the project has grown." Some Mono observers say they are watchful of Microsoft in this situation, wondering whether the software company is merely tolerating Mono now. "They will either outpace it with rapid-fire revisions to .Net or simply let Mono languish," said an anonymous observer. Read the article at eWeek.

"I always keep a number of machines around running different versions of Linux and one of them is a Lindows box. Lindows 3.0 was pretty good, but it had a bunch of shortcomings. But the new version, Lindows 4.0, is a much improved, desktop OS with a lot more polish." Read the review at MSNBC.

The L4Env, the L4 Environment, and DDE, the Device Driver Environment. L4Env is a programming environment for application development on top of the L4 microkernel family. DDE is an environment for Linux device drivers for using native Linux 2.4 drivers together with L4Env.

Following features are supported in the upcoming SkyOS 4 version: Multiple UHCI controllers, common HCD driver, USB Driver and interface, USB HUB Class driver and Mass storage class driver. So you can use you USB harddisks/floppy/cdrom/card-readers or digital cameras already. The USB/UHCI driver supports all transfer types (Interrupt, Control, Bulk, ISO). Additionally, the USB system is intergrated into SkyOS. Just plug your device into your USB Hub's, it will be detected and initialized automatically.

In this keynote, OSAF founder and chair Mitch Kapor asks if the same collaborative development methods that created success in the corporate arena can now make open source software central to the consumer desktop. ZDNews TechUpdate has an article on the subject too. Elsewhere, Linus Torvalds has published the last release of the current Linux development kernel, clearing the way to start work on the long-anticipated 2.6 kernel. And, this is an interview of the Ark Linux core team and a couple of contributors, while Gaël Duval tells why Mandrake Linux is better than Windows.

From the DOT: The KDE on Cygwin project, which produces ports of Qt and KDE to Windows using Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86, announced that the native Win32 port of the Qt3 GPL library has been started, mainly driven by Richard Lärkäng at the moment. The plan is to provide a base for a future native KDE port. Several screenshots of the ongoing port are available. Richard is seeking developers, who don't have access to the original Qt Windows sources, to help him.

In this third installment of Russell's MySQL series, he introduces some methods and tools for bulk importing of data into MySQL. This isn't an overly difficult task, but processing large amounts of data can be intimidating for newcomers, and as a result it can be a barrier to getting started with MySQL.

The GNOME Project announced the availability of the GNOME 2.2.2 Desktop and Developer Platform. The 2.2.x series is devoted to bugfixes, translations, and general polish of our major 2.2 stable release. The project strongly recommends upgrading to 2.2.2, as it contains large amounts of improvements.