The author of centericq, a popular instant messaging solution for *NIX, wrote an article about his first experience with Jabber as a developer.

Rocklyte Systems has released the first official (non-beta) release of Athene, a multi-platform operating system that's free to non-commercial users.

MPS, a new free operating system is a DOS clone, based on FreeDOS. It promises to give DOS a slew of new abilities making it ideal for HTTP servers and others. Powerful script system is designed for creating http servers, e-mail servers and others. It will give power of Unix on DOS. Programmed in Turbo Pascal, MPS is still in early programing mode and help from other programers is welcome. The MPS source code will be available on its successful functioning.

A little product from Romtec,Trios, allows three EIDE devices to be connected to it while switching between the three. This is great for all users especially newbies who don't mind spending more money for an easier install. It is mainly used to select between harddrives. And the best thing is that one OS can be put on a seperate harddrive, selected at start up and run as if it was the only OS on the computer. No problems with windows wanting to format your partitions. It is also protected against accidental switching.

Bell Labs has made the third release of its Plan 9 computer operating system available on the World Wide Web under an open-source agreement.

Although it is fast and stable, with excellent multimedia capabilities, BeOS 5.0 still enjoys too little support from developers of applications and drivers to make it a viable replacement for Windows on mainstream desktops.

In a bid to boost its profile in the emerging 'e-device' arena, real-time operating system supplier QNX is going open source - sort of.

The best thing that could happen to Mac OS X happened with the release of Darwin 1.0. Now that a (hopefully) large number of eyeballs will inspect the internals of the kernel, there is a very good chance that Mac OS X will be a solid offering early on.

TrustedBSD provides a set of trusted operating system extensions to the FreeBSD operating system, targetting the Orange Book B1 evaluation criteria.

Apple announced the release of Darwin 1.0, the advanced operating system core at the heart of Mac OS X.