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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.