BBC chief rejects iPlayer critics, Oct 31, 2007

The BBC chief in charge of the company's iPlayer TV show catch-up service technology doesn't think criticism of the service's Windows-only status is fair.

On Thursday the company announced the release of Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.1 for Apple PowerPC systems

Following the BBC Trust's recent move to canvas public opinion on whether the UK public broadcaster should provide its online shows in multiple formats, not just Windows Media, a collection of licence payers have launched a petition demanding the same on the Prime Minister's website.

If Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek interview with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is any example, Gates’ reality is pretty distorted too. But I’m not so sure it has as much to do with charisma as it does with self-delusion.

The European Commission and its allies continued their robust defense of the 2004 antitrust ruling against Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday and Thursday morning, tearing apart arguments that the decision trampled on the company’s intellectual property rights.

Hope of Linux tackling the desktop market has suffered a reality check with the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College dumping the penguin in favor of Unix cousin Mac OS X, not x86-based rival, Windows.

European Parliament member Michel Rocard wants to protect open-source software by limiting the scope of patent protection. He argues that coding essential for interoperation needs only copyright protection, writes Reuters.

Terra Soft Solutions Inc. has announced the release of a 64-bit version of Yellow Dog Linux, its Linux operating system implementation designed for PowerPC-based systems including Apple Macintosh computers.

Terra Soft Solutions Inc. announced Wednesday that its PowerPC-based Linux implementation, Yellow Dog Linux, now supports the Mac mini and iMac G5.

The open-source community has released GIMP 2.0, a free software tool for image manipulation.

GIMP isn't new – it has been available for Linux and Unix systems since 1995, and was designed to fill the gap left by the lack of Photoshop for those platforms.

GIMP 2.0 has been in development for three years by a group of volunteers. Described by the group as the "most professional release of the GIMP ever", the developers add: "It is the first stable release that is officially supported not only on Unix-based operating systems, but also on Windows and OS X."

Linux experts say the best Linux interfaces "pale besides the glory that is the Mac OS X user interface".

Linux Magazine includes details of the five variants of the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating systems, including Apple's BSD-based Mac OS X.

The report states: "Mac OS X is the leading Unix desktop operating system of all time. It may not look like a Unix variant to you, but underneath its glossy exterior lays an operating system based on the 4.4BSD-Lite2 Open Source distribution and the Open Software Foundation Mach 3."