MySQL 5.0 declared production-ready

MySQL AB has announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0,
described as the most significant upgrade to the database management
system in the company's ten-year history. The new release is said to
be compliant with the SQL 2003 standard, and will be supported by
enterprise database vendors including HP, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, SAP
and Sun. It's available for download under the GNU GPL in versions
for Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X, FreeBSD, HP-UX, AIX and a range of
other operating systems.

FSFE approves Microsoft 'shared source' licences

By the Free Software Foundation Europe's own admission, it doesn't
get the chance to congratulate Microsoft very often. Of the five
'shared source' licences recently published by the company, a
preliminary inspection by the FSFE indicates that both the 'Microsoft
Permissive Licence' and the 'Microsoft Community Licence' may well be
free software licences. Of course the FSFE would have preferred that
Microsoft had adopted the GNU GPL and LGPL, but it has nevertheless
welcomed the move. At the same time, the FSFE has pointed out that it
is not the publication of licenses, but the publication of software
under a free licence that really counts.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 released

After two years of development, the free software OpenOffice.org 2.0
productivity suite has been announced. Already available in 36
languages, the new version runs natively on Linux, Windows, Solaris,
OS X and other platforms. In addition to the OpenDocument format, the
redesigned user interface and a new database module, version 2.0
features improvements to PDF support, the spreadsheet module and
desktop integration, as well as support for XForms. Meanwhile, a
project has been launched which aims to bring OpenDocument
capabilities to Microsoft Office. The O3 project plans to use a .NET
plugin and SOAP to access document conversion as a web service.