"At the time, most of us thought Oracle undercutting Red Hat's Linux business with its Unbreakable Linux was a big deal. Would customers flock to Oracle's cut-rate version of RHEL? Would Red Hat be pounded by Larry Ellison's minions? After a few months, the answers appear to be: No, it wasn't a big deal; and no; and no."

"Beryl 0.2.0 will be released shortly and I spent time the last week testing out Beryl 0.2.0 RC2 on Kubuntu's Edgy Eft. The improvements found in 0.2.0 are simply amazing. Improvements in usability features, improvements in the pure 3D eye candy, and even the Beryl Settings Manager has been improved (the layout has become much more logically laid out). As you read through this preview of Beryl 0.2.0 and see some of the screenshots, I think you will get a firm grasp on how impressive Beryl can be. Basically, Beryl makes OS X and Vista look old and antiquated."

After two months of development, Linux 2.6.20 has been released. This release includes two different virtualization implementations: KVM: full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Aditionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, and many other things. Read the list of changes for details.

"Apple seeded a new build of the Mac OS X 10.4.9 update to developers late last week, Think Secret has learned. According to seed notes accompanying the Intel version (build 8P2125) and PowerPC version (build 8P125) of the update, there are no known issues with the latest seed, suggesting that Version 10.4.9 may be nearing release. The latest seed fixed a handful of bugs, including issues with OpenGL, CoreImage, CoreData, iSync, and the Sync Services engine." The Adium X team also released version 1.0 of their program, which is used by a lot of Mac users.

"This show features an interview with Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux. After introducing the concept of free software, Richard offers some trenchant criticism of two tech superstars: the Lord of Linux, Linus Torvalds, and Apple guru Steve Jobs. From there, we move into a discussion of the impact of free software - and freedom more generally - on the evolution of personal and global consciousness."

"A new investor lawsuit against Dell accuses the computer maker of improperly accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from long-time partner Intel, a plaintiffs' attorney said on Friday. The lawsuit accuses Dell of artificially inflating profits "by secretly receiving approximately $250 million a quarter in likely illegal rebate kickbacks payments" from Intel in return for an exclusive deal to purchase Intel's microprocessors, class-action lawyer William Lerach told Reuters.

With only 3 weeks until FOSDEM 2007, the staff have published the first batch of interviews with some of their speakers. In this initial round of interviews, Jim Gettys shares his thoughts on the goals of the OLPC project, Federico Mena Quintero, one of GNOME's founders, gives a brief introduction to his speech on profiling desktop applications, and GEGL's main author Oyvind Kolas elaborates a little on the recent resurrection of the GEGL project. More interviews will be posted in the next couple of weeks.

"This series is a guide to those who need a quick XML-and-Perl solution. In a surprisingly large number of cases, you only need one tool to integrate XML into a Perl application, XML::Simple. Part 1 tells you where to get it, how to use it, and where to go next. Once you whet your appetite for working with XML in Perl, the other two articles in this series will help you sharpen your new skills further."

"Future versions of Windows are going to bear little resemblance to what we've heard so far officially - and unofficially - from Microsoft and the individuals who love to leak tidbits about the company. In fact, according to one of my reliable tipsters, the new and reorganized Windows organization, led by Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky, is trying to wean folks completely off the Windows code names they have been using for the next couple of releases of Windows. Welcome to the brave new world of 'Windows 7' (a boringly named complement to 'Office 14', the successor to Office 2007)." More here.

Microsoft executives pondered whether to remove the company's name from a 2002 report done by research firm IDC that touted Windows total cost of ownership over Linux, according to e-mail messages entered into evidence in an Iowa antitrust case. The report, which IDC released in December 2002 and was plugged by Microsoft in its then-new "Get the Facts" publicity campaign against Linux, compared total cost of ownership of Windows 2000 and Linux server software. The IDC study, which was identified as Microsoft sponsored when it debuted, claimed that Windows 2000 offered a lower TCO in four of five enterprise scenarios. Before its release, however, company executives worried that adding Microsoft's moniker would only fuel the fire from Linux partisans.

The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft. "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft," Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday. Update: The FSF claims this is being hyped.

A Microsoft-sponsored open-source project is expected on Friday to release a translator that will convert file formats between Microsoft Office and rival standard OpenDocument, or ODF. Microsoft started the project at SourceForge last year, relying on three partners to develop the code that lets a user open and save word processor documents in two different formats.

GPLv3 threatens to fork GNU projects and marginalize the Free Software Foundation, writes Linux observer Bill Weinberg in this essay. Drawing on long experience evangelizing open source licensing to business users, Weinberg suggests that the FSF's GPLv3 high road could be a lonesome one.

A new video showing the touchscreen-based UI of the LG Prada phone has hit YouTube. The phone is going head to head with the iPhone UI-wise and it shows the path that the majority of phones will look like in the years to come. It is not clear if the LG Prada is a smartphone that allows you to run native applications or just a 'feature phone'. On other mobile news, Google released a native Google Maps application for PocketPC and MS Smartphones (screenshots) that works better than the J2ME version.