"Over the past years, the intrepid duo of James Bandler and Charles Forelle at the Wall Street Journal have helped unearth dozens of examples of options backdating at companies large and small. Their investigations of the dishonest practice have led to the resignation of dozens of top executives and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors. But the options scandal has never touched a more exciting company than Apple or a more thrilling executive than Jobs."

With some 24 hours until Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to kick off Macworld Expo, Think Secret presents a compilation of information we have received and reported over the last number of months concerning Apple's anticipated announcements.

"Two luminaries - chairmen of Apple and Microsoft - make keynotes this week, in a highly anticipated standoff between the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld. While analysts, bloggers and reporters will debate different strategies in operating systems (Leopard vs. Vista), entertainment (iTV vs. Home Server, Media Center and Windows Live), digital media (iLife vs. Windows Ultimate Extras and Windows Live), music (iPod vs. Zune) or mobiles (iPhone vs. Windows Mobile), I will focus on the men's personalities and the companies' different approaches to the events. The contrasts in style and substance will be important in making sense out of the companies' announcements."

"Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected. The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good news is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed. At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."

The new ReactOS newsletter has been published. "Currently the main development branch "trunk" even though it has many new features and bug fixes since 0.3.0, it currently has several issues that prevent it from being relatively useful. Furthermore functionality that once worked no longer does, this is called a regression. Until trunk has been reasonably fixed 0.3.1 will not be released. Be assured that the developers are working hard on fixing the current issues and bringing forth a good public release as soon as humanly possible."

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. The NetBSD Packages Collection is a framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 6400 packages. It is used to enable freely available software to be configured and built easily on supported platforms. Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q4 announcement in Alistair Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users m-l for more information.