From Upside.com: “It is perhaps not surprising then, that OS X is more than a little retro: Jobs and Co. layered an admittedly new polish on top of a late 1980s NeXT interface, which is built on the early ’80s Mach microkernel, itself steeped heavily in early 1970s Berkeley Unix. In other words, OS X’s ballyhooed Unix underpinning dates back more than three decades.”

From Linux Today: “KDE 2.1.1 is out. There’s no announcement, but it’s available for download…”

Kelly McNeill writes “Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would allow some corporate customers to view the source code to its Windows operating system was met with derision by the open-source community. Access to the code was severely limited, and nobody was allowed to modify it, so what was the point? In fact, this could mark the beginning of Microsoft’s move towards a new model, between proprietary code and full open source: something I will call “read-only source.” Read-only source is what it sounds like. Anyone can view the source code, but nobody can modify it, and no copyright or intellectual property rights are granted.”

“Establishing market share is always difficult in the Linux world. For starters, there’s the issue of installations vs. sales: a single copy of Slackware Linux, for instance, can be installed on an unlimited number of servers and workstations. Secondly, there are a large number of “stealth” copies of Linux sold through bookstores and resellers like LinuxCentral; the bookshelves are creaking with Linux books with a CD or multiple CDs containing a full Linux distro. And polls of users done by internet.com show that corporate users by and large buy Linux directly from distributors, totally eschewing the reseller market.” From LinuxPlanet

Dell today announced that it will phase out its PowerEdge 2400 and 2450 servers, replacing them with “a new generation of machines to address workgroup and corporate data-center environments.” The new PowerEdge 2500 and 2550 servers will ship with Pentium III processors up to 1GHz, three PCI buses (two 64-bit buses and one 32-bit bus), 4GB of RAM, and embedded dual-channel RAID with battery backup. Purchasers can choose from a variety of factory-installed operating systems, including Red Hat Linux 7.0. Full story at InfoWorld.

Info World reports that a quartet of leading technology companies have completed work on a project that aims to make CD data creation “as simple as accessing a floppy disk.” Known as Mount Rainier, the specification includes support for a variety of operating systems, including Linux.

LWN.net posts an important message for KMail users: “Old versions of KMail will stop working correctly on September 9, 2001. On
that date, a number overflow may cause KMail mail folders to be corrupted
when using KMail version

Alan Cox provides details of the latest changes to the 25th incremental release of the 2.4.2 Linux kernel, at LWN.net

In this issue of Dr. Dobb’s weekly roundup of Python news and links: Guido van Rossum announces Python 2.1b2, Sean Reifschneider announces Python 2.1b2 SRPM, Fred Drake updates documentation for the second beta release of Python 2.1, and Andrew Kuchling reminds there are Python HOWTO documents. More at LWN.net.

ZDNET: “ArsDigita, a producer of Web site content management and
e-commerce applications, is scheduled to announce today that the 4.0
version of its software is available as open source code.”