"Richard Dale recently announced that he has committed C bindings for the KDE3/Qt3 libraries to KDE's CVS. Richard generated the C bindings automatically using a hacked kdoc, with relatively little manual intervention. According to him, "The bindings wrap about 800 classes 13,000 methods, with 200k of C/C++ generated." The same hacked kdoc can also generate Objective C and Java bindings, and Richard hopes to be able to consolidate generation of these various KDE bindings (Java/Objective C/C) with this one tool." Get the rest of the news at .DOT KDE.

Microsoft is moving along with the deployment of .NET by announcing the first details of what it will charge software developers to build applications linked to its .Net My Services Web services plan. For entry-level, small-scale applications, Microsoft will charge developers $1,000 a year for access to .Net My Services and $250 per application they create. For standard use, which Microsoft expects will involve the majority of users, Microsoft will charge $10,000 per year for using .Net My Services and $1,500 per application.

InfoAnarchy has an interesting story about Microsoft's shady OEM practices. Everyone who believes in competition on the OS market should read it. The article is an extension of Scot Hacker's "He who controls the boot loader" article, published 2 months ago and had put lot of people into deep thinking regarding Microsoft's business practices.

"The quarter's revenue total includes $62.5 million made selling "non-core intellectual property rights" to Microsoft But it's worrying when a company has to look at what else it can sell off to help up make what it has lost in the sales of its core products. Take away the Microsoft-sourced revenue, and SGI's quarterly sales figure falls to $316.5 million - 27 per cent lower than the previous quarter" TheRegister reports on SGI's status. Our Take: Sell out may be one of the reasons why the interview we sent to the IRIX kernel team 2 months ago was never returned answered. The engineers were willing and responded immediately, but that was not the case for their marketing and PR departments which we had to go through and get their "ok".

After Palm announced the buyout of Be, Inc.'s intellectual property & Technology and after some consequent indications from several key people that Palm has no interest at Be's products and especially in BeOS, a number of the BeOS believers tried to find a new home. Some found confort in AtheOS, others joined BeUnited's effort to license the BeOS source code, while some developers formed efforts like OpenBeOS and BlueOS. OpenBeOS (OBOS for its friends) consists from a number of BeOS developers who are trying to recreate the BeOS Kits in a form of a new, complete and open source Operating System that has source and if possible binary compatibility with BeOS 5. One of the most important people in this effort, Michael Phipps, also part of the kernel team, is here today for an interview to OSNews.

"Move over IBM, Sun, and Microsoft. When it comes to operating systems that are scalable, reliable, and fully outfitted to run enterprise applications and e-businesses, there's a trusted name with a proven track record. It isn't Unix, Linux, IBM's z/OS, or Windows. It's the venerable OpenVMS, and it's on a path to become more affordable." Get the rest of the story at ZDNetTech.

REBOL is a powerful software technology (ever thought that you could write a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in only 7 kb of source code?) designed from the ground up to enable a new era of distributed Internet applications. The technology provides a ubiquitous, lightweight model of distributed computing that operates across all types of computer systems. REBOL is a true distributed computing architecture. Applications and data become distributed across all devices. REBOL is completely device independent, so it does not matter what operating system or hardware is being used. Every system of the Internet becomes an independent resource that can process and communicate information. The REBOL kernel currently runs on more than 40 different operating systems -- everything from large Sun Solaris servers, to Windows and Macintosh PCs, to Linux, BeOS, down to CE handheld devices. And it is here to revolutionize the Internet, by introducing the X Internet (also called as 'XNet') through the REBOL Internet Operating System (IOS). Read more of what Carl Sassenrath, Rebol Tech's CTO and founder, has to say about the future, Rebol and the race against Microsoft's .NET Services.

FreeBSD boots in single user mode on the SPARC platform. The boot log can be found here. FreeBSD already runs on x86 and Alpha, the SPARC port seems to go well, however the PPC port is not moving that fast.

"Apple is becoming increasingly irritated with its prime PowerPC provider, Motorola, to the extent that it talking to fellow PowerPC partner, IBM, about how the platform can continue to evolve without the chips-to-cellphones giant's participation, sources close to the Mac maker have claimed." TheRegister analyzes the situation and proposes alternatives for Apple. In the meantime, more information about Motorola's new G5 CPU are coming to light. Our Take: The article proposes that Apple should look into Itanium and Sun SPARC CPUs to port MacOSX into, but I think the author has left out a more realistic candidate, if indeed Apple is getting a divorce from Motorola: the AMD Hammer. Except Linux and some rumours that a new version of WindowsXP may run in this new AMD 64-bit CPU, I believe that MacOSX could enrich and also gain from this new platform.

Red Hat Linux 7.2 is available for sale in stores now, and for online download. See the Red Hat Linux product website for information. Key features include easy migration to the ext3 journaled filesystem, GNOME 1.4 and Nautilus, custom Linux 2.4.7 kernel, TUX, choice of GRUB or LILO bootloaders, and more. ZDNet has a review.

Borland, will announce version 2 of its Kylix package Tuesday. Kylix, introduced in January, lets software developers write programs that can be used on Linux or Windows machines. The new version will add features that improve the product's support for Web services, a representative said. Web services move tasks that took place on a PC or a single server onto a network of servers, ZDNews reports. In other development news, Python 2.2b1 was released.

Kerneltrap has posted the latest in-depth kernel hacker interview with Russell King, who originally ported Linux to ARM and continues to oversee ARM Linux development: "I started hacking on Linux for my Acorn A5000 machine back in Spring 1994 while still at Southampton University, after a fellow student, Martin Ebourne, introduced it to me. An A5000 is a desktop-like ARM based machine. It was already about 3 years old and underpowered at that time, with only 4MB of RAM but it was the machine I had." Russell talks about ARM, the 2.4 kernel, the upcoming 2.5 kernel and much more.

From Wired News: Apple on Tuesday will unveil a new portable electronic device that allows people to listen to digital music files away from the computer, according to sources familiar with the company. The device -- called the iPod -- can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system. Last Wednesday, Simple Devices released a wireless platform that allows users to stream MP3 files from a personal computer to home or car stereo systems. Motorola will roll out a wireless receiver for home stereos that runs on the new Simple Devices platform.

"...Some weeks ago we got a mail from Richard Stallman asking that we stop all mentions of non-free software in the GNOME summaries. The background for the request was that we had mentioned the beta of Star Office some time back. I argued that the purpose of the GNOME summaries was to promote GNOME and while our focus of course is free software I felt that it was natural to mention the availability of non-free software where the existence of such software where a clear advantage for GNOME. RMS replied telling us that he disagreed with my argument and saying that we are legitimatizing the use of non-free software by mentioning it..." This is part of the email that Christian Schaller sent to the Gnome Foundation mailing list asking the Gnome users for their opinion on how to proceed on the matter. So far, the replies are taking Christian's side and some mentioned that Richard Stallman's opinions are, simply put, extreme in this case.