"Microsoft Corp.'s new licensing programs take effect tomorrow, shifting the model for OS pricing but also for office productivity suites. Microsoft's Volume Licensing Program, delayed twice, kicks in on July 31. The most controversial feature of the plan, Software Assurance, is essentially Microsoft's subscription-based licensing plan for small- and medium-business owners. An enterprise version of Microsoft's software license already requires a yearly fee." Read the report at ExtremeTech, Yahoo!News, while News.com says that the majority of Microsoft's customers won't be signing up for a controversial licensing plan set to go into effect on Thursday, according to analysts' estimates.

"Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know what Mozilla is in general. For those of you in the dark, check out the overview provided by Mozilla for a decent breakdown of the project. The purpose of this review is to assess the win32 port of Mozilla 1.0 and its immediate successors (1.1a and .1b) as a milestone in the development of what may prove to be the greatest challenger to the Internet Explorer empire. We'll consider the pros and cons of Mozilla's core renderer, its implementation (Navigator), Mail, Chatzilla (an IRC client), and the bundle as a whole." Read the review over at ArsTechnica.

"Sun and Apple have no concrete plans to codevelop a version of Sun's StarOffice productivity suite for the Mac OS X operating system, two open-source developers and a Sun official said Monday. Sun held a conference call with the two OpenOffice developers on Monday to clarify that Sun and Apple are not working on their own project to create a version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X by year end. Sun has been in ongoing talks with Apple to see "what it would take" to make a version of StarOffice that had the look and feel of an Apple application, Siress said. These talks, however, are really little more than the same theoretical discussions that have been going on over the last couple of years, he said." The report can be found at InfoWorld.

The NetBSD team has decided to do away with any selective moderation for postings originating from the openbsd.org domain based on an email announcement on behalf of NetBSD. This rule was instated to protect the NetBSD mailing lists from abuse or denial of service attacks by the founder of OpenBSD, Theo De Raadt, who some time ago threatened to attack the NetBSD project machines. The original report can be found at BSDForums.org.

"The software giant on Tuesday announced a new version of its Windows CE .Net operating system, adding broader support for its .Net services from within Windows CE, a slimmed down version of Windows used to power devices ranging from handheld computers to gas pumps." Report is at ZDNews.

"As we reported back in March, IBM Corp is said to be readying the next release of its Unix operating system, AIX 5L V5.2, to get it into the market by October of this year. It is expected to deliver the kicker to this release sometime in the second half of 2003." Read the report at TheRegister.

Read more to vote for the operating system that should have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never happened for whatever reason. Please make sure you vote an OS based on its *technical capabilities*, not because you used to be its user when you were 16, or because you like its background color, or because you heard good things about it once. Vote for the one that you truly think it was technically superior at its time.

"A letter was received by one member of the KDE development team asking the KDE Project to use Red Hat Linux on machines at LWCE and to display RedHat's shadow man logo on those machines. In exchange, the letter from RedHat explained, KDE would "benefit from many valuable marketing benefits in our booth, on our website, and in our newsletter." At press time, Open for Business was unaware of any response by Mann or others at RedHat concerning this PR disaster. It does, however, raise an interesting question of what the software vendor hopes to accomplish with its continuing near boycotting of KDE. As Red Hat's might is considerably weaker in the desktop segment, with its preferred desktop (GNOME) taking only about 20% of the desktop market versus KDE's over 50%, they would be wise to change course. While being at 70% market share 2-3 years ago, Red Hat hardly enjoys more than 25% market share nowdays." Read the whole story about the PR fiasko at OfB.

"The four distributors Caldera, Conectiva, Suse Linux, and Turbolinux are planning to introduce UnitedLinux, a joint server operating system for enterprise deployment, in November of this year, the companies said late Friday. The technical specifications of the OS have already been finalized." Read the interesting report on what will be included on the UnitedLinux distribution over at ExtremeTech.

In light of all the controversy surrounding the price of Apple's new OSX 10.2 Jaguar upgrade scheme, it is interesting that is today obtainable from Amazon.com for $79 USD ($129 - $50 rebate). On a related note, Macintouch is reporting that Apple is extending the MacOSX Up-to-Date and MacOSX Server Up-to-Date programs to include Jaguar Server upgrades for just $19.95 in response to intense criticism. Apple also added that people who bought MacOSX 10.1 retail in its own box, can get an upgrade if purchased July 17 or later.

Red Hat released the second beta for their upcoming Red Hat Linux product, codenamed Limbo. Apparently, this will be called "Red Hat Linux 7.4" and not 8.0, as many people concluded earlier. The new beta includes many bug fixes, new versions for KDE and some additional fixes for Gnome 2.0 from the CVS, as well as GCC 3.2-pre. Mailing list archives for Limbo here.

Want to know why many developers have chosen Windows Embedded for their real-time computing solutions? Read technical articles, case studies, and independent viewpoints on real time, and learn which Windows Embedded operating system might be right for you.

This Cosmoe release's major features: Improved autoconf support for DirectFB, autoconf support for building Cosmoe to run in an X window (--enable-xwindows), mouse changed to /dev/mouse from /dev/psaux, better failure cases for the video driver loading, so if Cosmoe fails to load you're not stuck with a dead keyboard, incorporation of contributed bug fixes for Aedit and Aterm. Features coded but not included in this release: Sed scripts to convert Atheos programs to Cosmoe. Download here, read the mailing list here.

Norman Feske at the technical university of Dresden, Germany, is developing a new windowing system for the experimental Drops OS, called DOpE. DOpE runs under Linux as well and it can run X11 on a window. Read the proposal explaining the project (in german) and check out some screenshots.