A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael 'Monty' Widenius to 'save' the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures. Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL's current owner. The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three "solutions", including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

"Apple's Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is aimed squarely at small businesses that, for any number of reasons, need or prefer to host their core Internet services in-house without breaking the bank. Ars kicks the tires on the new combo to see if Apple has another hit on its hands."

The PC-BSD team has released the first beta release of PC-BSD 8.0. "The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, and KDE 4.3.4. Version 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements."

People, this is an interesting thing to follow first-hand. Hyperion, the company behind AmigaOS4, has been talking about its "Most Ambitious Project" for a while now, but on December 31, they started teasing the Amiga community like crazy. They opened a site called a-eon.com, which is most likely about the MAP.

BetaNews writes: "Microsoft executives and product managers -- Chairman Bill Gates, above all of them -- showed great technology vision for the new millennium. The company was right about so many trends to come but, sadly, executed poorly in bringing too many of them to market. Microsoft's stiffness, perhaps a sign of its aging leadership, consistently proved its foible. Then there is arcane organizational structure, which has swelled with needless middle managers, and the system of group competition".

"Last November, Russinovich triumphantly introduced developers at the company's annual PDC conference in Los Angeles to a multitude of measures implemented in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 not only to improve reliability and harden security, but to overcome the deficiencies he openly admits characterized the brief era of Windows Vista. Collectively, just the introductions to these new features by Russinovich and his partners consumed 11 hours over the first two days, all of that time with a standing-room-only crowd."