Monthly Archive:: July 2002

"BeOS is a marvel of software engineering and creativity. We all know it, use it, and love it. We are also re-creating it for the pure fact that we want to see it continue and thrive. But before it can be successful three things need to happen" Editorial from BeUnited's Simon Gauvin about the future of OpenBeOS. Also, yellowTab and BeUnited are to join development and promote the open source BeOS standards.

"Microsoft Corp.'s new licensing programs take effect tomorrow, shifting the model for OS pricing but also for office productivity suites. Microsoft's Volume Licensing Program, delayed twice, kicks in on July 31. The most controversial feature of the plan, Software Assurance, is essentially Microsoft's subscription-based licensing plan for small- and medium-business owners. An enterprise version of Microsoft's software license already requires a yearly fee." Read the report at ExtremeTech, Yahoo!News, while News.com says that the majority of Microsoft's customers won't be signing up for a controversial licensing plan set to go into effect on Thursday, according to analysts' estimates.

"Microsoft announced Wednesday a partnership with AT&T Wireless to offer wireless software and services to corporate customers. As expected, the companies said they plan to distribute software on Pocket PCs, Smartphones and laptops that will provide wireless access to e-mail, information and applications behind corporate firewalls." Read the report at News.com.

"Sun and Apple have no concrete plans to codevelop a version of Sun's StarOffice productivity suite for the Mac OS X operating system, two open-source developers and a Sun official said Monday. Sun held a conference call with the two OpenOffice developers on Monday to clarify that Sun and Apple are not working on their own project to create a version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X by year end. Sun has been in ongoing talks with Apple to see "what it would take" to make a version of StarOffice that had the look and feel of an Apple application, Siress said. These talks, however, are really little more than the same theoretical discussions that have been going on over the last couple of years, he said." The report can be found at InfoWorld.

After several months of beta testing, the most important service pack ever issued for Windows 2000 is at last available for download. The Service Pack 3 (124 MB, German here) is a collection of bug fixes that addresses all the issues that were discovered since Windows 2000 shipped. This new Service Pack 3 also adds some new features like the ability to configure the middleware and an automatic updater.

"The software giant on Tuesday announced a new version of its Windows CE .Net operating system, adding broader support for its .Net services from within Windows CE, a slimmed down version of Windows used to power devices ranging from handheld computers to gas pumps." Report is at ZDNews.

"He's hardly as well-known as Bill Gates but Eric Rudder will have more influence over the future of Microsoft's bet-the-company .Net software strategy than his more famous boss. Rudder, Microsoft's 35-year-old senior vice president of developer and platform evangelism, is in charge of enlisting software developers to the cause--and keeping them happy. That's a big job because, simply put, without a large corps of developers behind it, .Net will remain a pipe dream." Read the interview at C|Net.

Read more to vote for the operating system that should have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never happened for whatever reason. Please make sure you vote an OS based on its *technical capabilities*, not because you used to be its user when you were 16, or because you like its background color, or because you heard good things about it once. Vote for the one that you truly think it was technically superior at its time.

"Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates today responded to critics who call his company's .NET initiative incomplete and lacking innovation by acknowledging that it will take at least four or five years before the promise of .Net is realized. ".Net is not an overnight thing," Gates told 325 university facility members as he opened the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit here. "A lot of work needs to be done to put standards such as reliable messaging and transaction support in place. We have a commitment to XML to allow for information exchange." Read the report at eWeek.

"The four distributors Caldera, Conectiva, Suse Linux, and Turbolinux are planning to introduce UnitedLinux, a joint server operating system for enterprise deployment, in November of this year, the companies said late Friday. The technical specifications of the OS have already been finalized." Read the interesting report on what will be included on the UnitedLinux distribution over at ExtremeTech.

"With great excitiment, Lycoris releases a new and incredible update to its flagship desktop operating system, Desktop/LX. Desktop/LX now includes a powerful new Control Center, Desktop Sharing, Iris (Internet Rapid Installer for Software) and much more." Read more for the rest of the press release.

Red Hat released the second beta for their upcoming Red Hat Linux product, codenamed Limbo. Apparently, this will be called "Red Hat Linux 7.4" and not 8.0, as many people concluded earlier. The new beta includes many bug fixes, new versions for KDE and some additional fixes for Gnome 2.0 from the CVS, as well as GCC 3.2-pre. Mailing list archives for Limbo here.

The August 2002 update for MSDN contains the Windows Services for Unix 3.0, adding the Interix technology into Windows. Heres the blurb: Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 provides a full range of cross-platform services geared towards customers wanting to integrate Windows into their existing UNIX environments. With the addition of the Interix subsystem technology, SFU 3.0 now provides platform interoperability and application migration components in one fully integrated and supported product from Microsoft. Key Distinguishing Feature from SFU 2.0 The most significant feature of SFU 3.0 is the integration of the Interix subsystem technology. The Interix technology provides over 1900 UNIX APIs and migration tools such as: make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.

This Cosmoe release's major features: Improved autoconf support for DirectFB, autoconf support for building Cosmoe to run in an X window (--enable-xwindows), mouse changed to /dev/mouse from /dev/psaux, better failure cases for the video driver loading, so if Cosmoe fails to load you're not stuck with a dead keyboard, incorporation of contributed bug fixes for Aedit and Aterm. Features coded but not included in this release: Sed scripts to convert Atheos programs to Cosmoe. Download here, read the mailing list here.