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Finally, after months of small alpha version bumps, Flock, the social web browser based on Firefox, has unleashed a 0.7 beta with a whole slew of updates, improvements and bug fixes.

IBM is contributing more code to the open-source community based on the Web services distributed management (WSDM) standard, the vendor said Wednesday.

Open-Xchange Server and ChatterEmail extend Smart Collaboration™

Here’s almost a textbook example of where FOSS triumphs over proprietary ware. If ME and 98 were FOSS, then other programmers could patch the flaw (assuming there was sufficient demand). However, it’s not in Microsoft’s interests to do so, so they leave their users with little choice: Buy or die.

Sometimes, when a fun toy becomes available, your editor has no alternative but to go off and play with it. Later on, when LWN deadlines loom, the next step is obvious: justify all that playing by writing an article. One of those moments came when Google finally made its Google Earth application available for Linux under a free-beer license.

[Corbet provides some free-speech alternatives, too. -- grouch]

Nexvision has produced a prototype IP network video security camera targeting large area surveillance applications such as public transportation, utility plants, and medical centers. The "Nexdome Dragonfly" prototype is based on a Texas Instruments (TI) "DaVinci" processor, measures 5.1 inches (13cm) square, and runs embedded Linux.

Version 1.4.0 of the Linux Brochure Project (LBP) has been released. LBP is a GPL'd Linux advocacy and publicity project which documents key Linux information in a standard-sized brochure . A Spanish translation has been added for this release. French and Italian translations are also available.

Obsidian Systems joins with high-availability server builder Stratus to launch a range of Linux-based fault-tolerant servers for the South African market.

There isn't much to salvage from the sunken hulls of proprietary design.

[That's Jon 'maddog' Hall. -- grouch]

Hiding beneath the surface of your web browser, email and instant messaging lies a phone book for computers on the Internet. We call it Domain Name Services or DNS. It looks up the names of other computers and calls them to chat, shake hands or whatever PCs do with their own kind.

Aside from hiding beneath hundreds of millions of people's awareness, some people know that DNS seems to like Linux. In fact, they're sort of made for each other. You can get Linux for free and the software for DNS comes packaged with Linux distributions and it's also free.

We nearly missed the news... but already a week ago Raph Levien put some exciting news into his blog (Raph is the lead developer of Ghostscript since Peter L. Deutsch stepped down a few years ago): Ghostscript's latest release 8.54 is available. And it is not just under their commercial license (AFPL) -- they also put it under the GPL! In the past, AFPL versions were "made free" after about a year (and when again a newer leading edge version of AFPL Ghostscript was out). Now it looks they put even their development branch under GPL. Read more....

On the 12th of this month Google released version 4 of the Google Earth software with support for Linux. It can now be downloaded from here: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Linspire are making headway in the desktop market, but if you want to try something really different, you can find other, less-well-known alternative operating systems. While these OSes may not be the most stable, or have the greatest hardware support, they offer some unique ideas.

An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further "non-assertion covenants" (NACs) in support of open standards. That's a good thing, and more vendors should do the same thing.

On upgrading my webserver recently (from RHEL3 to Debian stable, fwiw), I discovered an issue with renamed/old versions of index.html in the new version of Apache (2.0.54).

Setting up enterprise groupware is usually associated with huge costs, both in money and staffing, and immense complexity, requiring professionals to keep everything running smoothly. The benefits are worth the costs, though, even for smaller organizations. If done correctly, your staff will be up-to-date and able to quickly and easily share essential information. With Open-Xchange Server, you can get those benefits from an open source application.

It's now been more than a week since Microsoft announced that its licensing discussions with Adobe had fallen apart after four months of negotiations. We don't know a great deal more now that Adobe has released a statement, but what we do know is bad for open standards.

Tiger Communications, XOU Solutions & Anam Mobile Join Growing List of Telecom Companies Adopting Open Source Database

Sun Microsystems has appointed a new Sun Fellow, Tim Marsland (pictured). The award signifies a rare event at Sun, with only twelve other individuals having had the honor throughout the company's history.

A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, VMware Player. It's a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can't create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.