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The winners of the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at this years OSCON. Over 47,000 open source projects were nominated for this years Community Choice Awards and 85 finalists were selected across twelve categories.

The Linux4Afrika development help project that is active in a number of east African countries has released the next verson of its software distribution. The donated used hardware will be expanded by new functionality.

Last week, Microsoft and the EU each announced that they had reached a proposed settlement of the various anticompetition law violation claims that had been brought against Microsoft by the EC. Typically, and as an afterthought, most of the stories written so far focus on browser issues, at most adding a brief mention that a settlement has also been provisionally reached relating to "another" dispute, this one relating to interoperability. That's a shame, because it's an important issue, and the answers are murky.

Eric Geier introduces the Untangle Gateway, a Linux-based user-friendly Internet shield that provides a firewall, ad-blocking, anti-malware, protocol control, secure VPN, WAN balancing and failover, and other advanced and essential services for safely navigating the big bad Internet.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, explained at OSCON how hardware convergence is changing the questions, not just the answers.

Microsoft has promised the European Commission a "significant change" in attitude and publishes its proposal for the marketing of Internet Explorer in Windows 7. Additionally there's news regarding the GPL publishings.

Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. Yahoo's request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last week in the on-again-off-again talks. But they were revived late on Thursday, according to executives with knowledge of the situation.

The 2009 kernel summit is planned for October in Tokyo. Over the years, your editor has observed that the discussion on what to discuss at the summit can sometimes be as interesting as the summit itself. Recently, the question of how user-space programmers can communicate requirements to the kernel community was raised. The ensuing discussion was short on definitive answers, but it did begin to clarify a problem in an interesting way.

It's not everyday that there is a public security exploit published for the Linux kernel, yet that is what happened in early July. Though the flaw itself was patched in the mainline Linux kernel several weeks prior to the public exploit code being published, not all users may have patched. It could have been a lot worse. The issue of patching aside, the public exploit could easily have been a zero day exploit on the Linux kernel itself, were it not for the fact that the bug that enables the exploit was caught by a scan from code scanning vendor Coverity. The Linux kernel has been actively scanned by Coverity since at least 2004 in an effort to find bugs and improve code quality

Experience Linux support on the front lines. I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. I removed Windows 2000 after backing up his precious documents, pictures and browser favorites. I installed the latest stable version of Ubuntu, restored all of his settings, Internet connection and documents. He immediately fell in love with the GNOME interface, the speed at which the system booted and how snappy it responded to his barrage of clicking. He was in heaven.

First of all, I like the sax on the cover. I like jazz music and especially tenor sax, so a little cool jazz on a hot summer's day works for me, and keeps me calm as I'm commuting to work, but I digress. The Passionate Programmer isn't exactly about programming. It's about the career of programming. Most Pragmatic books I review in this area, teach some programming language, how to program in general, or "tips and tricks" of some programming method. Chad Fowler's book addresses the larger context of entering into a programming career. More than that, the context can be applied to many other creative careers where the creative person conceptualizes their "product" within his or her thoughts and imagination, and then generates the result. How do you proceed into such a career path? Keep reading and find out.

Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.

Today's Report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, "A Healthier Future For All Australians: Final Report," makes the e-health system a central plank in the future of health management in Australia.

Microsoft's original proposal to the European Commission, that it drop the web browser entirely from Windows 7, has been superseded with a new proposal that users be offered a "ballot box" of browser options. According to analysis by Glyn Moody of the presented documentation, it also appears to go much further.

Had been doubtful this would work and upon initial searches, didn't think it should. But I found a way today to manage your iPhone photos with your linux machine without any tricks or hacks. Read on for the super easy and quick way.

Back in 2005 we had reviewed the SilverStone Sugo SG01 and found this innovative small form factor chassis with its unique design to be very impressive and a wonderful case for gamers and computer enthusiasts. There were a few areas with the case's design that was not perfect, but SilverStone had then introduced the SG01W Evolution model complete with a case window and a few internal improvements. Pushing forward to 2007, there was then the Sugo SG03 that had the same basic layout as the SG01 but was rotated so that it would stand vertically. This was, yet another, excellent SilverStone chassis to work with and was wonderful in almost every aspect. A year later, after initially only being available in the Asian countries, we got our hands on the Sugo SG02-F, which was a budget version of the SG01. Last year we then reviewed the Sugo SG04, which built upon the SG03 and was still another great chassis. What though do we have to look at from SilerStone this year when it comes to the Sugo series? You guessed it, the SG05. The SG05 (and the already launched SG06) are radically different from the earlier Sugo enclosures in that they are for micro ITX systems rather than micro ATX.

On Monday, I took part in the first Wine Bug Day (one of hopefully many). It was a great success, I managed to rope in some support from some friends specifically Sean and Yorik both of whom are Wine users, not Wine developers (yet!).

And it wasn't just us, there was of course Scott Ritchie who organized the thing, but also several users popped up in #winehackers asking for others to change the status of their bugs. It was all quite exciting in a weird kind of way.

Microsoft Corp.'s unprecedented release last week of more than 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux community could put pressure on several top suppliers of closed-source drivers to make similar moves. Observers note that virtualization vendor VMware Inc., Wi-Fi chip maker Broadcom Corp. and graphics chip maker Nvidia Inc. still decline to offer their Linux drivers under the General Public License, a free software license widely used in the open-source community.

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

First there were the "granny" articles, where someone's grandmother presented the simplicity of Linux and emphatically denied being coached by her son into using Linux. Albeit rather a quirky form of humor, they made their points, because the KDE Desktop had indeed matured and was easy to use. I was also tolerant when people started writing about Linux for their children, because I know...