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Earlier in the week, I conducted a lengthy phone interview with Aaron Seigo about the Open Source Desktop Workshop being held in San Diego on October 13th and 14th. Fast approaching, we discuss the workshop's inception, target audience and expectations. Read on to learn more about the first in a series of workshops planned for North America.

Xara is pleased to announce it is sponsoring an Open Source project for a 'universal vector graphics translator' to help facilitate the conversion between various vector graphic file formats. The Uber-converter is a universal vector graphics translator that can convert between numerous different vector formats. It is an Open Source software project produced by Scratch Computing. Converting between graphics file formats is a nightmare for both users and developers. Each new format results in a factorial increase in the number of converters needed to directly convert from one format to all the others.

The independent Mall School in Richmond has replaced its aging Windows 2000 PCs with a Linux thin-client network rather than going for an upgraded Microsoft-based solution.

Novell introduced its new PartnerNet program in India. The company said that the program will enable unified, effective synergies between the company's global solutions, technology and training partner relationships. Novell will integrate the existing Indian partners into the new partner program. Novell will have three tracks in its PartnerNet program: solutions providers, technology partners and training partners.

One excellent open-source program that often gets overlooked in the focus on products like Linux is The Gimp. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is freely distributed software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

The foundation just released their latest stable security update, which fixed a crucial security flaw. This IDN bug has now been published on the Internet as per the news released by a French security vendor. FrSIRT has now warned the users to upgrade to the latest release soon as the exploit can now be deployed by random public sites, which can lead to problems for the users.

The 451 Group is hosting a senior executive-level industry summit to discuss the impact of open source software in the enterprise IT arena and to identify how to build a successful business model around open source. The use of open source software is fundamentally changing the way that vendors, end users and investors do business and make money. Like all powerful tools, open source can do damage if used improperly; however, the potential benefits also are massive, and that's why it's important to understand where there is upside potential in the commercial adoption of open source.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, and is intended primarily for Linux newbies who use it mainly as a desktop. In short, it's a well-polished Debian distro, with fewer customization capacities and an excellent hardware detection. But Ubuntu is much more than that. Ubuntu never positioned itself as a Debian derivative, like Xandros, or Mepis, or Knoppix.

South African software house Dariel Solutions has launched a full service level agreement for Jboss and PostgreSQL platforms.

The Mambo Foundation has said that Mambo has been approved for inclusion in the SpikeSource Open Source component stack. Users are now able to tap into the resources of SpikeSource for information and automated installation tools for the Mambo Content Management System.

Mac owners and Linux users have been verbally bashed by Tommi Kyrra of the Finish division of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IPFI). The bashing of both the Mac platform and Linux platform came after users of these systems kicked up a stink about songs with DRM / Copy protection not working on their platforms.

In his reply to the Massachusetts decision to use only documents in OpenDocument format, the Microsoft manager Alan Yates writes: (paraphrased) Star Office, Open Office, KOffice and IBM Workplace are all derivatives of the same codebase. Thus there is only one program that supports Open Document, and that is illegal. This is, of course, not true, and here is an open letter written by KOffice Marketing Coordinator Inge Wallin on behalf of the KOffice team which clarifies these facts.

A very interesting little read came through my RSS feed this morning. (The image, by the way, is from Mark and Susan Andriani, who do business together as Cloudcat.) It was a fairly balanced look at Linux, from a corporate perspective. It cited two main reasons to choose Linux, a "drastic reduction of hardware costs" and "fear of being locked into proprietary software." It did say Linux isn't free, and called performance enhancements over Windows and Unix a myth, but it noted "many firms do realize significant cost reductions" when they switch, and that "Linux is the perfect service-oriented architecture." There was nothing remarkable here except the byline — Laura DiDio.

Microsoft is a bully, plain and simple. It has more programmers than anyone else, and always had the option of doing the right thing for the right reason, but for some unfathomable reason, never did. It preferred to hold your feet to the fire, and force you to do what it said.

Linux is at the top of the world's Top 500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers, but does it have what it takes to stay there?

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced the availability of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 release candidate builds. Thunderbird 1.0.7 is a minor update that will fix a few bugs, including a return receipt regression introduced in version 1.0.2 (bug 289091) and the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw (bug 307185).

Prepare for LPI certification with developerWorks tutorials! The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certifies Linux system administrators at two levels. Each certification level has two exams: the 101 and 102 exams for junior-level certification (cerification level 1), and the 201 and 202 exams for intermediate-level certification (cerification level 2).

With globalization considered one of the key factors in IBM's restructuring, Big Blue is scouting for new IT talent with numerous openings in Russia, China, Brazil and India--as well as the U.S.

Goodbye checkboxes, hello preview pane. No more client refreshes, no more "Move…" button. Now you can just hit the delete key on your keyboard and watch the message immediately disappear - instead of clicking a checkbox, hitting a delete button, and waiting for the page to refresh

Quick -- name a Canadian-made computer-programming language. Time's up. If you answered "Java," that's true enough -- its originator, University of Calgary graduate James Gosling, created the language for Sun Microsystems Inc. But the top prize goes to those who answered "PHP." Ten years ago this summer, Rasmus Lerdorf created the wildly popular Web-development language while working at the University of Toronto. Mr. Lerdorf, who returned to the city last week as keynote speaker at the PHP Works conference, is also a University of Waterloo graduate and worked for a number of years at Bell Canada, but is currently employed by search engine giant Yahoo Inc. in California.