Several long-term development goals are starting to come together for the Syllable project. At a request from Carl Sassenrath, inventor of REBOL and chief architect of the Amiga OS, Kaj de Vos has created a website that allows you to try the REBOL programming language without installing it. The site showcases the new REBOL version 3. It also offers to test the classic REBOL 2 and ORCA, the open source implementation of REBOL, and to make comparisons between them.

Another Week in Review, that's how fast the week went by. It's really been mostly about MorphOS this week, but we also talked about how software licenses used to and should look. My item of the week is certainly the one about the end of the legal tousles in the Amiga world.

A little over two weeks ago, Microsoft released Microsoft Security Essentials, a security software suite protecting users of Windows against malware and viruses. The company has released data about the number of downloads and fixed infections, and the results are encouraging.

Whilst it's not okay in Microsoft's eyes for Google to install a plugin into Internet Explorer, increasing the potential surface area of attack, when Microsoft do it to Firefox, it's a different matter. Now a security hole has been found in a plugin that Microsoft have been silently installing into Firefox.

"HTML5 defines a standard way to embed video in a web page, using a video element. Support for the video element is still evolving, which is a polite way of saying it doesn't work yet. At least, it doesn't work everywhere. But don't despair! There are alternatives and fallbacks and options galore."

"Apple Friday sent its third beta release of the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.6.2 update with fixes for QuickTime, iChat, and a widely reported guest account glitch that could delete user data. People familiar with build 10C527f said the latest update has only one known issue, and has a number of fixes in 13 different focus areas. It also reportedly provides reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, iDisk, and Safari plug-ins."

And it's that time of the, eh, quarter again. The third quarter of 2009 has ended, so IDC and Gartner both published their figures on marketshare and sales. The big news is that Acer has surpassed Dell and is now the number two PC manufacturer in the world.

Today marks an entire week of using Haiku as my primary operating system. This is my first PC to get the most out of any BeOS related operating system to date. My old 200MHz Toshiba ran R5 PE just fine but without any networking. My eMachine ran Zeta just fine, but once again, there were networking issues (and Zeta was pronounced dead around this time). In the age of the Internet, this pretty much forced me away from BeOS and its decendants until now.

"Nokia has announced the availability of the first Qt 4.6 beta release. Version 4.6 represents a significant milestone, the first release since Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech, the company that originally created Qt. The open source C++ application development toolkit has evolved considerably under Nokia's stewardship and has undergone noteworthy technical and licensing changes."

"Kubuntu has been my favorite Linux distribution since the very first release. It was made specifically for us KDE fans, branded with beautiful Kubuntu-specific artwork and themes, contained the best Qt-based software, and dared to be different. In a world ruled by Ubuntu, it's given us KDE fans something to root for. Unfortunately, Kubuntu later became known as Canonical's third wheel, and each release seems to steadily diminish in quality. What's responsible for its current status, and what should be done to improve it?"

"There are countless pundits and other tech gurus describing Google Wave as a disappointment, lately. Most of that seems to come from the fact that nobody seems to get what Wave is for. So they compare it to social media. Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon." Read more here.

In the past, OSNews' interview volume was quite a bit higher than it has been lately. I had the pleasure of having lunch with Eugenia and her husband last week, and she mentioned that we haven't done as many interviews, and that in the past they were always very popular. So I decided that I'm going to make it a personal priority to publish more interviews. I'd like to crowdsource the idea, and ask the OSNews community who they'd like to see us interview. Please let us know in the comments of this story who you'd like us to talk to, and what specific questions you'd like us to ask. Shoot for the moon. It's not as hard to get an email-based interview as you might think. Obviously OS-world luminaries will always be a priority, but feel free to recommend people from the larger tech community, or even geek-oriented popular culture.

Micro kernel Mona with KVM virtio-net driver 0.3.0 has been released. This is the first release of Mona for daily use. You can listen to music, run a web server and do some work with an interactive shell. Major changes since 0.2.0 are ported uIP httpd, added KVM virtio-net driver, Added Scheme-based Shell, libc implementation, ported a Squirrel programing language, added standard I/O and pipe, improved thread APIs, added sound player and driver, improved CD-ROM access speed, improved console drawing speed, supported build on gcc 4.1.x, added VFS, support build on Linux, added APM support, ported Mesa, added Stack auto expansion, improved memory management, boot from CD-ROM. Also see the catalog of applications.

Let's do a little trip down memory lane. We're talking the '80s, early '90s, and we're looking at a company called Borland, which produced several well-known and popular products related to software development. Back in those days, Borland had an end user license agreement. However, contrary to the EULAs we know and despise today, Borland's 'No-Nonsense License Statement' was a whole lot simpler, and in fact, is a perfect example of how software should be treated.