The European Commission's enterprise and industry department just released the final draft of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic/innovative impacts of FLOSS. The study was done by an international consortium, led by the United Nations University/University of Maastricht's department of innovation; UNU-MERIT for short. The study was prepared by senior researcher Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who did a tremendous amount of FLOSS studies the last few years, amongst them on FLOSSpols and FLOSSWorld.

Last July OSNews hosted the first version of the article "MorphOS - The Lightning OS" by Fulvio Peruggi as an entry to the OS Contest. The article has now been updated and extended, making it an even better introduction to the MorphOS operating system for a reader who does not know anything about MorphOS, and can be found here. Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French translations are available as well.

Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday said it has invented a revolutionary computer chip that uses nanotechnology to achieve a significant performance boost. Researchers at the world's largest computer maker said the new approach can allow an eightfold increase in the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a variety of programmable chips, while bringing savings in energy consumption.

The uIP embedded TCP/IP stack is a very small BSD-licensed implementation of the TCP/IP protocol stack that provides Internet-connectivity to 8- and 16-bit embedded microcontrollers. The memory footprint of uIP is very small; only about 5k code and less than 1k RAM, making it useful even in the smallest of embedded systems. The first version of uIP was released in 2001 and is currently used in a large number of embedded devices ranging from satellites and container monitoring systems to car engines and Cisco routers. But it all started with the world's first Internet-enabled Lego brick.

Even though the retail launch of Windows Vista just a couple of weeks away, Microsoft is still continuing to fine-tune its licensing and pricing details. Sources said that Microsoft will announce some time over the next few days that the two additional copies of Vista Home Premium for somewhere between USD 50 to USD 99 a piece. In order to qualify for the so-called 'Family Pack' promotion, customers will first need to purchase at retail a copy of Vista Ultimate, which carries an estimated retail price of USD 399. The deal will not be offered to those who purchase Ultimate preloaded on a new PC, sources said; it will be for customers buying and/or upgrading via retail channels only.

Lots of news on SkyOS. Kaffe using GNU Classpath (without AWT) is now working fine on SkyOS, just like Wine. Although there is no Wine graphics driver yet, you can already start Windows console applications directly from within SkyOS (once a Wine/SkyGI backend is available Wine should run on SkyOS as good as it does on Linux, and will be available via Software Store). On the driver side there is now an ACPI driver including support for ACPI power/sleep buttons (a SkyOS service, the PowerMonitor, will react on power events with configurable actions like shutdown, reboot, etc.). And finally, the SkyOS LiveCD is shaping together and should soon be available. Take a look at the changelog for all updates. Note: If you have problems accessing the SkyOS.org website, please click read more for how to solve this issue. Other than that, read more for a first glimpse of yet another improvement coming to SkyOS.

The FreeBSD development team is now busy working on the project's next major release, FreeBSD 7. This release is expected to contain a large number of radical new features, including a port of the ZFS file system and DTrace diagnostic tool from Solaris, as well as substantial performance enhancements. Those of you who are interested in learning about the changes in the rapidly evolving FreeBSD 7 branch should bookmark the 'What's cooking for FreeBSD 7?' page, which attempts to summarise the recent commits by the project's developers. FreeBSD 7.0 is scheduled for release in late 2007.

You may have missed it with all the news coming out of last week's Macworld Expo, but Apple recently distributed a new pre-released build of Mac OS X 10.4.9 to its developer community. The latest is just the second build of the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system update to make its way outside the company's walls since build 8P2111 was released to developers in late December. Since build 8P2111, which included numerous fixes for wireless and sync technologies, Apple has reportedly shifted the focus of Mac OS X 10.4.9 to some lower-level technology improvements.

"This guide shows how to work with LVM on Linux. It also describes how to use LVM together with RAID1 in an extra chapter. As LVM is a rather abstract topic, this article comes with a Debian Etch VMware image that you can download and start, and on that Debian Etch system you can run all the commands I execute here and compare your results with mine. Through this practical approach you should get used to LVM very fast."

In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.

"Just because KDE has been designed to be portable across Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX/X11 environments for an age now, doesn't mean we aren't up for the occasional challenge. With version 4, Trolltech released Qt for the Mac, Windows and now even embedded environments under the GPL. Since Qt is the base upon which KDE is developed, KDE is now free to offer native support for these platforms. Today I am focusing on the KDE/Mac developments for KDE 4."

"With thousands of packages to maintain, most important part of any distribution is indeed its package management system. PiSi is the package manager of Pardus, written from scratch in Python. By writing another package manager, our purpose was not to reinvent the wheel but to create a new kind of wheel that takes distinctive ideas from existing ones with also easy integration and maintanence in mind."

"MIT's Technology Review recently interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup in a two-part article (part one, part two). You may know Bjarne as the inventor of the C++ programming language. Indeed, he even maintains a comprehensive C++ FAQ that answers every imaginable C++ question. Here are a few select quotes from the interview that I found notable."

Ian Murdock blogs about the importance of backward compatibility. "Yes, it's hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term 'just' for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don't break. Why is backward compatibility important?"