Qualcomm on Wednesday joined up with the Mozilla Foundation to announce it is transitioning Eudora into an open source e-mail client that will be based upon Thunderbird. In turn, all future versions of Eudora will be free and Qualcomm will discontinue the current paid client. Although it may seem like Eudora is simply abandoning its e-mail software, which has a small but strong following of loyal users, the company claims the Thunderbird-based client will retain "Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements".

Normally we don't report on every fart that gets patented by the big companies, but the following patent by Apple is actually pretty interesting: Apple has patented a method to store a user's ~/ directory (home directory) on external storage (the iPod?), making it portable. This will enable users to carry all their settings, programs, and files with them, so they can load up any Mac in the world with their own settings, programs, and files. Obviously, this is 'just' a patent, and by no means a definitive feature of Leopard or Leopard+1, but interesting nonetheless. Is this Apple's answer to Google's OS?

The Open Source Development Labs and Freedesktop.org announced the 1.0 release of the Portland common desktop interfaces today, less than a year after work started on the project. Portland was conceived last year at the first Desktop Architects Meeting in Portland, as a way of making it easier for ISVs to write applications for Linux.

A few weeks ago, Gael Duval lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding his new project a little bit by 'leaking' some screenshots and information. Obviously, a lot of questions remained, and hence we contacted Gael Duval in order to ask him some basic questions about Ulteo. Read on for the mini-interview.

Microsoft has denied allegations that it offered to guarantee an investment made in The SCO Group, a software company embroiled in a long-standing intellectual property dispute with IBM. "Microsoft has no financial relationship with BayStar and never agreed to guarantee any of BayStar's USD 50 million investment in SCO," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement on Monday.