In the News Archive

The space shuttle Columbia broke up Saturday as it descended over central Texas toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Seven crew members were aboard. Many believe that a debris that hit some shielding during take off might be the culprit for the explosion during the return of the shuttle. Our condolences go out to the families of the brave astronauts.

In preparation for the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM), to be held in Brussels next week, the event organizers have published interviews with several people who will be speaking at the conference. This week, they interviewed Jon Maddog Hall, who discusses Linux and the role of Linux International, and Havoc Pennington, who covers free standards and platform interoperability.

Read the latest in earnings reports and financial news from some Sun and other technology's leading players. This page over at News.com is updated as new reports are filed. Keep checking back for the latest. In other financial news, Microsoft sets its first-ever annual stock dividend and says it will split its stock as earnings surpass expectations.

Dr. Jiang Li joined Microsoft Research, Asia as Researcher in January 1999. His research interests include video compression, image processing, video broadcast and communication, peer-to-peer networking, realistic image synthesis and image based rendering. Read the interview at ActiveWin.

"According to a Reuters report that crossed the wires late today, the speculation is that Microsoft will make bids to buy both Rational and Borland. Shares of both Rational and Borland are up on the news, and so far both IBM and Microsoft have no comment on this report." This from Java Developer news. I've been digging around but haven't been able to get a confirm or deny from MS sources.

"I wasn't a believer in Linux at Microsoft -- I couldn't be a believer at Microsoft. But Linux is clearly the biggest competitive challenge that Microsoft has ever faced. It's unlike anything before -- there's not a company behind it. It's very elusive, in a way. I don't think Linux is going to be successful as a desktop replacement. But Linux is going to surround new appliances and new segments, and really affect Microsoft through prevention of Microsoft from moving into new segments effectively." Read the interview at ComputerWorld.

J. Todd Slack emailed in and asked us to inform everyone that their donations towards the FreePepper project will be returned to all who contributed. The contributions from the community were a bit above $500 USD and that was obviously not enought as $11,000 were needed to open source Pepper. "I have come up with the funds privately to buy Pepper and I will be returning everyone's donations in the next few days. I thank everyone who donated" Mr Slack said. Pepper will stay commercial and it will not be open sourced.

"Having spent more than $1.2 trillion on information technology in the United States alone from 1995 to 2000, companies now want to wring the elusive productivity and bottom-line gains from this massive outlay. If buyers are glad to end their spendthrift ways, IT providers of course have a different perspective: After years of heady sales growth, they are now engaged in bare-knuckle competition as the industry confronts sated customers and overcapacity." Read the article at C|Net News.

Today is a solemn day of introspection and rememberance here in the United States, and we here at OSNews would like to send our condolances to those who lost loved ones in the attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers. Though most of the people of the world did not experience the attacks first hand, there are very few people in the world who were not affected by them in some way. I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'd like to open up a discussion thread today for people to air their feelings about the events of a year ago, and where they think things stand today. And if you read on, I'll get things started by talking a bit about what happened to me on that day and since.

OneStat.com, today reported that Microsoft's Windows operating system has a global usage share of 97.46 percent. Microsoft's Windows still dominates the global operating system market. The global usage share of for Apple's Macintosh operating system is 1.43 percent and is the second most popular operating system in the world. The three most popular operating systems according to OneStat are: 1. Windows 97.46%, 2. Macintosh 1.43%, 3. Linux 0.26%. All numbers are an average of the last 2 months. The other big statistics company, StatMarket, placed (in June 2002) Microsoft at around 95%, MacOS at 2.4% and Linux around 0.35%.

One year later, the jury is still out on whether the tech industry's most contentious merger was worth the effort. The company still faces the same criticisms: Technology mergers rarely work.

So, ReactOS 0.20 was released very recently, the guys seem to make strides. NewOS had a new version too. Syllable is set for a new release, 0.4.1, in two weeks time, with lots of changes on the desktop part of the OS. Kurt Skauen, the AtheOS creator, is now presumed alive, he was just flying around! The MenuetOS web site has lots of new screenshots, they now have implemented skinning. SkyOS now has a sound API, based on OSS. FreeType 2.1.2 was released, and it is presumably much faster than before. A new IDE for Linux, named Anjuta, seems very interesting too, while mySQL, Lua and GnuCash had new versions too. On the downsides, we had Maarten Hekkelman quitting the Pepper business, while the guy who released ReBorn 1.0 just a week ago - a ReBirth clone, we were the first to report on it -, was instructed from Propellerhead Software to remove ReBorn from his site. Sad.

Linux sales lost some ground to Windows last year, but are expected to climb in coming years as distributors create new revenue streams. Meanwhile, Windows showed hefty gains. Read it at ZDNews.

Ailing software companies have the highest hurdles to clear to get back in business--a McKinsey study found that only 13 percent of the 492 firms examined were successful. Why is it so difficult? The study can be found at News.com.