A thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list started innocently enough about proper spacing in source code, then grew and grew into a somewhat philosophical debate about evolution and code design. The subject of the thread was "Coding style - a non-issue". However, before long a debate was sparked, leading to some interesting comments by Linus and some others, perhaps best summarized by Alan Cox's comment: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works." and Linus Torvalds: "And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has _nothing_ in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design there."

The second beta of the promising office suite gobeProductive 3 has been released. The Windows download file only weighs 6.3 MB and it includes further bug fixes and some new features. Remember to send bug reports to Gobe by stating your software and hardware setup along with a explanatory description of the bug. In related news, OpenOffice 6 Build 641b has also been released for Windows (47 MB), SPARC Solaris (68 MB) and Linux (75 MB).

"Windows XP helps itself to 20 per cent of your bandwidth, a useful tip at TweakXP reveals. But although this sounds like the sort of thing that could easily fuel paranoia (what's it doing with it?), it's more just a case of sloppy and wasteful configuration." Get the rest of the story at TheRegister.

"I predict that Linux will eventually be at the foundation of nearly every enterprise system and that the whole issue of which server operating system to choose will then disappear into ambient background noise. It's not often that I make predictions about predictions, but because the above prophecy is so bold, I'll make an exception: I predict that this will turn out to be one of the easiest predictions I've ever made." Nicholas Petreley predicts the future of Linux for ComputerWorld.

In last month's column, Dr. Edward G. Bradford, senior programmer at IBM, covered synchronization primitives and gave a reprise on pipes. This month he takes a first look at communication using sockets. Ed demonstrates some techniques for writing a sockets program and shows how his programming techniques perform in various operating system environments.

After a very short period of beta, Opera 6 for Windows is released. Read the press release or download the plain (3.2 MB) or the Java-enabled (10.7 MB) version. Opera 6 for Linux, Tech Preview 1, is also available.

If English is your native language and you are a technology or an OS savvy person, maybe you would like to join the OSNews Crew. OSNews needs people who enjoy writting feature articles, reviews and/or editorials and can deliver at least two or three of these articles each month (guidelines available). If you are up to the task, please let us know. If you are a developer (in this case, we couldn't care less about your native language, let C/C++ talk), who would like to write articles about algorithms, OS-related coding, OS techniques etc, we are also very interesting to host your article.

Daemonnews reports that "Looks like the OpenBSD project is a bit ahead of the scheduled Dec 1st release date for OpenBSD 3.0. This release is a 3 CD set, instead of the usual 2 CD set, but still comes in the 2CD size jewel case." In related BSD news, USB v2.0 support added to NetBSD-current. "The new ehci driver is still in development but is in a working state for some mass storage devices, such as CD-RW drives."

O'Reilly Network feature an interesting article regarding the QT 3.0 Toolkit, introducing C++ programmers to this elegant cross-platform OOP API. Also, the O'Reilly 'Programming with QT (2nd Edition)' book is slated to be released in the first quarter of 2002. Update: Another informative programming tutorial about asynchronous coding with QT, can be found at eZ.

LinuxPower features an interesting interview with Rodney Dawes. "At daytime Rodney is a faithful employee at Ximian working on making sure that the packages in Red Carpet are up to date. At night he is working hard to make his GNU/Elysium Linux distribution a reality."

MC emailed us about his own, new, operating system for x86 processors called... BugOS. Latest version is less than one month old, and the OS even has a TCP/IP stack, IDE driver, 64-bit FAT filesystem, a micro-kernel and more. The OS can be booted from a partition, from within DOS, CD-ROM or from two floppies.

Lineo, current holder of the CP/M and DR-DOS intellectual property, decided to open source the two operating systems. CP/M is a legendary operating system of the '70s and '80s, while DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS, used by Novell and Caldera at the end of the '80s and in the beginning of the '90s. Get more information at the full story at NewsForge. Update: DR-DOS' source code is only available for a fee.

Galeon 1.0, the browser that utilizes the Mozilla engine but in a lightweight fashion, was released recently and the LinuxLaboratory feature a quick review of the application. In related news, Opera Software announced the Opera 6 TechPreview version for Linux.

The Unununium-based distribution FRuSTRaTiON, version 0.3, has just been released. Features improved console support, new keyboard code with unicode support, ext2 file system support; and it can now run applications. Unununium is a Single-Addressing-Space environement entirely developed in 386+ assembly with an emphasis on speed. The system is entirely dynamic: Any component of the system may be reloaded at any time; there is not even a static nano-kernel. Channeled IRQ, dynamic linker, memory allocation, 3d engine and communication channels are only a few of the elements present in the system. Multiple virtual consoles support, fixing the thread engine and starting the development of a GUI are their current development priorities.