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With new social networks launching everyday most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto, typo and other open source solutions. Yet there isn't an open source social network platform, until now. Built with Ruby on Rails this open source project has all the basic features you will need to setup a basic social network.

Over the past 2 years I've been getting into Linux more and more. After getting over my initial fear to move away from Windows, I realized in order for me to stay away from M$'s OS I would need to get my favorite applications to run in Linux. That's where Wine comes in.

While not directly related to Linux or Open Source, this is the man whose vision predicted so much of our current world. His visions of future have directly and indirectly shaped the technological playground that we take for granted today. Men like him show us not only where we have been, but where we can go if we only set our minds to it.

The official 1.0 release of MonoDevelop was announced late last week. The open source development environment includes a number of advanced features such as project management tools, a graphical user interface designer, a unit testing system, version control integration, and an add-in system that facilitates extensibility. MonoDevelop provides code completion, passive error notification, code navigation, and autoindent functionality for several programming languages, including C#, VB.NET, and C/C++.

Alexandre stated back in October 2007 that he knew of no 1.0 release blockers even then, and suggested we pick Wine's 15th anniversary for the actual date. Depending on how you look at it, there are several possible birthdays for Wine. Given that the exact birthday is a bit fuzzy, we'll simply continue with our normal biweekly release dates. That puts the 1.0 release at June 6th if it's ready by then, or June 20th or July 4th if it's not.

[I personally never thought I would live long enough to see a 1.0 release from Wine :-) - Scott]

Pat Quinn, the vice president of IT at lighting manufacturer Acuity Brands Inc., is quick to admit the irony. Nine years ago, he opted to go with an enterprise resource planning system from Oracle Corp. primarily because of Windows. "At that time, Oracle was one of the few vendors that could run on Windows, and we had a real Windows bias," Quinn said. Today, although Acuity Brands still considers itself a Windows shop -- many of the company's applications are developed in .NET and run on Windows -- its Oracle enterprise systems run on Linux.

This document describes how to set up the Open Ticket Request System (OTRS) on Fedora 8. Taken from the OTRS page: "OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries."

2008 Linux/Open Source on Wall Street will focus on enterprise Linux and open source technologies, and their adoption in the datacenters of financial markets firms. Killer applications, including virtual appliances and virtualization, Linux-as-a-Service and realtime/low latency Linux will be explored, as will the practicalities of deploying open source stacks in business-critical, high availability scenarios.

The Open Source Initiative, the organization that certifies Open Source software licenses, is holding an executive board election soon. I am standing for election. The board is self-electing, and I'm told I don't have a chance unless I can show community support for my candidacy. One problem I'd like to help solve is the over-representation of vendors, particularly the kind that have an Open Source product as their profit-center rather than part of operations. The vast majority of Open Source developers, paid or volunteer, are not in that sort of business, yet vendors tend to dominate the leadership of organizations like OSI and conferences about Open Source in business.

[I signed. Bruce for president^Wboard member! - Sander]

When I wrote about file managers in my review of KDE 4.0, I noted that several important features had been removed from Konqueror, including the tree-based detailed view. Many power users regard the tree view as the most effective mode for advanced file management and mourned the loss of this feature. Developer Peter Penz reports that the tree view has been restored and that it will be fully functional in time for the KDE 4.1 release.

Glyn Moody wrote an interesting article for the Guardian earlier this month titled “Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft.” It got me thinking about commoditization; specifically pondering the question: Is Linux driving the O/S towards commoditization as many would have us believe? The key point of Mr. Moody’s article is that several converging market forces are poised to impact Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system and productivity software markets.

Overall, Linux is not known as a resource hog. The free operating system is a fairly lean machine out of the box -- some distributions moreso than others. Still, there are some tweaks you can make to any Linux installation to speed things up.

"Linux is an excellent alternative to Windows and, as a Unix flavor technology, competitive with other Unix offerings," Slashdot blogger yagu told LinuxInsider. "It's not for everyone, but unfortunately large numbers of users for whom Linux would be perfect don't even know what Linux is," he said.

[The reason I noticed this story is that one of my posts to LXer is quoted. - NoDough]

One of the problems with open source is that much of it happens invisibly. Whereas proprietary software, which is sold, has to publicised at some point, open source can simply be written: whether or not it gets used is a question of the author's personal inclinations. Even the big-name open source projects – Linux, Apache, Firefox – have the problem that contributions are made in all sorts of ways, and that there is nobody really tracking who is doing what where. That makes a paper from SAP Research's Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle particularly welcome, since they do the hard work of tracking down just how much coding is going on these days. They start from a hard core of open source activity, ignoring projects that are dormant.

PARSIX 1.0 is a Persian Linux distribution, created by a team in Iran and built on a Debian base. It comes as a live CD in which the default languages – ironically, I have to say, given the prickly relationship between the leaders of Iran and America – are Persian and American English. I always have some initial concerns about using Linux distributions whose first language is not my own, simply because of my own linguistic limitations. However, I had read good things about Parsix so I cast aside my doubts and dived in.

Hewlett Packard will start shipping some of its notebook and desktop computers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled later this year. “We are really excited by this deal because of the power that the HP distribution channel brings, the reach they have and their commitment to interoperability. I am very enthusiastic about what this relationship could bring,” Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian told eWEEK in an interview here at its BrainShare 2008 conference.

"I lost a day-and-a-half this week due to a disk that decided to get read errors due to an unfortunate power outage, and had to spend too much time regenerating my normal setup," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc6 kernel, "but I don't think I lost any emails, and things seemed to have calmed down a bit, so here's to hoping that -rc6 is starting to look better."

Today while browsing around the CodeWeavers site I came across the 2008 CrossOver roadmap that was posted by Jeremy White the CEO of CodeWeavers.

Novell used its BrainShare 2008 conference here to start talking publicly about its development plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, the next version of its server operating system. Among the company's lofty goals is to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that will be supported by a new tool set designed to quickly build specialized images.

I am not aware of any other entity, group or idea that matches these five primary characteristics of the open source movement as exactly as terrorist organizations.