The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' -- companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion.

I don't think we've ever done this before, but we're going to promote a set of items currently up for bids on eBay. Why, you ask? Well, it's a complete collection of rare BeOS items - from t-shirts and software all the way up to a BeBox and a very rare BeIA web tablet. This is a goldmine for BeOS fans.

We are glad to present an exclusive interview with Plamen Dragozov--Director of Engineering at PopCap's mobile studio in Dublin, Ireland. "OSNews prides itself on (trying to) cover the diversity of operating systems, and so whilst we rarely cover games, we have approached you to discuss not so much the games themselves, as the technical challenges you go through bringing your games to a wide range of platforms". Read More for the full scoop.

Yes, it's been one busy week here at OSNews. We published a guide on how to build a computer that can run Mac OS X using an unaltered retail disc, and this guide became one of the most often-visited stories in a matter of days. On top of that, we had countless interesting and insightful discussions about Mono and Moonlight, the Linux Unified Kernel, switching to Mac OS X, the future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and lots of other interesting stuff. Due to me being engulfed in university work, there is - again - no My Take this week. It might take a few weeks before I can get My Take back into the game - my apologies for that.

Back when the whole netbook thing started, Asus was king of the hill with a focus on netbooks with Linux pre-installed. Since they were kind of popular, it didn't take Microsoft long to start working together with Asus to 'port' Windows XP to the Asus line of netbooks, and with that, to other netbooks as well. The result was that Linux netbooks are now harder to find for many people. While Dell committed itself to Linux on netbooks, Asus has decided to just skip the first date and jump right into bed with Microsoft.

If there is one technology in the Linux world that ruffles feathers whenever it's mentioned, it's Mono, the open source .Net clone. Since .Net comes out of Microsoft, and has some patents encircling it, it is said to be a legal nightmare. Supposedly, you can obtain a "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" license from Microsoft regarding the patents surrounding Mono. iTWire decided to look at just how easy (or hard) it is to get such a license. Turns out it's kind of hard.

The pairing of Sprint and Palm for the launch of the Pre was romantic. Don't laugh, you thought it too. Erstwhile smartphone leader Palm put its best hope for survival in the underdog wireless carrier who, without the Pre, has no ultra-competitive exclusive touchphone. Both companies have endured declining market share, and together they could take on the world and get some of it back. Well that romance is over, and it ended a little more than a week before the Pre even hit consumer availability. Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, yesterday announced that his company will offer the Pre "in the next six months".

Lots of people who are testing the various Windows 7 builds have already reported that Windows 7 is faster and snappier than Windows Vista, and some even say that it approaches Windows XP. Apparently, web browsers in particular will benefit from running on Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista SP2. BetaNews ran tests of all the major browsers on both Vista SP2 and Windows 7, and concluded that in general, browsers are round and about 12%-18% faster on 7 than on Vista.

Let's get thoroughly British! What what. Digital Planet, BBC's technology podcast walks through the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (Home to code-cracking Station-X during WWII), taking a simultaneous trip down memory lane discussing the general history of home computing. The podcast also talks to "Pixelh8" a chip-tune composer who has put together "Obsolete?" 'composed using some of the oldest and rarest computers in the world such as the WWII code-breaking machine Colossus Mark 2 Rebuild'.

Looking at the amount of ex-Apple people working at Palm, this shouldn't be a surprise: the Palm Pre works with iTunes on the Mac (not Windows), out-of-the-box. You can plug it, and the iTunes Store will treat as any iPod or iPhone. It obviously can't handle iPhone applications, and songs encumbered with Apple's DRM won't work either, but for the rest you're on your merry way. Apple didn't want to comment on this little tidbit.

"The heap in user mode has a number of different measures built in to make exploiting heap overrun vulnerabilities more challenging. Similar checks have been in debug versions of the kernel pool for some time to aid driver debugging. Windows 7 RC is the first version of Windows with some of these integrity checks turned on in release builds."

Here at OSNews we believe that in many ways the future of computing is mobile. It's also a pretty exciting field, since it's been so dynamic over the past ten years, with platforms rising and falling, and no one vendor ever rising to dominate. But this "wild west" market can be a real source of anxiety for mobile-oriented software developers, who have to gamble on which platform to support, or go to the extra effort of placing multiple bets. Maybe it's not a huge problem for hobbyists or developers of simplistic apps, but as the devices get more powerful, it's enabling the development of more powerful apps. If only these developers could develop a sophisticated mobile app that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms. Now they can. There's an open mobile framework called Rhodes that allows developers to write an app that will deploy on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.

Google will add scripting capabilities to Google Docs, allowing organizations to customize its online applications and automate tasks. Google plans to sign up about 1,000 customers over the next few weeks to test the feature, called Google Apps Script. It will be tested initially in Google Spreadsheets and extended to other Google Docs applications over time.