Open-source database company MySQL has decided to stick to the current General Public License rather than move to an upcoming revision, pending broader industry acceptance. MySQL, one of the most successful commercial ventures to use the GPL, has modified its license terms from 'version 2 or later' to 'version 2' only, according to Kaj Arno, the company's vice president of community.

Novell's controversial pact with Microsoft reflects the desire of the number two Linux seller to position itself as a mixed-source company. Speaking to ZDNet Asia last week, Maarten Koster, the newly-appointed president of Novell Asia-Pacific, noted that the company positions itself in the market differently from its rivals. "You've got Red Hat as a pure open source company, and you've got Microsoft as a license-based company," Koster said. "The reality is, most Novell customers run a mixed-source IT environment."

"In my opinion, the Draw module is one of the most significant and useful components of RISC OS. For the uninitiated, it provides a set of routines for calculating, transforming and rendering lines, polygons, bezier curves, sprites, and text. The Draw application has been bundled with every version of RISC OS and the draw file format is a defacto standard for almost every RISC OS application that incorporates graphics, and then some. In this article I hope to demonstrate some of the flexibility that Draw and the RISC OS desktop can provide."

"Today, you can do everything you want with a Linux desktop, except play the latest games. Even there, Linux is catching up. So, why do only a handful of people run Linux instead of Windows? Here are my top-four reasons why Windows wins and Linux loses."

An attempt is being made to quickly patch flaws in Apple software that are announced by vulnerability researchers Kevin Finisterre and LMH this month. The researchers' 'Month of Apple Bugs' project, launched on Monday, promises to feature a new Apple software bug for each day in January. However, a senior open-source developer with extensive experience working for Apple says he is attempting to offer fixes for each flaw found.

"In the street's imagination, Apple is Jobs. Or perhaps the other way around: Jobs is Apple. Whatever. This theory is still all about Jobs cracking the whip in Cupertino and speaking the Mac gospel to the public at the annual Macworld Expo and Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynotes. But is that right? Is this personal identification necessary for the continued success of Apple?" Elsewhere, Apple's top five business decisions.

"Since KDE 4 development is in full swing with plans for a KDE 4.0 release sometime later this year, I thought I'd put together a weekly piece entitled The Road to KDE 4. The idea is to have a short overview of one or two of the features that show progress in KDE 4. For my first issue, the goal is to show off some of the great SVG work that has taken place so far."

A US computer scientist and a Microsoft researcher have devised a program that drastically reduces application crashes and can prevent some types attack by altering the way applications use memory. The program, called DieHard, officially launched over the holidays, following development that was funded by large grants from Microsoft, Intel and the US' National Science Foundation.

Volunteers are calling it quits on a project called Fedora Legacy to provide long-term support for Red Hat's hobbyist-oriented Fedora version of Linux. "The Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down," said project organizers Jesse Keating and David Eisenstein in a Fedora Legacy mailing list posting Friday. The organizers didn't provide a specific reason for the decision, but a lack of contributions from outside programmers contributed, Keating said in a separate mailing list posting.

"D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. See this comparison of D with C, C++, C#, and Java."

"It has been one year to the day since XGI Technology had last released a Volari Linux display driver and about 14 months since we had first delivered word of XGI considering open-source 3D display drivers. Where do things now stand for XGI Technology? We will tell you all of the details today where things are for this Taiwan graphics company."

Our friends over at MobileBurn posted an in-depth review of the Linux-based Rokr E2. This is the first phone Motorola released that doesn't use their touchscreen-based EZX Linux platform, but a very modified softkey version of it instead. A few months ago we also reviewed the Rokr E2. In related news, a few weeks ago Motorola also released in Asia the new, Linux-based Rokr E6, based on the touchscreen-based EZX version of their Linux platform. Native SDKs are not available.

About a week ago the Elive project released version 0.6 of their E17-based (installable) live CD. Since Elive is one of the few distributions using E17 as its standard desktop environment, we thought we would treat you to a nice screenshot tour.

The winter issue of the OS2eCS eZine has been published, with various different articles on, among other subjects, OpenDOC, Warpstock Europe and North America, Lucide, and CBIRC.