Borland Software has licensed a key piece of Microsoft's .Net software and will build a new line of programming tools for .Net later this year, the companies announced Monday.

KDE 3.1 is out, announcement here, the source packages are linked on the 3.1 info page, and are also available in stable/3.1 directory on the KDE FTP site.

Microsoft comes under regular fire for its apparent eagerness to end-of-life its products, making them more difficult and expensive to support, and hence forcing users to upgrade to the next version. But without fanfare Red Hat has quietly introduced its own approach to end-of-life, and compared to this, Microsoft's idea of an upgrade cycle looks pretty sedate. As of the release of Red Hat 8.0, the company is only guaranteeing errata maintenance for the 12 months following a product's release.

"Going by the numbers, Apple appears headed for trouble again. But fear not, Mac faithful: Apple may never again pose a threat to Microsoft and its PC allies, but its niche is safe. In the $160 billion PC market, a 3% market share should be enough to fund Apple's research-and-development push. Nothing will come easy for Apple, however. It is rapidly losing its grip on the education market, a former stronghold. Over the next year, Apple may get a boost in the professional market. Finally, Apple is moving beyond the Mac." Read the article on BusinessWeek. Also, Apple strengthens server support.

Windows NT 4.0 Server, still the weapon of choice for quantities of the more truculent IT manager, has been given another 12 months to live. Microsoft today intends to announce that paid incident and security hotfix support for the product, previously scheduled to cease at the end of this year, will now run up until 31st December 2004.

"A lot of people are watching Miguel de Icaza, a bubbly young Mexican programming whiz behind an unusual project he named 'Mono', Spanish for monkey. Icaza's company, Ximian, has already produced software called Evolution that gives users of the free, open-source Linux operating system e-mail and calendar tools comparable to those that run on Microsoft's Windows operating system." Read the article at SiliconValley.

In late November of 2002, OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt announced on the project's mailing lists that after over a year of attempting to obtain useful UltraSparc III documentation, they had still not made much headway. In the email he rallied the OpenBSD community to help out, asking them to contact the people within Sun responsible for providing such information. C/Net reported on this in their story titled, Open-source clan in spat with Sun. The UltraSparc III is Sun's third generation 64-bit RISC architecture based processor.

From BSDForums: "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

"The Unix98 standard requires largefile support, and many of the latest operating systems provide it. However, some systems still chose not to make it the default, resulting in two models: Some parts of the system use the traditional 32bit off_t, while others are compiled with a largefile 64bit off_t. Mixing libraries and plugins is not a good idea." Read the article at Freshmeat. On another interesting technical reading, you will find "Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager" and "Code Commentary on the Linux Virtual Memory Manager".

In their on-going GNU/Linux review series, most OfB have received much criticism from loyal users of the various distributions we have covered. Timothy R. Butler notes that many of the issued raised by those who commented on the series were cases of "knee-jerk" reaction and ponders how such reactions impact the community at large and its appearance to outsiders.

The bug fix version Bochs 2.0.2 has been released. This release is the last planned bugfix release for the 2.0.x series. On other dev news, multiplatform GUI toolkit wxWindows 2.4.0 was recently released.

It's been a week since FreeBSD 5.0 got released. Many argue that this release is the most important and most technically advanced, ever, for FreeBSD. I am truly disapointed though on the way the media have responded to this release.

Jamie Zawinski wrote an editorial regarding the status of video playback under Linux (note: strong language is used). My take: The guy is my hero (he could use better language though). This is exactly the status of usability on Linux, and not just with video players...

HelloWorld is a software application with a visual approach to connecting people, online messaging, search and transfer operations, and personal publishing, in a decentralized network environment that is owned and operated by the network community. The application (soon to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac) is literally an alternative user interface for our online needs.