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A critical point for Adobe developers arrived a few years back during the Web boom period. The company had to choose whether to continue developing Photoshop as an all-in-one graphic tool supporting both publishing and Web development, or create a separate Web graphics editor for Web graphic creation. It chose to spin off ImageReady for Web development and GIF animation and keep Photoshop for desktop publishing. Now the GIMP, the open source answer to Photoshop, faces the same decision.

Next up is likely to be Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1, coming straight from the trunk. A more cutting-edge release, 1.8b1 will be the first non-alpha version to feature the major internal changes that have been completed since 1.7 branched, including many substantial improvements to Gecko.

CPU Reviews Earlier this week Intel announced their first desktop processors that will support 64-bit extensions similar to those found on the AMD Athlon 64 processors. These new chips not only bring new features to the table, they also raise the maximum clock speed of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to new heights. I've received both the new Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.73GHz and the Intel Pentium 4 660 (3.6GHz) and I plan to show you the most comprehensive 64-bit benchmarks of these chips that are available on the Internet. While Microsoft still hasn't come around with an x86-64 64-bit OS, Linux has had a stable 64-bit version for some time now. So let's take these processors out for a spin and find out how they handle 64-bit code and how they stack up against AMD's top two processors. Welcome to the LinuxHardware.org 64-Bit Desktop Battle!

While the French Linux provider presents its purchase of the Brazilian company as a triumphant expansion, some observers call it a desperation move.

"Regular security updates are essential for maintaining a safe browsing experience for our users," said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "The Mozilla Foundation has developed a community of users and developers who continuously provide feedback on Mozilla software, and as a result of that constant vigilance, we are able to provide quick and effective responses to security vulnerabilities."

IBM is putting its corporate heft behind a popular open-source Web development technology called PHP, in a move meant to reach out to a broader set of developers. On Friday, the tech giant announced a partnership with Zend Technologies to create a bundle called Zend Core, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools.

I've been an enthusiastic owner of a GSM cellphone since 1999. I soon bought a serial communication cable to connect it to my PC. Since then I've tested several tools to retrieve and send data between the two. Searching the net one day I came across Gammu, a Linux-based command-line-driven open source synchronisation and backup tool written in C, focused mainly on Nokia models old and new. Gammu lets you retrieve and send SMS directly from your PC, synchronize your address book data, manage your calendar, and check out internal information about your phone's firmware and IMEI number.

The Mozilla Foundation released on Thursday an update to the Firefox Web browser to fix several vulnerabilities, including one that would allow domain spoofing. The open-source project released Firefox 1.0.1...

My work involves administering Unix Web servers and a mix of office desktops, along with developing the applications we run on them. I use Mac OS X to do it because it is something like a superset of those other popular OS choices. While much of the software I deploy is free, both as in speech and as in beer, I'm willing to open my wallet for OS X.

With shipment of an Intel-based "Linux mainframe" slated for later this year, and the release this month of new "Shunsaku XML Search" software, Fujitsu is currently pulling together mounting momentum in an increasingly competitive enterprise Linux race.

Commentary: As you've probably read, Mandrakesoft and Conectiva announced their merger today. The combined firms will be well-positioned to go after emerging markets not only in South America but around the globe. MandrakeSoft derives 40 percent of its revenue from North America, 40 percent from Europe, and the remainder from elsewhere around the world. Conectiva derives 95 percent of its revenue from Brazil, but its distribution is spread by partners in Columbia and Peru as well.

IBM has quietly added a new option to the suddenly vogue market for "hypervisor" software that lets a computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, CNET News.com has learned. [Licenced under GPL]

- PathScale EKOPath(TM) Compiler Suite Voted '2004 Supercomputing Product of the Year' in Online Reader's Poll -

Will the software industry's wave of open-source databases spill onto Microsoft's turf? Perhaps. The software giant is considering making the source code for its SQL Server database available to customers, according to Tom Rizzo, director of product management in Microsoft's SQL Server unit.

Mandrakesoft has agreed to acquire Conectiva, a move to combine the weight of two Linux sellers that individually have failed to achieve the dominance of Red Hat or Novell's SuSE.

Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation.

IBM continued to march ahead of rivals in 2004 in server sales, a key market in the computing industry, making gains in models using x86 chips and the Unix operating system.

Mandrakesoft, the European Linux leader, today is announcing a definitive agreement to acquire Conectiva, the South-American Linux leader. All details for this new acquisition are available in the press-release below.

Late last year the relationship between a free software project, Prelude, and a company that hired one of its programmers, ExaProtect Technology, broke down. In a reaction to what it perceived as unethical treatment of its development team, the Prelude project closed its development source repository, not just to ExaProtect but to the world, in an apparent breach of the spirit of the GPL and free software ethics. NewsForge investigates this cautionary tale of a relationship gone wrong.

For those of us who attended last week's LinuxWorld trade show in Boston it became clear that the worlds of Linux and business have intersected.