Microsoft is licensing the rights to Unix technology from SCO Group, a move that could dramatically impact the battle between Windows and Linux in the market for computer operating systems, News.com says. Update: Please note that Microsoft simply licenses the rights of Unix (the same way as Sun and SGI have done in the past) and does NOT become the owner of Unix IP. SCO remains the owner.

This may not be of much use to those of you who dread text based installs, and those in the know, but a bit of useful information I came across when I installed Red Hat Linux 9 recently.

Amiga OS4 will finally be presented to the general public and the first OS4 events are sheduled for June. Also Fleecy answered 10 more community questions for his 10th weekly Q&A.

"Robert Watson has started the automatic posting of open issues for the upcoming 5.1 and 5.2 releases. The list for 5.1 is automatically posted to -current every other day, with the most up-to-date version found here. The list is divided into the following four sections: "Must Resolve Issues", "Desired Features", "Documentation items that must be resolved", and "Areas requiring immediate testing". Read it at KernelTrap.

The OpenBSD project is having currently its Hackathon event (despite their financial sponsor backing down last month), where all the developers are getting together to code for almost two weeks. Usually, that's the month of the year with the most CVS commits and the biggest advancements that are happening to the OS. Canada's tech media are reporting the event with more info.

"The 'meta-distro' Gentoo makes it possible to compile and configure everything on your system exactly the way you like, providing you with more structure and tools to ease the process and automate updates. Do I still like Debian? I absolutely love it. But until further notice, Gentoo is now my flavor of Linux." Read the review at LinuxWorld.

Gentoo Technologies founded a new company, Gentoo Games, which is set to release numerous gaming titles on self-booting CDs, fully configured to work on i686s+ with the latest Geforce and Radeon (8500+) graphics boards. First title to come out is America's Army. Another similar distro is Morphix.

Mozilla.org has finally released version 0.6 of Firebird, the project formerly known as Phoenix. Version 0.6 includes a new theme as well as a host of new features. It can be downloaded from here.

This document describes the feature of the BeOS kernel to monitor nodes. First, there is an explanation of what kind of functionality OpenBeOS have to reproduce (along with the higher level API), then the author (Axel Dörfler) presents the implementation in OpenBeOS.

At last week's WinHEC show, Nvidia Chief Scientist David Kirk pontificated on where 3D graphics rendering is going over the next decade. What can you expect? Photorealistic rendering and cinematic realism, of course. Bottom line -- it's not about pushing clock speeds and pixel rates, but rather making pixels much better looking!

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux Beta is now available for evaluation and testing. Read more for the full press release and more links:

Database users who rely on Linux operating systems are drooling over the list of features promised by the soon-to-be-released 2.6 kernel. Read the report at eWeek.

Who will emerge as the king of the desktop OS jungle: Apple's Panther or Microsoft's Longhorn? Read the article at Microsoft-Watch.

Microsoft is offering to Visual Studio .NET 2002 Professional, Enterprise Developer, and Enterprise Architect customers a corresponding upgrade to a Visual Studio .NET 2003 product for only $29 USD. This offer is open until September 30, 2003 and is indeed one of the first signs of yesterday's news that Microsoft is cutting down the prices like crazy in order to beat the rising competition. The original price for the PRO upgrade was about $480 USD (Enterprise and Architect upgrade versions were even pricier).