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If you're near Boston, Mass. and want to find out the development plans and design issues for the GNOME desktop, or just are curious to see an energetic collection of software developers from around the world interacting, head on down from now through Monday to the GNOME summit at MIT's famous Stata Center. Over one hundred people showed up for today's morning presentation, and nearly every one was a developer for GNOME or a related technology: X, Linux, or a desktop application.

Edditor's Note: Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Bryce Harrington, Inkscape and Worldforge hacker (as well as super-friendly OSDL guy), recently opined that gaining lots and lots of users isn't the only -- or even the best -- gauge of success for an open source project.

chromatic is the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, specializing in programming, Linux®, and open source development. He's also been known to evangelize to his co-workers toward better development practices, being the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide and the co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. -Ed

The rocky road for the once-mighty NOS could be running out

In the past year, development of the open source Xen virtualization platform (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen/) has forged ahead at a rapid pace, adding support for hardware virtualization and large- scale enterprise server hardware such as symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) guests and physical address extensions (PAE). Simultaneously, the Xen project has amassed a substantial community of developers and refined the software to be stable and robust. Now with a third major release, Xen is ready for “The Big Show,” production use. Up until the recent release of Xen 3.0, a major obstacle to the adoption of Xen in some environments was the software’s lack of support for unmodified operating systems. Xen’s original approach of paravirtualization, modifying an operating system to facilitate virtualization, yielded great performance, but failed to host operating systems for which source code is unavailable.

In a stroke of irony, Microsoft's Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system.

In an interview with Computerworld, VMware President Diane Greene talked about emerging competitors and her company's strategy of partnering with friend and foe alike.

Known in KDE.nl circles as the documentation coordinator for the Dutch localisation project, this man is also a demon player at ultimate frisbee and a reader of Hercule Poirot.

This comment refers to "Open Source could use a face lift.".

Nobody knows for sure how many Internet cafés there are in the Philippines. But in every major city and in many small towns, there are such places where, for as little as P20 an hour, you can plunk down before a PC and roam the digital universe to your heart’s content.

The Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans developer community has released a beta version of the NetBeans 5.0 open source IDE, with enhancements for client development based on Java. The general release of Version 5.0 is due by the end of 2005. Sun is positioning NetBeans as a counter-balance to the rival Eclipse open source tools platform. NetBeans 5.0 features the Matisse GUI builder which offers visual, drag-and-drop capabilities for building desktop clients that can either work in a client-server or standalone mode, says Dan Roberts, director of marketing for developer tools at Sun.

Over the course of the Linux emergence into corporate America, one fear has repeatedly emerged -- that Linux would fragment, that there are too many distributions -- that customers and corporate managers would be confused by the myriad of choices on the Linux distribution landscape. Paul Ferris and Dean Pannell have taken sides on this issue. People need clarification. They need to understand the issues at hand. They need clear, concise, professional sources of information where decisions of this magnitude are at stake.

Are they likely not to get that kind of information here? You'll have to find out, as here comes another Penguin Counter Penguin.

The former co-founder of Documentum is applying lessons learned in the commercial ECM (enterprise content management) space to open source software. John Newton, CTO and chairman of Alfresco, says that tackling content management with open source technology isn’t new, but most of the open source offerings available today target web content.

This document describes how to install a mail server based on Postfix that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database.

Eric Raymond's recent attack on a Microsoft recruiter has sharply divided the Linux community, with some applauding his bluntness and honesty, while others accused him of exaggerating his own achievements -- not to mention exhibiting immature behavior. Yes, Raymond could have been a little more subtle in his reply, but when a company such as Microsoft attempts to recruit one of its most scathing critics, and an ardent supporter of competing products at that, one cannot help but feel such an answer was appropriate, given the absurdity of the circumstances.

Linspire claims to have significantly increased its user base since the launch of version five of its Linux desktop product. Kevin Carmony, the chief executive of Linspire, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that there has been considerable demand for Linspire 5, also known as Five-0.

Only now are details emerging of the months of secret talks that allowed the birth of the Windows Treo

AMD said on Thursday that it served more than 15 companies with subpoenas this week as of part of its antitrust lawsuit against rival Intel.

Cybercops claim a victory as two men receive prison terms for contributing to a virus that was used to create botnets

Microsoft will be forced to adopt the open file format or risk 'sliding into irrelevance', according to industry observers

The third annual LinuxFest was held on Saturday, October 1 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It's the first time I attended this one day conference so I didn't know what to expect. Overall, I found it to be an interesting and generally well-planned affair with a good balance of informative presentations, relevant vendor displays, and some general Linux geek fun.