"A group of leading developers calling themselves Dunc-Tank is preparing to pay selected Debian developers to complete specific projects. But although Dunc-Tank's first goal is the practical one of ensuring that the next version of Debian is ready for its scheduled release, its announcement has also publicized a previously private debate about what happens when free software developers suddenly receive pay for what they are already doing for personal reasons."

Two US software firms are asking the European Commission to take action against Microsoft's new Vista operating system, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Adobe Systems has told EU regulators that Microsoft should be banned from incorporating free competing software for reading and creating electronic documents with Vista, the paper said, quoting people familiar with the situation. Anti-virus software maker Symantec will send officials to Brussels next week to brief journalists about features of Vista that it has told EU regulators will undercut rival makers of computer security software, the paper said.

AMD chief executive Hector Ruiz said Wednesday that Apple will eventually use its microprocessors alongside those from Intel. Ruiz made the comments during a dinner speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, according to Bloomberg. "Everybody wants choice," he said, adding that rival Intel's practices have stifled the PC industry's growth. "Knowing Apple, why would they want to be held hostage like everyone else has been?"

While some BeOS users have enjoyed USB Mass Storage support on compatible (read: Dano USB stack-equipped) systems since the release of the USB Storage Module back in 2004, it today became possible to use this driver with an entirely legal USB stack on BeOS R5. In addition, USB 2.0 now works on R5, whereas Be's stacks have only ever supported USB 1.1. Michael Lotz's commit allows the driver to operate on R5, and on the SVN mailing list, he has stated that in testing, he has written to and read data from his Playstation Portable at USB2 speeds using this combination.

There is a lot of noise about VoIP lately, especially because it can help you avoid a major part of your cellphone bill. The first VoIP handsets released were all USB-based, but now cordless, Bluetooth and WiFi handsets are springing one by one in the market. The most affordable WiFi handset in the market right now, selling for just $150, is the FiWin SS28S that was released at the beginning of the summer by FiWin. Geeks.com sent us in a unit for the purposes of this review.

Apparantly, it's damn lies statistics time again in the Apple world, boys and girls. A few days ago, Net Applications published OS market share figures which showed that the market share of the Mac OS remained largely flat over the past year. However, today, the Switchtoamac website posted an article which looks at the same set of figures in a different way, only to conclude that when you compare last year's figures to this year's, the Mac OS has risen 25% in marketshare. We all know the saying: there are lies... Damn lies... Funny detail: while the debate rages on about half percentage points for the Mac OS, Windows XP increased its share by 8 percent the past 12 months. According to these figures, of course.

"Is Linux a good choice for your old PC? In this article I’m going to examine the main issues connected with using GNU/Linux on some very old hardware. I will also cover choosing a distro, a desktop and the key applications for such a configuration."

"Groovy's concise syntax frees developers from typical Java constructs that are required for code compilation but don't facilitate expressing what a program is really trying to accomplish. In this revival of the Practically Groovy series, Groovy developer and guest columnist J. Scott Hickey walks you through a series of comparisons between normal Java code and the same Groovy code to show you how this exciting language frees you to focus on the important aspects of coding."

ATI has released the 8.29.6 version of its proprietary Linux drivers, with the announcement that the 9000, 9100, and 9200 IGP and Mobility Radeon chipsets are no longer supported by the new version. Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, 9200, and 9250 devices are also dropped from support. Thankfully, these models are supported in 2D/3D mode by the open source DRI driver.

The first Beta build for the FreeBSD-6.2 Release Cycle is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. If the release cycle goes as planned it is the first of two BETAs, which will be followed by two Release Candidates (RCs) and then the final release.

David Wheeler does a cross-examination of the GPL and BSD and why the GPL and Linux specifically have managed to attract a larger number of corporate contributors. "If your goal is to get an idea or approach widely used to the largest possible extent, a permissive license like the BSD (or MIT) license has much to offer. If your goal is to have a useful program that stays useful long-term, then a protective license like the LGPL or GPL licenses has much to offer. Protective licenses force the cooperation that is good for everyone in the long term, if a long-term useful project is the goal."

Phoronix has published an article covering a majority of the changes that will be making their way into NVIDIA's next Linux display drivers: the 1.0-9XXX series. Of the changes to come is Quad SLI, improved nvidia-xsettings, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, OpenGL 2.1, GLSL 1.2, and other fixes. No release date is reported.

Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.

The launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system has been a long time coming. Missing the important pre-Christmas slot earned the software company a lot of criticism from partners and customers but Microsoft has committed to shipping the OS in January. But now some analysts claim that a number of 'events' in the IT industry have made it more likely that Microsoft may delay the launch of Vista again until at least May next year. The reservations hinge around a research note, 'Events aligning to make Vista delay more likely', published by analyst Gartner late last week, and take in market, political and industry issues that the researcher believes are beginning to stack up.