Reading the notes of yesterday's teleconference with people like Mike Harris from Red Hat, fontconfig's Keith Packard and others, it seems that they have decided to actually do fork the XFree86 codebase or at least to create a parallel organization to "demonstrate how a scalable community might work" (they also seem to email eachother in a non-archived mailing list of a sort). They currently looking for a nice, catchy name for the project, but they have registered xwin.org just in case nothing better will come up. Reactions of the teleconference have been recorded at XFree's public mailing list.

Opera Software released Opera 7.10 for Windows and Opera 7.10 for Linux Beta with features that are not only new to Opera, but also completely new to the world of browsing. Right from the beginning, users can see the two new buttons FastForward and Rewind in the toolbar, accelerating Opera users' Web navigation. Users can also speed up researching with the completely new Notes features or view photo files with SlideShow.

The OpenBSD project hopes that new changes to its latest release will eliminate "buffer overflows," a software issue that has been plaguing security experts for more than three decades.

NetBSD's main claim to fame, so to speak, is its portability. Although ports of Linux are available for several platforms, NetBSD blows the penguin's doors off when it comes to platform support. Read the article at NewsFactor.

"I'm tired of reading on an almost monthly basis articles asserting that Linux isn't yet ready for the desktop. Nonsense! Linux is about as ready for the desktop as Windows is. It's simply a matter of corporate and user inertia that's keeping Linux marginalized." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

Novell is releasing new networking software aimed at small businesses and will make it available for free, the company said on Thursday.

It's worth watching for, as indications are that X# would be used to treat XML as a first-class citizen in the .Net programming arena. Read the article at TechUpdate.

Open source never stands still. Even the flexible and mature BSDs are continuing to evolve. In this article, Michael Lucas looks at the NetBSD upgrade process, demonstrating the most common steps to stay abreast of the current source code.

MySQL is aiming for speedier development cycles than most database companies. The company is currently focusing on two products: MySQL versions 4.1 and 5.0. It released the binaries of 4.1 this week and plans to unveil a final version in about eight months. A final version 5.0 should be available about six months after that. Read the report at News.com.

The up to now highly anticipated Red Hat Linux 9 is finally released. OSNews had its hands to the final version of Red Hat Linux 9 for over 3 weeks now and we were able to evaluate it in a number of ways. The final version is not too different than the Phoebe-3 beta for which we wrote a preview recently.

The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0 "Mighty Atom", is ready for your bug-busting and testing. A few new modules were added to this dev beta of Gnome for testing: battfink (energy saving and battery tool), fontilus, galeon, gcalctool, gnome-mag (desktop magnification tool), gok ('GNOME On-screen Keyboard', an accessibility tool), gpdf, gucharmap (unicode character map tool), nautilus-cd-burner, themus (theme management), zenity.

"When I interviewed Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell last August, he hinted at a blurring of the lines between Linux and Solaris, if not an outright merger. Said Gingell: "Five years from now, when all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what's Solaris and what's Linux, and who's going to care?" Read the editorial at ZDNews.

I was desperately looking for something to write about when I happened to chance upon Apple’s new shipping system – a dual 1.42GHz Power Mac G4. A new system, a faster system, but does it mean a brighter future for Apple?

Microsoft Corp. "dropped the other shoe" today, as it were, announcing the first source code sharing program for its Windows CE embedded operating system that allows developers and manufacturers to actually redistribute modified OS code in real products. Read the report at WindowsForDevices.