Concern is growing in the Linux community that the forthcoming UnitedLinux distribution will not be able to meet the enterprise server challenge of Red Hat Inc. in the United States. Red Hat's dominance is worrisome to some industry players, who say the Raleigh, N.C., company needs effective competition to prevent it from becoming a Microsoft among Linux vendors and to ensure the operating system continues to develop in an open way. The article is at eWeek. Update: NewsForge has an editorial too.

This IBM article shows how J2EE (WebSphere for Linux) and .NET can work together using Web services standards. Specifically it explains how EJBs can interact with COM+ components using Web services standards developed on WebSphere Studio and Visual Studio .Net. You can download WebSphere Studio for Linux. Update: On a related note, Microsoft released its Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview.

The new release of Syllable includes many updates on the code, drivers, API and widgets. The OS is now more "desktop-oriented". A copy of the announcement can be found here.

Caldera International, Inc. today announced it will change its name to The SCO Group (SCO) upon shareholder approval and will change the name of Caldera OpenLinux to SCO Linux as of version 4.0, due out this Fall. SCO Linux 4.0, powered by UnitedLinux, is a joint development effort from SCO, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux.

This document contains a summary of Microsoft's plan for Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework over the next two releases. Designed to assist customers in their planning process, it is not a comprehensive "feature dump," but more an overview of general themes and direction—an explanation of the development issues that Microsoft is planning to help customers address in each new release.

"Open source is supposed to be about freedom. Unfortunately, certain advocates have lost sight of that goal. People should be free to use software which best fits their needs, whether or not it adheres to a particular programming philosophy. I suggest that open source proponents spend their time crafting interoperability guidelines rather than creating a protected environment, which artificially boosts open-source adoption while hiding it from the full rigors of competition." Read the editorial at ZDNet.

SGI IRIX 6.5.17 is released and all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide include it. The IRIX 6.5.17 release contains updates for both the maintenance (6.5.17m) and feature (6.5.17f) streams. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release process.

Slow news day today, but this product is truly interesting and it deserves our attention. It is the most innovative graphics application I've seen since Painter (demo here), and that was many years ago. ZBrush from Pixologic is neither strictly 2D or 3D, but it is "2.5D". In addition to new features, ZBrush1.5, which comes out tomorrow, also provides significant enhancements in nearly every tool and palette. You'll get expanded and improved 2.5D painting capabilities, texturing options, and sculpting utilities, plus many behind-the-scene changes. The available demo for download (Mac/Win) is only for version 1.23b currently, but it will give you an idea of what this is all about. Also, CorelDraw 11 is out.

This is just a follow-up to our previous story about Apple designing the new Sherlock 3 to be very similar to Watson. We raised the question if this policy (the OS company competing with its own third party developers in the application space) was a good thing or not in the long run. Now the company behind Watson, Karelia, openly speak against Apple's policy and they are planning to port their (great) application to Windows. On a similar note, did anyone got even close to start working on this? Update: Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, wrote an editorial related to the question above.

An article on Japanese site PCWatch writes about a briefing Microsoft gave journalists earlier this week about 64-bit products it is proposing. One 64-bit OS is conspicuous by its absence, it would appear. Microsoft has outlined, according to the article, four different types of .NET server – Web, Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter – and the article gives an interesting table describing the differences between these products. In particular, the table outlines IA-64 support, memory requirements, Numa support and also whether the products will support multiple CPUs. But Opteron support is still a mystery.

From Slashdot: "FatPort (a wireless Internet service provider in Vancouver, BC) just released CompactBSD. It's a set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burns it onto compact flash (or similar) so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform (like FatPort's own FatPoint). CompactBSD takes the security and networking features of OpenBSD that we know and love, and combines them with ease-of-build and small footprint, which is great for embedded devices. Check out the project on SourceForge."

Download and beta test the version 9-beta 4, of the popular Linux distribution, Mandrake.

IBM just released a tutorial detailing the process involved in transforming "out of the box" Red Hat OS into a stable, secure, and better performing system customized to individual needs. Its based on Red Hat 7.3 but most of the techniques and procedures discussed are equally applicable to other Linux systems. This is also related to a "Speed Start Your Linux Program" and CD.

Apple plans a contrarian celebration for the anniversary of the Windows 95 launch, unleashing a new operating system aimed at stealing customers away from Microsoft. Saturday, the official release date of MacOSX 10.2, also is the seventh anniversary of the day that Microsoft presented Windows95 to the world in the most extravagant product kickoff in computing history. Apple hopes to make a little history of its own with software it sees as capable of wooing Windows users to the Mac. Read more at C|Net.