In the never ending parade of speculation surrounding the feature set and release date of OS X, ZDNet has added fuel to the fire with a report they posted on Thursday. According to the report, Apple officials told a gathering of German developers that OS X was "feature complete" and that the next release would be a Gold Master of the shipping 1.0 product, not another beta release. According to the ZDNet article:

According to Apple, there will be no further beta releases or updates; the next version of Mac OS X will be the golden master distributed to developers.

Another member of the European developer staff hinted that Apple plans to introduce the final release of Mac OS X either in January or February during an Apple event--either Macworld Expo/San Francisco, which runs Jan. 9 through Jan. 12, or Macworld Expo/Tokyo, which runs Feb. 22 through Feb. 24.

OS Xis ship date has slipped so much, it is not clear if this is an indication that the product is shipping "on time," early, or late. However, popular opinion had the first commercial version not hitting the market until well after the early round of MACWORLD conferences in 2001.

The article also discussed Appleis plans for Java on the OS X platform, and the companyis views on USB 2.0.

You can find the complete article at the ZDNet web site.