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At the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Amarok developers Bart Cerneels and Nikolaj Hald Nielsen gave a talk about how a community-developed Free Software project like Amarok can work with businesses in a way that benefited both, without compromising on the spirit or openness of the project. One of the things that was touched upon was the recent release of the Palm Pre smartphone which relies on Apple's iTunes software for synchronising music with a computer. An interesting question asked was what would happen if Apple decided to block the Pre from using iTunes. Now, just over a week later, this is exactly what happened. Apple has indeed blocked the Pre from using iTunes with its latest update.

Akademy 2009 was held as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last week. During the week the KDE community attended conference presentations and was engaged in meetings, informal discussions and of course a great deal of coding. This article provides an overview of what's happening in the KDE universe and what can be expected for the future.

KDE e.V.'s Annual General Meeting was held today during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The KDE e.V. is the association that provides representation, support and governance to the KDE community. After former board member Klaas Freitag and KDE e.V. president Aaron Seigo stepped down and vice president Adriaan de Groot's term ended, three open positions had to be filled.

Summer releases of the latest smart phones from Apple, Blackberry, Google and Palm have excited geeks all over the world. The big question on the mind of Linux users has to be "Can I sync my Linux machine and my cool new phone?" Paul Ferrill finds the answers for the new Palm Pre.

Today the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has started, bringing KDE and Gnome developers together in the biggest conference of its type. It is situated on the beautiful Atlantic island of Gran Canaria and housed in the spectacular Albert Kraus Auditorium which dominates the skyline of Las Palmas, capital of Gran Canaria. The conference was opened by a series of talks from various people in the Canaries local government and the organisation. After that the keynotes started with star speakers and impressive announcements including an Open PC developed by the community and Maemo switching to Qt. Read on for an impression of the GCDS!

It is that time of the year again. Akademy 2009 is about to begin in only a few days. Held in the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium close to the beautiful beaches of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this event is shaping up to be a special conference.

Once the leader and innovator in all things mobile, in recent years Palm has barely kept up with the pack, let alone acted as a leader. With the introduction of the Palm Pre it appears that open source technology is helping bring Palm back from the edge of irrelevancy.

Bring me a Pre that fixes Synergy, improves performance, has iPhone-like materials/build quality, full search, full copy/paste, visual voicemail and a more mature app store and I’ll leave Apple. Until then, personally, I’ll keep a close eye on the Pre because Palm totally gets it. This is what a smartphone is supposed to be and we finally, two years after the iPhone’s release, have a real competitor both in hardware and in OS.

The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia's Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

Every day finds another rumor regarding the release date for the Palm Pre. Palm and Sprint are still not forthcoming about a specific launch. At first, it seemed that both companies were simply building excitement over the Pre, but as time drags on — and believe me it has started to drag — it feels like something else is at work. Back in January, when Palm first announced the Pre and granted many of us a one-on-one look at the phone, it wasn’t surprising that Palm wouldn’t let anyone actually hold the phone. Most of us just wrote that off to the fact that the Pre was in the very early beta stage and Palm wanted to control the demos to make sure that things not quite ready weren’t fussed over. I can understand that.

Putting Linux on mobile phones is all the rage these days, what with Google's Android popping up on prototypes left and right, and even the venerable Palm pushing the Pre, a penguin-phone of its own. That wasn't always true, though, but way back in those dark days of proprietary phoning — at least a little ways back — there was Openmoko bringing us hope of truly-open telephony.

Another idea came to me after reading Software AG Deputy CTO Mike Miko Matsumara's blog, who thinks that with this deal collapsing, we might see the return of Sun Co-founder, Scott McNealy. Whether that happens or not, the company should also pursue an option of going private. The four Sun co-founders - Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim - swing enough clout in the Valley to help put together a rescue package. Given how easily Palm has been able to raise additional funding, I don't think Sun will have trouble raising the capital. Bad as it is - down 10.7 percent from fiscal 2008 - Sun will post revenues of just over $12 billion. And it still has a few billion dollars in cash.

John “J5? Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.

IBM CEO, Samuel Palmisano, announced at 12:01 am EDT that IBM has completed the purchase of Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds for $4.6 Billion in cash and stock. This unprecedented human purchase by a corporation is being met with shock and surprise within the Linux and IT communities. Palmisano said that IBM was the "highest bidder" in a bitter battle for Torvalds.

This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community's annual summit, GUADEC.

You don't see many physical gadgets coming out of the high-tech Demo conference anymore, the confab made famous as the launchpad for Palm Pilot and TiVo. What typically emerges now are tools and services around social media and productivity. Still, executive producer Chris Shipley says she saw more consumer hardware in advance of Demo than even during boom times, though only a few made it onto the conference stage. Times are tough, and Demo took a hit in attendance and in exhibitors: 39, down from more than 70 in peak years. Here's my take on a couple of interesting products this time around, a netbook computer with a twist and a network of cheap consumer webcams. Caveat: I haven't tested these yet.

The number of open source projects targeting mobile platforms increased at a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent between 2005 and the end of 2008 according to a new study released by open-source software management services provider Black Duck Software. After reviewing more than 185,000 projects collected from 4,000 Internet sites, Black Duck reports 2,300 of them target mobile--while 1,850 total project releases were developed expressly for the Palm platform, only 113 were created for Palm in 2008. Instead, iPhone captured the majority of open-source focus last year, with 266 project releases in 2008--Android followed with 191, trailed by Windows Mobile with 174.

Andrew Shebanow didn't imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm's app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn't expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened. On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: how should application updating and installation work; should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties; should application trials be available; and how should Palm handle featured applications.

By many of the accounts we've seen, the star of last week's Consumer Electronics Show was Palm's new Pre smartphone, a Linux-based offering with all the features we've come to expect from post-iPhone devices and a few innovations of it's own. Indeed, iPhone appears in reviews of the Pre perhaps more often than Palm, with terms including iPhone killer" and "iPhone-like" popping out of paragraphs like coins from a slot machine. Among the iPhone-like attributes are the ubiquitous touch-screen display, along with 3G service, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, on-board camera (reviews differ on whether it is a 2.0 or 3.2 megapixel offering), and third-party applications, while tossing additional specs, including a G1-like slide-out QWERTY keyboard, to the mix.

One of the highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) just ending in Las Vegas is Palm's offering of its WebOS for mobile devices. A fitting name for its coming attraction in mid-2009 that uses this OS is the Palm Pre, to be offered exclusively through Sprint.