The feud between Minix inventor and operating system czar Andrew W. Tanenbaum and Linux Torvalds is legendary in the OS world. Before Linux there was Minix. Torvalds used to be a Minix user who set up his first Linux version in 1991 on Professor Tanenbaum’s operating system. Mr. Tanenbaum has now agreed to write a guest editorial for Linux Magazine. His opinion has not changed over the years: Linux (and Windows) are “unreliable.”

Moonlight is the name of Novell's Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0 technology. Moonlight is now available in a Beta version for 32 and 64 Bit Linux systems, albeit only for Firefox users.

After many years of development, the Songbird open source software is finally released as version 1.0.

The OpenSolaris project has issued its second solid release with the Live CD 2008.11, which integrates subprojects such as the installer and package manager.

Mandriva's financial situation appears to be none too rosy. At the end of the year, the distributor will terminate the employment of two of its freelance workers, Adam Williams, effectively the Community Manager, and Package Manager Oden Eriksson.

The Dutch software dealer HW Trading has proffered a complaint concerning Microsoft's marketing practices to the European Trade Commission. The reason: Microsoft has for years been selling its products at a higher price in Europe than it does in America.

The university-based research project Cooperative Bug Isolation (CBI) digs into Fedora packages to isolate and report bugs. Fedora 10 is now included.

With the release of version 3.0, the development of Flowplayer's free Flash player has reached another milestone.