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SourceForge (NASDAQ: LNUX), the leader in community-driven media and e-commerce, today announced inclusion of the OpenID functionality in their SourceForge.net website. OpenID is an open, decentralized, framework for digital identity that eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites. SourceForge.net users can now log in with an OpenID and receive a corresponding SourceForge.net identity for use at other sites that support OpenID logins.

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay, along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn't need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft's open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft's open-source charade is not about customers. It's about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness..

Browser maker Opera has released an early version of a tool to help developers debug web pages. It hopes Opera Dragonfly will assist developers in making the experience of surfing the net consistent across web-enabled mobiles, desktops, and consoles while prompting the adoption of open standards. Opera Dragonfly is designed to debug web pages, widgets, and web applications on any device. The Alpha version of the tool comes with Opera 9.5 beta 2. Opera Dragonfly includes a JavaScript Debugger, DOM and CSS Inspectors, Error Console and Command Line, among other features.

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we arepresenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbedFile-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in thechangelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications.

Every major operating system has more than one media center solution for users who can't spend a day without watching a movie or listening to music. In Linux we're all familiar with MythTV and Freevo, two media center applications that are so appreciated they even have got their own distributions. Freevo is highly configurable, and Freevo 2 SNV builds look promising. MythTV has everything a personal video recorder needs, from scheduled recordings to weather plugins. The thing is, many people need a media center application just to watch Xvid files, listen to their favorite music, and watch family pictures on their television. If this is the case for you, give Entertainer a try.

Sun first announced OpenSolaris in 2005 but they keep finding ways to announce 'first releases'. Yesterday was one such release. When will Sun finally give up on this fiasco and realize that Linux has won?

Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that do their bidding. Chickenfoot was developed by MIT's User Interface Design Group. It's similar to the Greasemonkey scripting extension for Firefox, but its scripts tend to be simpler and easier for nonprogrammers to customize.

It's quite characteristic of the cultural cringe that prevails in Australia that a man who works in America, Barry Vercoe, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coming to the country next week to lobby for the local branch of the One Laptop Per Child project.

Politically, that is. We still do not enjoy certain freedoms that we deserve. A new wave of freedom movements, to achieve these freedoms, is now sweeping the world – a movement that is bound to change the way we think, the way we do things and the way we interact. It started in the United States and aims to free people from the clutches of monopoly corporations. And the role of Gandhiji is being played by an extraordinary person with long hair and a long beard; a man called Richard Mathew Stallman, who vehemently rejects any comparison with Gandhiji or Nelson Mandela.

There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.

Broadband deprivation, Vista, Linux, Telstra, Microsoft, Yahoo, iPhone, spambots, phishing, climate change ... It's all getting too much for me. Won't these technology issues ever go away! Australians are rather well-known for taking a dim opinion on people and organisations that take things too seriously. One of the best-known Australian cartoons is that penned in Smiths Weekly, 1933, by US expatriate Stan Cross: "For gorsake, stop laughing, this is serious!"

James Maguire, Datamation's managing editor, claims he has no interest in software whose source code is available for editing. "I'm not a software engineer," he says. "If I can't grab it off the shelf, I can't use it." He's half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many people outside the free and open source software (FOSS) community about what its efforts are about. Ask average computer users what FOSS is about, and, if they've even heard of it, they'll probably say something about the source code being publicly available.

NVIDIA has long supported their CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology on Linux for allowing general-purpose code algorithms to be executed on the graphics processor, while AMD and their Stream Computing support has been absent on Linux. AMD has only been supporting their Stream SDK on Windows XP, but this morning we have confirmation that the Software Development Kit will be released for Linux in the coming days. According to AMD's Michael Chu on the AMD Developer Forums, an SDK v1.1 Beta is expected within the next two weeks (this message appeared a week ago) and that testing has been done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise. This SDK will make it possible to use CAL and Brook+ on Linux, permitting of course you're using an R600 GPU.

Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake. For years, Linux has been big business, and if projections made by the market researchers at IDC turn out to be correct, in a few short years the Linux server ecosystem spending on hardware, software, and services directly relating to the platform will hit $49 billion by 2011. That's more than twice the $21 billion in Linux-related server spending that IDC reckons the companies of the world accounted for in 2007.

[Here are some more 'statistics' for you - Scott]

Software as a service (SaaS) entered the IT landscape in 2000 and has revolutionized the deployment models of many software companies and even entire industries, such as Internet search. It has also becoming an increasingly popular form of consuming applications within enterprises of all shapes, sizes and geographies.

The US smartphone market may continue to be dominated by mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, and RIM, but Linux has been creeping into ever more mobile devices in the last few years. Some Motorola RAZR 2 models have donned a Tux, Palm is looking to Linux to drive its next-generation consumer smartphones, and Android's backers hope to spread it to an even wider array of handsets. Linux is also driving many avant garde connected consumer electronics devices such as the Chumby, Nokia N810, Amazon Kindle, Dash Express, and whatever the fertile minds tinkering with Bug Labs' modules are envisioning,. Even the remote control that houses the user interface of Logitech's Squeezebox Duet is a Linux computer.

Eclipse is still open source's best-kept secret. Here Mike Milinkovich, boss of the Eclipse Foundation, explains how Eclipse has evolved from its origins as a Java IDE, what goes to make up the new Equinox run-time project, and why he hopes Microsoft will join Eclipse.

It has been said that the best things in life are free. While this isn't always true, it applies in this case. If you've struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download a copy of FusionCharts Free. You'll be producing professional quality charts and graphs in no time.

The Ubuntu Live conference is still a few months away, but The VAR Guy has already booked his trip to the event -- and he expects to track these five trends at the conference.

Linux does many things to bring many people together. Often, the effects of such convergences are powerful. Larry Cafiero, an Editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, tells the story of how 2 people with absolutely nothing in common can find common ground for the greater good. A great read and indeed food for thought.