Three new interesting InformIT developer articles posted: "J2EE Performance Tuning, Part 2" (Part I here), "C# Design Patterns: The Decorator Pattern" (Part 4) and "Object-Oriented Frameworks for Network Programming".

The GPL is a wonderful license for community works, for the basic reason that it starts out with the premise that the point is the source code. The program, someone is trying to make. Not the programmer, not the programmer's company, or the programmer's pay check. What it basically says is that there is no way for one to act as a stop-gap to the flow of code development and the organic way that code tends to build upon itself.

After much delay, the first 2 Amiga Gamecards (offering 4 games each) are currently selling at CompUSA stores. This was shared in latest of the weekly held AmigaWorld Q&A sessions with Amiga's CTO. Some of the most notable games were written by the AmigaDE/AmigaOS software development house Zeoneo Limited.

Jason Filby has notified us: "ReactOS 0.1.1 is out, and features much improved windowing and GDI abilities; WineMine can be played to a limited extend and the MS VGA and VMWare VGA drivers can be used. There is also better disk drive detection and support as well as registry, IO and console improvements. The usetup installer has also progressed well." For more infomation and screenshots, turn to the ReactOS website.

William Lee Irwin III recently announced on the lkml that he'd successfully gotten Linux running on a 64GB x86 server. His posts included two different boot message logs, one without his page clustering patch, and one with. In the latter case, his patch overcomes the 1GB mem_map virtual space limitation imposed by x86 32-bit servers, without which the kernel over-runs allowable memory space. Read the report at KernelTrap.

Yes, we all know the "big three" (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) commercial distros, we also know the next big bunch of respected traditional/geek distros (Debian and Slackware and some might add Gentoo too in this list), and we know the "other big three" in the desktop Linux area (Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris). However, not everyone knows what is available besides this "threshold". Here is a list of Linux distros that worth knowing about and to keep an eye on!

A milestone for Syllable OS: "With a couple of patches from Arno Klenke, both the ATAPI driver and ISO9660 filesystem driver work together happily, and we are able to mount, read and unmount discs" project leader Vanders wrote. In the meantime, SkyOS gets some significant updates on its installer on other parts of the OS.

A long thread has started in the phoebe-list over at Red Hat, people arguing that Mp3 capabilities should/shouldn't be included in Red Hat's products. Mike Harris of Red Hat replied to the issue and gave a clear answer about the facts.

"An update on the current status of OpenBSD Symmetric Multiprocessor support was recently posted to the OpenBSD smp mailing list. At this time, it still looks to be quite a ways off in the future, with currently only i386-specific code that will detect and spinup a 2'nd processor, but not yet actually use it." Read the report at KernelTrap.

Eclipse 2.1 was released today. For a list of what is new checkout here. In other developer news, OnLamp posted an article explaining what's new in Python 2.3. Info on PHP 5 can be found from here.

"The GPL, GNU General Public License, is a license boilerplate that the FSF, Free Software Foundation, has put forward to be adopted by software developers that are creating software. The GPL has some fundamental flaws that may actually make one wonder if people using the GPL license really understand the license." Read the editorial here by Chris Davies.

MadPenguin has the first review of SuSE 8.2. OSNews' SuSE 8.2 review is coming this Monday, so stay tuned.

SciTech Software is preparing to release the first version of SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux to outside beta testers over the coming weeks. If you have an interest and XFree86 based display drivers for your Linux platform and are willing to test out new technology, we would love for you to join our growing Linux beta program! Read more for the rest of the announcement.

In a major strategy shift, Sun will stop offering its own customized version of Linux and will instead turn to several other standard Linux distributions.