"It all boils down to these two extremes: RMS wants software freedom regardless of user satisfaction, and Miguel de Icaza wants user satisfaction regardless of whether the principles of the GPL are violated. Everyone else in the GNOME project is somewhere in between, spanning the gap." Read the report at NewsForge.

Yesterday we hosted a competition for the great multi-platform programmer's text editor, Pepper. Hekkelman Programmatuur informed us that the lucky winner is Tim Vernum. Congratulations Tim!

The first big news today from the WWDC 2002 is that Apple now officially stops the MacOS 9 development and goes full speed with OSX. Steve Jobs calls the next step "X only. It's time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only." He cited Microsoft as an example of companies that are going X only. Apple expects to see 5 million MacOSX users by the end of the year. "These are the guys buying the application software," he said. "MacOS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for you . Today we say goodbye to MacOS 9 for all future development," said Jobs. Stay tuned for more news from WWDC. Update: "Quartz Extreme" will probably force most of the Mac users to upgrade. Read on. Update 2: Read on.

When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book was for beginners. But, reading through it, I realized that the beauty of the book is in teaching new users lessons that are solid and well constructed throughout its 350 pages.

In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary -- and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple's genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a "Kernel Programming" online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.

Pepper is a great text editor for programmers whose main principle is to help its user be as productive as possible. A typical example of Pepper's innovations is the invention of the "Accelerator". The Accelerator allows you to enter text or code quickly with a simple keystroke. Hekkelman Programmatuur, the company behind Pepper, will give away for free a copy of Pepper 4 to a lucky OSNews reader. Pepper currently runs on MacOS/X, Windows2k/XP, while a release for Linux and FreeBSD (and possibly IRIX and Solaris) will be ready in the next few months. The winner will receive a "keycode" unlocking the software for all platforms. Read more to see how you can enter the competition. Update: Competition is now closed! Thanks everyone who participated!

As seen on BSDForums: "The FreeBSD-STABLE branch of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.6. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the release engineering team first. The expected ship date for 4.6 is June 1 2002."

"Solaris 8 is getting a little long in the tooth. It has been out and stable for more than a year. Most applications are certified and supported on it by the vendors. And yet many sites are still running Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 2.7. There are many reasons to move, and many reasons not to upgrade. A major hurdle to performing the upgrade is the sheer complexity (and risk) of system upgrades. This month, the Solaris Companion explores the reasons to stay put and the reasons to upgrade, and provides detailed how-to-upgrade instructions." Read the article at UnixReview, while OnLamp features another Solaris-related article, titled "Optimizing Disk Subsystems for Random I/O".

"Although many people frequently belittle Palm OS 4 as being nothing new, it has introduced true disk-like expansion to the Palm platform en masse. Although not the first instance of expansion options for Palm OS, OS 4-based devices are now appearing in droves, ushering in a new wave of applications and possibilities. Of course, as with any major step forward, with all of these new options come new problems, incompatibilities, and confusion." Part I, Part II and Part III of the article at InfoSync.

Porting Windows applications to Linux doesn't have to involve a retraining nightmare. Markus Neifer shows how to port MFC using wxWindows, giving a user's guide to this open source GUI toolkit and providing a complete, step-by-step porting example.

On May 14, 2001, H. Peter Anvin announced to the linux-kernel mailing list: 'Linus Torvalds has requested a moratorium on new device number assignments. His hope is that a new and better method for device space handling will emerge as a result.' Greg Kroah-Hartman describes how the PCI Hot Plug core implements a RAM-based filesystem and how you can do the same for your drivers. The article is hosted at LinuxJournal.

This article at LinuxGazette is a hands-on tutorial for building a small boot sector. The first section provides the theory behind what happens at the time the computer is switched on. It also explains our plan. The second section tells all the things you should have on hand before proceeding further, and the third section deals with the programs. The little startup program won't actually boot Linux, but it will display something on the screen.

"Xlib is a library that allows you to draw graphics on the screen of any X server, local or remote, using the C language. All you need to do is include , link your program using the -lX11 switch, and you are ready to use any of the functions in the library." Learn to program X with the tutorial at LinuxGazette.

"Microsoft wants us to believe that Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are tied so deeply in the OS that they cannot be removed. As middleware they are good things, but so is DirectX, and Microsoft doesn't say that can't be removed from the operating system. Windows is far more modular than Microsoft wants to admit to the court. Microsoft has grown to the point that they no longer need to compete, and the only way for them to survive as a company is to stop competing and start sharing. If something doesn't happen to change Microsoft's behavior, the backlash against them and other corporate giants will send proprietary software and countless tech jobs into obsolescence." Read the editorial at Kuro5hin.