The money just keeps on rolling into Redmond and Microsoft's partners, almost faster than ever before!

Coming from a lifetime as a Mac user you can imagine that I am rather trusting of the OS, especially as a creative tool. In recent years, as Apple has evolved OS X, it has continued to surprise me (in a good sort of way.)

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over. We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows. Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD.

Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was open-sourced under the Apache license last month by Apple and now it has worked its way into FreeBSD. This software, which helps in optimizing applications for multi-core systems, has ported the libdispatch library from GCD to FreeBSD and made Grand Central Dispatch more POSIX friendly.

Going green doesn't mean joining some radical organization, using pig waste to power your data center or flying the ecology flag at your place of business. It does mean doing your part to save electricity, fossil fuel and your own money.

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free? Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.

Attend any computer conference these days and you can expect that almost every giveaway is an iPad. In fact, I recently attended a conference for a Microsoft oriented customer group and the talk of the attendees was Apple and how excited they were to possibly win an iPad from the vendors in the exhibit hall.

One of the interesting corollaries to the fact that Microsoft is making far less money from Windows than it used to – largely thanks to the popularity of netbooks – is that it must depend on other sectors of its portfolio that are still making money to keep the company ticking along.