A note from Subband Software, former developer of MacAmp, cropped up recently: "Thanks to everyone who supported us over the years. iTunes just got to be far too big, far too free, and far too bundled with the OS." The editorial is going on giving more examples how Apple is taking away market from the small developers by embedding such user software on OSX (e.g. iPhoto, iMovie etc). In the past we talked about it regarding the Watson application and its competition with Sherlock 3. Update: One of the two developers (the most commited one) of Chimera is thinking of dropping out: "I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn't any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much." In the meantime, Safari tops 1 million downloads.

We recently reported on the possibility of Apple acquiring Gobe Productive 3, and we suggested caution on the rumors. Yesterday, MacRumors quoted Bob Hearn regarding the issue (ex-Claris/Gobe employee), who says that the 3 ex-Gobe employees now at Apple, have nothing to do with a possible GP3 port, and they don't even work on AppleWorks' codebase (ex-ClarisWorks, which was also developed by Gobe back in the day as "Claris Inc"), but on other projects. Surfing around the MacRumors site, I came across an article regarding the USB-2 status on Macs. On other office suite news, OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 is available (release notes here) but no official announcement is out yet.

The GNU-Darwin project is now considered stable and it has reached 1.0 status (it seems that the latest beta will be marked as 1.0). Download from here, packages, ports.

The Genesi Group calls for the creation of Development Teams and User Groups in an effort to establish the new platform and introduce it to technically-savvy users. The company also hopes for ports of a number of x86 OSes to their Pegasos platform as an addition to MorphOS.

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

Distrowatch was the first to notice that the second beta of Mandrake Linux 9.1 is hitting the mirrors. Unlike the first beta, this one comes on two CDs: an 645MB ISO and a 650MB ISO image. There is plenty of pre-release and beta software, including Kernel 2.4.21pre3, XFree86 4.2.99.4, KDE 3.1rc6 and Mozilla 1.3alpha, but it also comes with the brand new OpenOffice 1.0.2.

"As the second victim in the TinyMinds interview series we have picked the SlicKer project as our target. SlicKer aims to someday replace Kicker in KDE with its own more task-oriented approach. Today we talk to one of it's developers; keyboard cowboy Shamyl Zakarika." Read the interview here. Our Take: I worked with Shamyl back in the early BeUnited days, just right after Deej and myself founded it (the goals for BU were different back then), and Shamyl was one of the very few developers (a total of 130+) who actually delivered what he said he would. I have faith on Shamyl's ability to deliver great apps.

The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it, but how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year. The benchmarks provide coverage for a diverse set of workloads, including Web serving, database, and file serving. In addition, we show the various components of the kernel (disk I/O subsystem, for example) that are stressed by each benchmark.

The company plans to update its Smartphone 2002 operating system to fix flaws that make it possible to send rogue software programs to a specific model of phone that uses the OS.

Hewlett-Packard and others pull out of a Linux conference after sponsor Lindows bumps open-source advocate Bruce Perens out of the keynote speech slot in favor of its chief executive. We reported on this, but now News.com reports on this with more news about the companies that are starting to pulling out of the event.

"A year after Bill Gates called for Microsoft to make its products more "trustworthy," executives are touting myriad initiatives as proof of the software giant's new resolve. The company has spent millions to train staff in privacy concerns and secure programming, while building new tools and processes to help create reliable software. But critics--and Microsoft's own executives--said much more work remains." Read the report at ZDNews.

Brian Richardson, AMI's engineer, replies to a long interview on Slashdot about TCPA, Palladium, and other BIOS issues. Interesting read.

Ladislav Bodnar writes "Mandrake Linux 9.1, a GNU/Linux distribution in the making, is currently under intensive development. This review is an attempt to compare its first beta to Mandrake Linux 9.0, which I have been using for several months. What are the main improvements? The major difference as I can see between the two releases is that MandrakeSoft has updated practically all the packages in 9.0. In the process they have solved a number of small but annoying bugs that plagued 9.0, while keeping the qualities that users have come to appreciate in their various releases: ease of installation, speed and usability." Read the review at DistroWatch

Jonathan writes "I'm proud to present SkyKruzer, the first WebBrowser for SkyOS. Finally, I reached the first milestone I set for myself more then 2 years ago. It should be possible to develop new applications with an IDE, browse through the internet and listen to some MP3's or play games. I reached this point with the brand new implementation of SkyKruzer (the default WebBrowser for SkyOS)." More can be read at skyos.org.