"It's always an interesting day when you get to write a kernel patch, at the urging of Andrew Morton, that notifies the world that non-GPL Linux kernel modules will not work after January 2008 and write some poetry all in the same message." More here. Hopefully, many closed-source drivers will be opened during the next year if this patch goes through. Update: Linus responds.

Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development.

"ExAmour is an exokernel, a kernel bound to ensure a fair access to hardware resources for applications. The management of those resources is up to the applications (called environment under ExAmour). Kernel specifications: it presently works on x86-32; each application can define its own memory management policy, its own scheduling policy an use its own drivers (hardware or logical); it is multi segmented, no pagination, no overlap between segments in order to avoid exploitation of buffers overflows, heap overflow or off by one; there is no drivers in kernel mode. (increases the security, reliability of the system)."

MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general.

Microsoft released seven security bulletins, including fixes for three critical vulnerabilities, as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update delivered on Dec. 12. The software giant shipped 11 security patches in total, including a cumulative Internet Explorer bulletin and an update meant to fix a flaw in the Windows Media file format.

ReactOS, the open source implementation of a Windows XP/2003 compatible operating system, just published a new interview in their series of interviews with ReactOS developers. Today's interview features the developer Johannes Anderwald, who has worked on source compatibility with Visual Studio Development Suite lately.