SCO has withdrawn its motion, the "emergency" motion, to sell its assets. No reason given. Maybe all the peals of laughter from the IBM and Novell attorneys at the hearing?

On the 13th November 2006 Sun announced its decision to begin the process of open sourcing Java SE and ME under the GPL v.2. The decision was broadly welcomed, although Sun did lose two senior executives who cited the open source policy as their main reason for departing. Vice President and senior Fellow Graham Hamilton, who had helped create the JCP and led the Java SE team for a while, left within weeks of the announcement. More recently Larry Singer, Vice President of Global Information Systems Strategy, left and again cited Sun's open source strategy as a significant factor.

While Vista worries lead some IT pros to consider Mac OS X and Linux as alternatives, technology professionals will be facing different kind of technology barrier should they decide to adopt Mac OS X and Linux instead of Microsoft Vista.

"My colleague John Timmer reported yesterday on Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader. Kindle's software platform unsurprisingly runs on the Linux operating system and uses numerous open source software components including Alsa, zlib, busybox, and Freetype."

The Mozilla Corporation today released Firefox 3 Beta 1, which is now available for download in a variety of languages. The beta includes updates to the default theme, the new places site management features, improved security architecture, and Gecko 1.9. Release notes with a more complete list of features, are also available.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality.

The IBM Lock Analyzer for Java, available from alphaWorks, provides real-time lock monitoring on a running Java application. This article introduces the IBM Lock Analyzer for Java, explains the architecture on which it is built, and provides some thoughts about the tool's future direction.

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 8. CBI is an ongoing research effort to find and fix bugs in the real world. We distribute specially modified versions of popular open source software packages.