Thursday here, a slow evening. Time for a new poll. This poll might require you to think a bit extra: it asks you to vote not for your favorite application, but which OSS application, in your opinion, has achieved high standards, performance, features and ease of use when compared to the best of breed of the closed source world. Read more for more explanation and voting.

"Is this the end of Netscape? So much for Netscape 8.0" C|net says. Where does that leave the Mozilla project? After Apple and Microsoft, Real and Amazon get into online music business. IBM launches Lotus admin Kit resources for Win/Linux/Mac. How-to animation in SDL. 3D UI for Windows Desktops. Revolution 2.0 development tool released. New Gnumeric screenshot. Review of Poseidon USB, a USB stack for Amiga/MorphOS, plus a benchmark of AmigaONE against Pegasos and AthlonXP.

In an era when mature Linux distributions abound, do you need a special one just for college? Robert Kennedy College in Delémont, Switzerland, thinks so. The school's CollegeLinux 2.3 , a single-CD Linux distribution, is a power tool for educational organizations. Read the review at NewsForge and our recent interview with professor David Costa here.

In an interview with Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau, SCO's Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Division, the group within SCO in charge of enforcing the company's intellectual property, discussed the company's position. It is discussed the Linux kernel issue, Novell's reasons and why Microsoft licensed the Unix IP. Update: More SCO news.

The OpenBFS team is proud to announce that a new version of OpenBFS (Beta 6) is available for download. This new version features a fix for the dreaded "Vnode already exists with a different cookie" problem, a fix for live queries, a fix for searching on non-indexed attributes and lots of other small corrections and additions. BeOSJournal features a mini-interview with BGA. Update: Here are part 2 and part 3 of David Reid's editorials.

In a statement today, SCO seems to have threatened to sue Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, if more companies don't start licensing UNIX. (Note: Look at the very last paragraph.)

OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is announced, available immediately for both ppc and x86 architectures. OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is based on the Darwin 6.6 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.2.6) source release and licensed under the APSL. It includes additions and modifications from the OpenDarwin CVS Repository.

Ellison faces pressure from both sides of the database market -- IBM on top, and Microsoft below. A little more than a year ago, Gartner Group principal analyst Colleen Graham issued a study that showed IBM taking the lead over Oracle for the first time in the cutthroat corporate-database market.

In what Bruce Perens is describing as answering "the call of the open source community," Novell, makers of the popular NOS NetWare, has delivered a letter to SCO challenging their rights to UNIX System V. "Novell has just won the hearts and minds of developers and corporations alike," Perens continued. Read the article and the letter at Yahoo. Update: SCO's response.

As the PostgreSQL developers continue to move forward on the upcoming v7.4 release, several bug fixes have been tag'd as being safe to back-patch into the v7.3.x branch, so there is 7.3.3. Click here for a recent interview with the PostgreSQL team.

The software giant says it withdrew a security update for Windows XP after discovering that it switched off Net connections for some of the 600,000 users who downloaded and installed it. Update: Microsoft explains what got wrong.

Information and pictures of the new Swing on Java 1.4.2. Elsewhere, this article examines some of these urban performance legends and 'sets the record straight' regarding Java's performance.

I don't need a server. Our FreeBSD home server runs unstoppably for years, asking nothing in return. However, my curiosity about OSes drove me on ordering the free evaluation version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, the latest Microsoft's OS offering. Naturally, there is a lot of marketing hype surrounding the product, but this time, I am really happy to witness that most of the hype is for real.

John Carroll editorializes about the SCO situation and advocates that the worst it could happen to the Linux OSS market is to have a temporary slow down, and not a collapse. Elsewhere, Sys-Con reports that people started all these conspiracy theories when Microsoft licensed the Unix IP from SCO, but in reality the magazine says, it was something that was on schedule to happen as Microsoft needed the license possibly for a new product of theirs.