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.”
Mobile networking firm Nokia now has the requisite majority shares in Symbian Limited to complete the purchase of the mobile phone OS manufacturer. All Symbian employees will become Nokia employees as of February 1, 2009.
The commercial unified communication solution Unison is now available in a free, "sponsor-supported" version whose revenue comes from embedded advertising.
For two years now Novell and Microsoft have been playing with the idea of interoperability between Linux and Windows. They hope to strengthen their partnership further through their announcement of the Advanced Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and a beta of the Moonlight Firefox rich media plug-in.