"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?"

"There are dozens of articles like this one on the net. Over and over people suggested solutions like this for different reasons and although I know that such thing probably won't happen any time soon, from my point of view now it is the best moment ever in the history of both operating systems to merge in a one powerful alliance. And the hell has already frozen over, hasn't it? First I will give short description of both OSes, so we can see the strong and the weak sides of them and see if the combination should eliminate the shortcomings and make the good points even better." Update: Sun is giving out free Solaris 10 DVD sets.

The shared source licence being drawn up as part of the RISC OS Open project is in the hands of lawyers, it was revealed this week. In a report to be published by Archive magazine, Castle are said to have spent a 'lot of money' on legal bills to make the licence watertight. The company fears loopholes may be found in their complex shared source agreement which could allow royalty free use of the source code for commercial purposes or let people avoid disclosing updates to the RISC OS blueprints.

Sun took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress. On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress 'interpreter', a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.

This week's KDE Commit Digest tells about an installer for KDE on Windows and the problems the developers encountered setting up a working environment for KDE to run on. Many screenshots included, showing the first applications (such as Konqueror) running natively.

"When open-source developers and IBM took gambles on each other, free software showed it can flourish in the heartland of corporate computing." This is chapter 7 (free sample, so to speak) of a book on Linux and free software's rise to fame and use in the corporate world.

The next alpha release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Herd 2) is out. The Kubuntu announcement is here. "The Feisty Fawn Herd 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. The feature list for 7.04 has been slowly growing more exact since Feisty opened late last month." Update: Screenshots for Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

"When Steve Jobs took the stage this week to present one of the most important products in his company's history, he knew that the very name of the iPhone was in dispute and that U.S. communications officials had not even approved the device. Those facts might have concerned other business leaders in his position. But Mr. Jobs didn't miss a beat." More here.

Some more information about the Apple iPhone is keep hitting the web: the ARM CPU is apparently made by Samsung, applications will only be developed by third party companies that have a license agreement with Apple and make sure they follow specific guidelines (and possibly the apps will only be available by iTunes) while other sources say that the iPhone indeed runs a modified version of Darwin with a few OSX components (incorrectly reported by Slashdot today that it's not). Desktop OSX apps won't run on the iPhone of course. David Pogue also has two FAQs on the product (1,2).

The author of this article tells how tightly coupled are the Vista built in modules. As of date there is no known way to fix an individual component in case it gets corrupted.

Following on from the tutorial in part 1 of this series, David Chisnall explores some more-flexible mechanisms for allowing processes to communicate on a POSIX-compliant system.

As announced on the Haiku website and reported by IsComputerOn.com, Eric Petit has announced the development of a VMWare graphics driver for Haiku. Based on Be's driver sample code and code inspired by the X.org driver, Eric's driver so far implements RECT_BLIT and cursor functions (the latter are disabled as they are still buggy). The driver is already working as can be confirmed from this screenshot. On his initial post to the Haiku mailing list, Eric is asking for feedback, and has made the sources available in this tarball for those brave souls who would like to test the drivers.

"While the eyes of the IT world have spent years squinting to see Microsoft's slowly unfolding vistas, the companies and individuals that drive open source have been steadily building a case for broader adoption of Linux-based operating systems. Two of the best all-around Linux distributions to emerge from this process are OpenSUSE 10.2 and Ubuntu 6.10, both of which bundle together the best of what open source has to offer into operating systems that merit consideration for desktop and server workloads."