From all of us at OSNews, we wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2003. 2002 was a great year for OSNews. We saw steady growth in readership, a huge effort by Eugenia to make the site better, and constant support and submissions by OSNews readers that kept the wheels turning. The bad economy didn't seem to dampen the action in the OS Arena, and may have even given Linux a boost as people look for more economical solutions. We hope that the world's economy improves, that the technophiles who read OSNews have and keep good jobs, and that ad rates go up. 2003 will probably see the launch of a sister site to OSNews. Please post with any ideas you have on a tech-oriented topic that's under-covered, and we may launch a site to cover it!

Network Computing Asia published a recap of open source software's progress in 2002, and includes discussion of Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, UnitedLinux, Ogg Vorbis, Lindows.com, Sun, advances in storage options for Linux, and Linux on the desktop.

News.com has published a 2002 in Review piece on the open source segment of the technology industry. Open source had a very good year in 2002, even as (or perhaps because) the rest of the industry suffered financially. Linux made strides in adoption at large companies and saw some major improvements in power and usability, Open Office became usable, Microsoft started to get scared, and Sun finally succumbed to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Most of all, even though scores of small companies went out of business as venture funding from the last millennium finally ran out, Open Source software is still around, and flourishing.

The last few years have seen a rise in "skinability" of applications and even operating systems as a whole. Stardock has taken a look back and reviewed the year in skinning. "2002 was a turning point for skinning. It was the year where millions of people started using skins without even knowing what the heck skinning is." writes author Brad Wardell. Read the rest at stardock.com.

Jim wrote in to tell us about Sun posting the latest update of their Solaris/SPARC OS. The update, dated 12/02, is downloadable from the sun website here.

According to this New York Times article, Lindows.com, Inc. is suing Microsoft over the Windows trademark. Says Lindows.com attorney Clifford Chance, "No company, no matter how powerful, no matter how much money it has spent, should be able to gain a commercial monopoly on words in the English language." Read more at nytimes.com.

"Today we are looking at Linux Mandrake, a relative newcomer but which has picked up a large user base through the years which keep its development alive and well. The first version of Mandrake was based on Red Hat which is a fine distro in itself. The makers wanted too keep all that was good with Red Hat and get rid of all the bad, such as using KDE instead of GNOME as default desktop. Over the years, though, it has changed from simply being Red Hat repackaged into a separate distro in its own right. However if you dig deep enough you can still see the Red Hat roots but we are not really interested in that." You can read the full 7 page review over at Techseekers.

"Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other. " You can get the full article over at Sudhian Media.

Need a job? This classified posting appears to confirm that Microsoft is developing a new, original "next generation" shell to take advantage of the .NET framework for its next version of Windows. The ad says experience with "shell languages like PERL, Python and Bash" are a plus - interesting, I'd bet most of the experts in these areas are UNIX users.

dabooty writes "International Business Machines (IBM) may soon start packing its PCs with the open-source Linux operating system (OS). IBM’s Linux initiative has so far been limited to its servers and workstations. Read it at Financial Express." Yes, we all know Linux isn't an OS - but a better comment would be 'Is this Yet Another Linux Distribution or the sound of the the first stone of the Microsoft empire crumbling?'

Nowadays, all you hear about is Windows, MacOS X, or GNU/Linux. However, what ever happened to the good old BeOS?

Shell writers: "IBM recently shipped an enhancement to the DB2 Web services object runtime framework (WORF) to enable interoperability with .NET. This article showns you how to create a .NET C# client to consume a DB2 DADX Web service. The latest WORF improves the interoperability between DB2 DADX Web services and the Microsoft .NET platform."

Pahtz writes: "A very alpha release of The Humane Environment (THE) for MacOS was made on Christmas Eve. Jef Raskin, creator Apple's Macintosh, and author of the book "The Humane Interface", is the leader of the open-source THE Development Team."

A clash among engineers who want to use Unix apps and bureaucratic dictates that they use Windows is resolved.