Microsoft Corp. said it plans to distribute an update of the Windows XP operating system within 10 days as part of an effort to comply with the terms of an antitrust agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. Also, the judge overseeing Sun Microsystems Inc.'s antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp. said he will consider ordering the world's largest software company to include Sun's Java programming language in its Windows operating system.

Netscape browsers have continued to lose market share at a steady clip, falling to a new low of 3.4 percent as of this week, according to new figures. A year ago, Netscape's market share stood at 13 percent, but fell steeply to 7 percent by March, as IE 6 gained popularity. IE has now reached 96 percent market penetration, according to StatMarket, up from 87 percent a year ago. Mozilla gained some market share when it finally reached a 1.0 release earlier this year, but browsers such as Mozilla and Opera still only accounted for less than 1 percent of the market, StatMarket said.

"Jaguar is the desktop that Linux should have had. I mean, don't get me wrong, KDE3 is very cool if you soup it up a bit, and I'm really enjoying GNOME2 on my actual cooker-based workstation. But OS X, and Aqua, have an elegance and refinement that KDE and GNOME are just lacking. Which leads me to believe that Linux has no future on PPC hardware as a desktop. Apple has that covered. Unless you're absolutely against commercial software, you don't need to use Linux." Read Vincent Danen's article. Vincent is a co-owner Danen Consulting Service and a Linux Mandrake employee.

An Illinois company that has shipped Linux preloaded on PCs since 1998 now offers a choice of four Linux distributions on Apple machines, the company has announced. QliTech Linux Computers will ship Apple notebook and desktop systems with SuSE PPC, Mandrake PPC, Debian PPC, or Gentoo PPC configured to dual boot with OSX, says QliTech's Ray Sanders. Recently, Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. announced the availability of Apple computers with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed as well.

Sun's recent moves towards supporting Linux might feel like a warm embrace for the open source movement. But it has much more to do with supporting anything that will enhance the Java ecosystem.

"Using Mac OS X is like touring a land of fabulous ancient treasures - with a tourist authority that's still busy renovating them, and that hasn't quite completed the infrastructure. The sights can be breathtaking, but the roads are potholed and incomplete, and sometimes you have to get out and push." Read the review at TheRegister. More than 100,000 copies of OS X 10.2 are sold worldwide during its first weekend, and 50,000 people visited company stores Friday night, ZDNews reports.

Sun Microsystems and Be Inc. lost bids to keep their antitrust cases against Microsoft from being sent to a court handling more than 100 other lawsuits against the world's biggest software maker. A panel of federal judges said it moved the California cases to a Maryland court to expedite pretrial fact-finding proceedings. Lawyers have said that the East Coast court is more conservative on antitrust issues and that could favor Microsoft. Read more here and here.

The new version of Mozilla, 1.1, is released for many operating systems. Release notes here. Opinion: Check the screenshot, showing Mozilla's slow UI (XUL) performance on a dual Celeron @ 533. Before you comment on it, please read the already published comments, because we explain more over there. Update: I added a comment with the image attachment on Mozilla's BugZilla. There was already a bug entry for this, which suggests more people having problems with this behavior. See? I am not mad... Update2: And here is another bug submitted by someone else, with the same problem, and his shot. His bug is marked as "Verified". But it is still not fixed.

This IBM article shows how J2EE (WebSphere for Linux) and .NET can work together using Web services standards. Specifically it explains how EJBs can interact with COM+ components using Web services standards developed on WebSphere Studio and Visual Studio .Net. You can download WebSphere Studio for Linux. Update: On a related note, Microsoft released its Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview.

"Let's take an in depth look at the basic usability of these 2 OSes. Is it no longer true Macs are easier than PCs? Has Windows XP finally caught up with (and maybe even surpassed) Mac OS X? To get a little more clarity on this topic, I decided to look at the 2 OSes—Mac OS X 10.2 and Windows XP— in depth, and cover usability issues such as networking, windows and keyboard controls, voice feedback and voice recognition, the Dock vs. the Taskbar, Find/Search, Help, and much more." OSX scores 23 points against XP which scores only... 10. Read the article at WebMaster Mac.

Caldera International, Inc. today announced it will change its name to The SCO Group (SCO) upon shareholder approval and will change the name of Caldera OpenLinux to SCO Linux as of version 4.0, due out this Fall. SCO Linux 4.0, powered by UnitedLinux, is a joint development effort from SCO, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux.

Almost a year after our much discussed Mac OS X 10.1 review, it is time to write down our impressions from the new version of OSX, Jaguar 10.2. Is Jaguar worth the full $129 USD? Dive in for more. Update: Slashdot seems to agree with our review, at least on the backwards compatibility issue.

"Open source is supposed to be about freedom. Unfortunately, certain advocates have lost sight of that goal. People should be free to use software which best fits their needs, whether or not it adheres to a particular programming philosophy. I suggest that open source proponents spend their time crafting interoperability guidelines rather than creating a protected environment, which artificially boosts open-source adoption while hiding it from the full rigors of competition." Read the editorial at ZDNet.

Exclusive NewsForge report: "The second IBM Linux Scholar Challenge is accepting registrations through October 31. Finished projects are due by December 13. On January 20, 2003, IBM will announce the winners of 20 ThinkPad laptops, and will offer summer internships at IBM's Linux Technology Center to three of the top winners."