Hey, who remembers the InfiniteOS flap that arose several months ago? Cache Computing's "alternative operating system" for the Power Macintosh hardware platform caused quite a buzz when news of the project made the rounds a few months ago. There was a ruckus when first several people claimed the whole thing was a hoax; then that ruckus grew into a full-fledged brouhaha when a few hapless users reported that running the "early version" of InfiniteOS from Cache Computing's web site led to hard disk corruption. After that, Cache Computing denied that InfiniteOS was just a Trojan horese, reiterated that it was in fact a real OS, and stated that it would gain a graphical user interface sometime in March; that was the last we'd heard until now.

Well, InfiniteOS is back with a vengeance. The Cache Computing folks have decided that they simply don't have all the time necessary to continue the project on their own, so they're posting the source code and inviting everyone else to help. There's no doubt in our minds that InfiniteOS is a real project that just kind of stalled out due to lack of time, but now that the source code is being released, it has the potential to grow into a really interesting community project. Heck, Linux probably started out pretty small, too, we imagine. (As for the disk corruption charges, we're not technically savvy enough to know one way or the other, though we certainly invite any programmers to examine the source code to see if anything in there could possibly have caused it. We consider it a non-issue at this point.)

In other "alternate OS" news, we're all still anxiously awaiting release 1.0 of COS, das WünderOS from German development house Omega. You may recall that COS includes such features as full B2-class security, complete compatibility with Mac applications, four times the speed of the Mac OS, a microkernel architecture, zero system crashes, Java support, symmetric multiprocessing, and support for all Macs and clones with 68030's and higher-- all in 4MB of RAM and 12 MB of disk space. It will also be free to try for 20 days just by downloading it over the web, will cost $99 U.S. to buy, and has a firm release date of, er, last November. And gee, Omega's web site seems to have vanished from the face of the DNS world last time we checked. What do you suppose that means? You guessed it-- they must have upgraded their web server to COS, and its B2-class security is preventing anyone from connecting to it (or even finding it). That's some serious security! (You didn't think we were going to call it a hoax, now, did you?)